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Bananas and Cream
Peel, slice and pile in a glass dish. Serve with sugar and cream.
About as short as a recipe gets, and it depends entirely on the quality of three things rather than on any technique.
- CreamPeriod recipes calling simply for "cream" generally mean an unwhipped pouring cream, richer than modern half-and-half. Light cream at around 20 percent fat is a reasonable everyday substitute; heavy cream if you want it richer.
- SugarSuperfine or caster sugar dissolves into the banana juices instead of sitting on top; sprinkle it a few minutes before serving and let it draw a little syrup.
- BrowningSliced bananas oxidise within minutes. Assemble immediately before serving, or toss the slices with a teaspoon of lemon juice, which the original does not call for but which costs nothing in flavour.
- RipenessBananas heavily flecked with brown slice badly and turn to paste under cream. Use fruit that is fully yellow with the green just gone at the tips.
- YieldThe original gives no quantities. Allow roughly one banana per person and add sugar and cream to taste.
Bananas reached American tables in quantity only in the last decades of the nineteenth century, when steamships made it possible to land Caribbean fruit before it spoiled. Within a generation they went from what is traditionally said to have been a curiosity sold singly at expositions to a staple cheap enough for everyday desserts, and cookbooks of the 1900s register that shift by giving bananas their own cluster of entries. Nothing here is cooked, nothing is skilled, and the dish earns its place purely by being served in glass with cream. It belongs to the same family as strawberries and cream and peaches and cream, the warm-weather desserts of households that had good dairy and wanted the fruit to speak for itself.