Bananas Foster

This dessert spoons hot bananas and a brown sauce over cold vanilla ice cream. Bananas Foster, finished with rum flames beside the table, is a New Orleans dish that Brennan’s says it created in 1951. Foster was not a cook; it is the name of a friend of the restaurant’s owner. The dish grew out of a family’s idea and a style of service finished in the dining room, in a city whose trade included its role as a port for imported bananas.

Adding banana liqueur and then rum

Butter, brown sugar and cinnamon are heated in a pan, and once the butter melts, banana liqueur is added. Sliced bananas go into this sauce of combined sugar and fat and are cooked briefly until the fruit softens. In Brennan’s recipe (ingredient formulation and method), this cooking takes about 1 to 2 minutes. In this step, the bananas keep their shape while their surface is coated in the sweet liquid.

Aged rum is then added and flambéed. The banana liqueur added first gives a fruity aroma, and the dish is finished by igniting the alcohol vapor of the rum added afterward.

Ice cream melting under the hot sauce

When the bananas and sauce are poured over vanilla ice cream, the heat starts to melt the surface of the ice cream. The melted ice cream mixes into the brown sauce, and the temperature and thickness change as you eat. The soft bananas are scooped up together with the warm sauce and the cold ice cream.

In restaurants it is prepared beside the table, and guests also enjoy watching the butter melt, the sauce bubble and the flames rise. The spectacle of the flambé goes hand in hand with serving the dessert immediately, while it is still hot.

Bananas Foster served in New Orleans, with bananas and ice cream in a dish. Photo: rulenumberone2, 2013-11-13, New Orleans, United States. Original image / CC BY 2.0. Reduced-size version from the hosting source, with no further processing.

An origin story about surplus bananas and a mother’s breakfast

As Brennan’s tells it, the dessert began with a surplus of bananas at the produce company run by Owen Brennan’s younger brother John. Owen then asked his younger sister Ella and chef Paul Blangé to make a dessert with the fruit. The city’s role as a port for bananas imported from Central and South America combined with a more personal circumstance: the inventory of the family’s company.

According to the origin story told by a tourism organization, Ella remembered her mother browning bananas for breakfast and turned that into a tableside dish made with rum. Richard Foster, the special guest that night, was Owen’s friend, and the two were both involved with the city’s crime commission. The restaurant also records that the dish was named after him. This account of how the dish was created has been passed down through later recollections by the restaurant and the family.

Owen’s son Ted later also said that a travel magazine asked for the recipe for an article about the restaurant’s breakfast, and that the chef made it again and again to develop it. In his recollection, the menu at the time called it “Banana à la Foster.”

When the dish was created, the restaurant was “Owen Brennan’s Vieux Carré” on Bourbon Street. The restaurant has since moved to its current location on Royal Street, and the signature dish has been carried on there. The restaurant says that making it the finale of “Breakfast at Brennan’s” was the turning point when its popularity really took off, and after its creation the dish continued to spread through the breakfast service.

Tableside cart service and a crêpe version

At Brennan’s, the dish is still finished today on a rolling cart brought up beside the table. It is one of several tableside preparations, along with Steak Diane, Crêpes Fitzgerald and others, and the moment when the flames rise is built into the service.

The presentation varies even at the same restaurant. In the breakfast version that chef Slade Rushing introduced in Food & Wine in 2014, the bananas are placed on crêpes, baked and served with cream. Instead of being finished by igniting rum at the table, this version is baked with the crêpes before it is served.

Glossary