This is the season when Cuba and other West Indian points embellish the markets with choice bananas. The fruit from those plantations is much richer in flesh and color than the ordinary strawripened bunches from Aspinwall. With their sun-mellowed flavor and tropically gilded and reddened rinds, they are decidedly more attractive than the common thin plantation style of the usual steamer lots. Without interfering with the dessert list, northerners are learning to prepare bananas for tea and breakfast relishes. It is remarkable that such a fragile fruit will undergo the ordinary operation of freezing and retain its delicacy. An easy West Indian method of cooking either bananas or plantains,* though the former should be exceptionally firm if used, is to slice them lengthwise about one-third of an inch thick, melt a piece of butter, of walnut size, for each banana, and fairly brown quickly.

When the fruit is rather fully ripe, it can be managed by dipping it in egg and flour. This, of course, requires slightly more fat. A showy tea-dish can be formed by cutting into discs and covering same with finely grated cocoanut and a suspicion of nutmeg. Another plan likely to become popular is to serve similar slices of bananas in heavy home-made strawberry syrup. This wedding of flavors is truly delicious.

* In this sense practically a distinction without a difference, though meant to signify the true Musa sapientum as differing from M. sumatrana,known as a cultivated plantain in the West Indies. - Ed.