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Bananas with Cream
Put a layer of sliced bananas in a glass dish, then some strawberry jam; over this a rich custard, and then some clotted or whipped cream. Garnish with dried cherries and slices of citron. Probable cost, 1s.
An assembled trifle-style dessert with no cooking beyond the custard. The instructions assume you already know how to make the components, so most of the work is in sourcing and layering.
- "A rich custard"Most likely a stirred egg custard, cream or milk thickened with egg yolks over gentle heat, close to what a modern kitchen calls creme anglaise, though the recipe gives no method and a baked custard is not ruled out. If you make it stirred, take it to about 175-180F, stirring, then chill it thoroughly before it goes over the fruit, or the bananas will slump and weep.
- Clotted creamThe genuine article is a scalded, thickened West Country cream at roughly 55 per cent butterfat, sold in tubs and worth seeking out here; it holds its shape against the custard in a way whipped cream does not. If you whip instead, stop at soft peaks and sweeten barely.
- CitronNot lemon and not the modern glacé cherry's neighbour in a tub of mixed peel — citron is the candied rind of Citrus medica, sold as translucent slabs in Italian and Middle Eastern groceries. Slice it thin; it is intensely sweet and chewy.
- Dried cherriesPeriod usage covers both candied and true dried fruit. Sour dried cherries give a sharper contrast to the jam and are the better choice; if you use glacé cherries, rinse and dry them first to shed the syrup coating.
- Order of assemblyBananas go first, directly on the glass, and in a glass dish the layers show through the side. Spread the jam by dotting rather than dragging so the banana layer stays intact, and let each layer set in the refrigerator before adding the next.
- TimingBananas brown within an hour or two even under custard. Assemble no more than three or four hours ahead, and toss the slices in a little lemon juice if you must build it earlier.
- YieldNo quantities are given. Three or four bananas, a cup of jam, a pint of custard and a half-pint of cream fill a standard glass trifle bowl and serve six.
- "Probable cost, 1s."One shilling, twelve pence in pre-decimal money. Cassell's quoted a probable cost for its dishes as a guide to whether one suited the household's means.
Bananas reached British greengrocers in quantity only in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, once fast steamers made it possible to bring green fruit from the Canaries, to be ripened after landing, and later from the Caribbean; before that they were a curiosity of the hothouse and the docks. Their appearance in a Cassell's dessert — sliced raw, layered with jam and custard in a glass dish — shows the fruit being slotted straight into the existing grammar of the English trifle rather than treated as anything exotic. The glass dish itself is part of the recipe: pressed and cut glassware had long since become cheap enough for middle-class households to own footed bowls made to show off strata of fruit, preserve and cream. Citron and dried cherries as garnish are older habits still, carried over from the candied-peel decoration of Georgian sweets and puddings.