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Banana and Orange Pudding
Peel six bananas and four oranges, and cut them into thin slices. Carefully remove the seeds from the oranges. Arrange them in alternate layers in a glass dish, sprinkling each layer with castor sugar. Make a custard by boiling one pint of milk, three eggs, and sugar. Flavour with vanilla. When cold pour it over the bananas and oranges. Whipped cream, sweetended and flavoured, may be used in place of the custard if preferred. Probable cost, 1s. 6d.
A layered fruit trifle-without-cake, and the only tricky part is the custard. The instruction to "boil" the milk with the eggs is the one place the original will let you down.
- Do not boil the custardScald the milk first, whisk it into the beaten eggs and sugar, then return it to low heat and stir until it coats a spoon, around 175-180F. Taken to a boil with the eggs in it, the mixture curdles into sweet scrambled egg.
- Pint and proportionsAn imperial pint is 20 fl oz, so use 2.5 US cups of milk to the three eggs. That gives a thin pouring custard, which is what is wanted here; for a thicker set, use five yolks instead of three whole eggs.
- Castor sugarSuperfine or caster sugar, finer than granulated and quicker to dissolve on wet fruit. Ordinary granulated works but may stay gritty between the layers.
- Sugar quantityThe recipe gives none. About 2 oz (1/4 cup) in the custard and a light dusting between layers is enough with ripe fruit; the oranges do most of the sweetening argument for you.
- The orangesRemoving the seeds is not sufficient by modern taste. Cut away the white pith and the papery membrane from each slice, or supreme the segments, or the pudding turns bitter as it stands.
- Bananas browningSliced bananas discolour within minutes. Toss them in juice from one of the oranges as you go and get the custard over them promptly, which seals them from the air.
- VanillaA Victorian kitchen might well have steeped a split vanilla pod in the hot milk, though bottled vanilla essence was also sold by this date. Half a pod, split, or a teaspoon of extract stirred in off the heat.
- Chilling and yieldAssemble, then refrigerate at least two hours so the custard sets around the fruit; eat the same day. Serves six in a deep glass bowl.
- The cream variantIf you use whipped cream instead, whip it only to soft peaks and sweeten lightly, or it will sit on the fruit as a stiff cap rather than settling among the layers.
Bananas are the tell here. When Cassell's was compiling its cookery dictionary in the late nineteenth century, bananas had only recently become a shop item in Britain rather than a curiosity, arriving in bulk from the Canaries from the late 1880s; a recipe that calls for six of them at once, alongside four oranges, is quietly showing off the reach of imperial trade. The construction itself is older and thoroughly English: fruit layered in a glass dish under a boiled custard is the trifle stripped of its sponge and sherry, and the specified "glass dish" matters, since the alternating bands of fruit could be seen from the outside. The "probable cost, 1s. 6d." that closes the entry appears throughout the book, and it marks this out as a dish for a comfortable table rather than a frugal one.