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Banana Cream Ice
Peel eight ripe bananas and rub them through a sieve into a basin, add the juice of two lemons and a small glass of curacoa; stir one pint of custard into this. Whip half a pint of cream, and add it last. Put the mixture in a freezer and freeze in the usual manner. Serve in a pile, or in cups, or mould it if preferred. Probable cost, 1s. 6d.
A late-Victorian frozen custard that depends entirely on the bananas being ripe enough to go soft through a sieve. The recipe assumes a cook who already knows what "one pint of custard" means and owns a salt-and-ice churn.
- The custard is the hinge"One pint of custard" here means a cooked, sweetened egg custard — roughly 4 egg yolks and 3 oz sugar stirred into a pint of milk or single cream over low heat until it coats the spoon. Make it the day before and chill it thoroughly; a warm base will churn to a coarse, grainy ice.
- Imperial pintsCassell's pint is 20 fl oz, so the custard is 2 1/2 US cups and the cream 1 1/4 cups. Using US pints throughout shifts the ratio but will not ruin it.
- A small glass of curacoaCuraçao, the orange liqueur; count on 2 tablespoons. Alcohol lowers the freezing point, so do not be tempted to increase it or the mixture will stay slushy in a domestic machine.
- Sugar is unstatedThe period assumed the sweetness came from the custard and the fruit. Eight ripe bananas are already sweet, but taste the finished base before churning — it should taste slightly too sweet cold, since freezing mutes it.
- Rub them through a sieveA blender or food processor does this in seconds, though a sieve holds back the stringy fibre a machine leaves in. Add the lemon juice to the purée immediately; bananas brown quickly once mashed, and the acid works as both flavour and anti-browning agent.
- Ripeness"Ripe" means heavily freckled and fragrant, not merely yellow. Underripe fruit tastes starchy and chalky once frozen.
- Freeze in the usual mannerThe original means a pail churn packed with crushed ice and coarse salt, cranked 20 to 30 minutes. In an ice-cream machine, churn until thick, then firm up for 2 to 3 hours in the freezer. Without a machine, freeze in a shallow tray and beat hard three or four times as it sets.
- YieldRoughly 2 quarts, serving six to eight. It is best on the day it is made — banana ices harden and dull in flavour after a day or two.
Cassell's belongs to the moment when bananas stopped being a curiosity and became a shop fruit. Regular steamship traffic from the Canaries and the Caribbean brought them into British greengrocers in quantity through the 1880s and 1890s, and cookery writers responded with a rush of banana fritters, custards and ices. The "probable cost, 1s. 6d." that closes the entry is a Cassell's house habit — nearly every recipe in the dictionary carries one — and it is the most telling detail here: a dish built on imported fruit, cream, eggs and Dutch liqueur priced as an ordinary household dessert rather than a luxury. The curaçao is conventional for the period, and the pile-it-up or mould-it serving note reflects a table where a shaped ice was expected to arrive looking deliberate.