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Banana Cream
Get fresh bananas; after peeling, mash them very fine, allowing equal quantities of bananas and sweet cream; to every quart of the mixture use one-fourth pound of sugar. Beat very hard all together until light.
Four lines and no yield, but the proportions are exact enough to work from: equal volumes of mashed banana and cream, sweetened at a fixed rate. The one thing worth changing is the order of operations.
- Whip the cream firstBeating banana pulp and liquid cream together "very hard" fights you: the fruit's moisture and pulp weigh the cream down and it may never take air. Whip the cream to soft peaks on its own, then fold the mashed banana in. The finished texture is the point of the dish.
- Sweet creamMeans fresh, unsoured cream, not sweetened cream. Use heavy cream, around 36 percent fat; lighter creams whip less reliably and may not hold.
- A quart of the mixtureTwo cups mashed banana to two cups cream. That is roughly four to five medium bananas. Note the sugar is measured against the combined mixture, not against either component.
- A quarter pound of sugarFour ounces, a little over half a cup of granulated. Superfine dissolves without grittiness in an unheated mixture; if using standard granulated, beat it into the cream before folding in the fruit.
- BrowningMashed banana discolours within minutes. A tablespoon of lemon juice worked into the pulp checks it and sharpens the flavour, which otherwise reads as very sweet.
- Serve at onceThis does not hold. Within an hour the fruit weeps and the cream slackens. Spoon it into glasses and serve cold, within twenty or thirty minutes of making.
- YieldA quart of finished mixture fills six to eight small glasses as a dessert course.
Bananas move through late nineteenth-century American cookbooks as a novelty settling into ordinary use. Steamship routes from the Caribbean and Central America, and the refrigerated rail cars that followed, turned a fruit that had been a curiosity at the 1870s exhibitions into something a city grocer might stock through much of the year by around 1900. This appears under "Fancy Dishes" rather than among the puddings: the technique is nothing more than mashed fruit folded into sweetened whipped cream, a formula the same books apply to strawberries, peaches and apricots, though the banana still carried something of an air of the imported and the exotic. Recipes of this kind, cream beaten with fruit pulp and sugar, are generally traced to the English fruit fool.