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Banana Ice Cream
To three pints of rich cream add one pound of pulverized sugar. Grate six large bananas into the cream and freeze.
Three ingredients and one sentence of instruction, which leaves the modern cook to supply the technique. The essentials are the sugar, the state of the bananas, and what "freeze" meant in a kitchen with an ice-and-salt bucket.
- Pulverized sugarThis is sugar ground finer than granulated — closest today to caster or superfine sugar. A fine grind dissolves in cold cream without cooking, which is presumably why it suits an uncooked base; ordinary granulated will leave the base gritty unless you warm part of the cream to dissolve it first. Do not substitute confectioners' sugar, which carries cornstarch.
- A pound is a lotOne pound of sugar to three pints of cream is roughly 2¼ cups to 6 cups, well above modern ice cream ratios of about half that. Period freezers were less efficient and sugar was prized for texture as much as sweetness. Cutting to 1 to 1¼ cups gives a dessert most palates today will prefer, though the result will freeze harder.
- "Grate six large bananas"Grating reduced a soft fruit to a smooth pulp without a machine. Mash thoroughly with a fork or pulse in a blender or food processor; six large bananas is roughly 2½ to 3 cups of purée.
- Keep the fruit from browningBanana pulp oxidizes within minutes and will grey the finished cream. Mash the fruit directly into the sugared cream, or stir in a tablespoon of lemon juice, and get the base into the freezer without delay.
- Rich creamIn period usage this meant cream well above 30 percent fat, close to today's heavy cream. Use heavy or whipping cream; half-and-half will churn to something icy rather than smooth.
- FreezingThe original assumes a hand-crank freezer packed with cracked ice and rock salt — period instructions commonly give roughly one part salt to three or four parts ice — cranked until stiff. In a modern machine, chill the base thoroughly first and churn 20 to 30 minutes, then ripen in the freezer an hour or two before serving.
- YieldAbout two quarts, serving twelve to sixteen. With no egg custard to bind it, this sets softer than a custard ice cream and is best eaten within a day or two.
Bananas were a novelty turned commonplace in exactly the decades this book was published. Fast steamships and the growth of the Central American fruit trade in the 1870s through 1890s took the banana from an expensive curiosity, sold wrapped in foil at exhibitions, to a fruit ordinary American households could buy by the dozen. Cookbooks of the period reflect the shift: bananas appear in fritters, salads, puddings and — as here — in ice creams, where their natural sweetness and starchy body do some of the work a cooked custard would otherwise do. That this recipe uses no eggs at all is typical of the American "Philadelphia-style" ice cream, a plain cream-and-sugar base that was faster, cheaper and less prone to curdling than the French custard, and that appears to have been widespread in home ice cream making in the age of the hand-crank freezer.