Home › The Principles of Cookery › Banana Custard
Banana Custard
Cook three ounces of rice and two ounces of sugar in one pint of milk until soft, then add one ounce of butter; let it cool, then spread it over a glass dish and cover with sliced bananas; sprinkle some castor sugar over, then pour over it one gill of brandy, and over that some thick custard. Probable cost, 1s. 8d.
A layered cold pudding rather than a baked custard: sweet rice at the bottom, bananas and brandy in the middle, thick custard on top. Nothing here needs an oven.
- The rice is the hingeThree ounces of rice to a pint of milk is a loose, slow-cooked rice pudding done on the stovetop, roughly 30-40 minutes over low heat with regular stirring. It must be genuinely soft and creamy before the butter goes in, because it sets firm as it cools and any chalky grains will stay chalky.
- GillAn imperial gill is 5 fl oz, about 140 ml. That is a great deal of brandy for a dish of this size, and it will not be cooked off. Two to three tablespoons gives the flavour without swamping the fruit; use the full gill only if you want the pudding frankly boozy.
- Castor sugarCaster sugar, i.e. superfine sugar. It dissolves into the banana juices rather than sitting in grains. Granulated works if it is the only option.
- Thick custardA proper egg custard, cooked until it thickly coats the spoon and then cooled: about 4 egg yolks and 2 oz sugar to a pint of milk, or a thinner-set creme patissiere if you want clean layers. Proprietary custard powder made up on the stiff side was available at this date and would not be out of keeping, though how commonly it replaced egg custard is not recorded.
- Assemble coolLet both rice and custard cool before layering. Warm custard poured over bananas will darken them and draw liquid out into the rice.
- Bananas darkenSlice them at the last moment and layer immediately under the custard, which seals them from the air. A squeeze of lemon over the slices helps if the dish is to stand more than an hour.
- Yield and servingFills a glass dish of roughly 1.5 litres and serves about four to six. Chill at least two hours so the rice sets enough to spoon out in layers; it is best eaten the same day.
- The cost note1s. 8d. is the original's estimate in pre-decimal currency, given because Victorian and Edwardian household cookery books priced dishes for the reader budgeting a week's meals. It has no modern equivalent worth quoting.
Cassell's arranges its entries alphabetically, which puts a dish like this beside a run of other banana recipes at a moment when the fruit was newly ordinary in Britain. Steamer traffic from the Canaries, and later refrigerated shipping from the Caribbean around the turn of the century, brought bananas from a costly novelty in the 1880s to a barrow fruit, and cookery writers responded by fitting them into the shapes they already knew: fritters, ices, and layered cold puddings in glass dishes. This one is essentially a trifle with rice standing in for sponge, in households where a rice pudding was a fixture. The glass dish matters more than it looks: pressed and moulded glassware had been cheap since the mid-nineteenth century, and a pudding built in visible stripes was part of the point.