Home › Fancy Dishes › Banana Salad
Banana Salad
Select some fine ripe bananas and slice them lengthwise the thickness of a silver dollar; lay in a dish and sprinkle with powdered sugar. Have ready some thick cream, which must be whipped to a froth. Pour over the bananas one pint of sherry wine and then the whipped cream. Set on the ice and allow it to remain for several hours. This is delicious. -Mrs. John Fletcher.
A late-Victorian fruit "salad" that is really a trifle without cake. Two things need attention: the sherry is a startling quantity, and sliced bananas do not improve with long standing.
- "Thickness of a silver dollar"A silver dollar is about a tenth of an inch thick, so these are thin lengthwise planks, not chunks. Cut each banana into several long slices with a thin, sharp knife.
- One pint of sherryTwo cups of wine over a few bananas will drown them and pool in the bottom of the dish. A quarter to a half cup is enough to scent the fruit; use a medium or cream sherry, since a dry fino tastes thin against sugar and cream.
- "Thick cream"Heavy or whipping cream, 36% fat or better. In this period 'thick cream' generally meant the richest cream skimmed from unhomogenised milk; avoid anything labelled light, or whipping cream sold with stabilisers.
- Powdered sugarIn this period the term usually meant granulated sugar ground fine, not the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar of today. Either works here; superfine (caster) sugar dissolves into the banana juices most cleanly.
- "Set on the ice"The icebox, so the refrigerator. But bananas brown and slump within an hour or two in liquid, and whipped cream weeps as it stands. An hour chilled is the practical limit; several hours will give you grey fruit under a watery cream.
- Assembly orderSugar the fruit, moisten with sherry, then spoon the whipped cream over at the last moment rather than folding it in. Poured cream sitting on wine-soaked fruit is the whole effect of the dish.
- YieldFour bananas and a cup of cream whipped serves four to six as a dessert course. Serve in a shallow glass dish so the layers show.
Bananas had not long been a common sight when this book was compiled: cheap steamship transport from the Caribbean brought them into American cities in quantity only in the last decades of the nineteenth century. "Salad" in that context did not mean lettuce — it covered any dressed assembly, and a sweet fruit salad with wine and cream sat comfortably beside chicken salad in the same section. The formula itself is an unbaked cousin of the English trifle, which had long steeped fruit or cake in sherry beneath whipped cream. The attribution to Mrs. John Fletcher is typical of community-contributed cookbooks, where recipes carried the name of the woman who vouched for them.