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Banana Cream Pie
Slice 2 large bananas into a baked crust. Fill up with whipped cream, sweetened with vanilla. Drop a spoonful of red jelly on each piece.
Barely more than an assembly note, which is how quick pies were written in this book — the reader was assumed to know how to blind-bake a shell and whip cream. The gaps worth filling are quantity, timing and the fact that this is not a custard pie at all.
- The crust"A baked crust" means a fully baked and completely cool shell; no size is given, though a 9-inch pan is the likely default. Any residual warmth will slacken the cream within minutes.
- How much creamNo quantity is given. For a 9-inch shell use about 2 cups (500 ml) heavy or whipping cream, 35% butterfat, with 2 to 3 tablespoons sugar and 1 teaspoon vanilla. That yields a mound tall enough to "fill up" over the bananas.
- Whip it cold and stop earlyChill the bowl, beaters and cream. Take it to soft-medium peaks, not stiff — a pie that has to sit for an hour will firm up further on its own, and over-beaten cream weeps and turns grainy.
- Bananas brownThis is the hinge. Slice the bananas directly into the shell and cover them with cream immediately, or brush the slices with lemon juice first. Sliced bananas left exposed for even ten minutes go grey at the edges.
- "Red jelly"Unspecified; a currant, crabapple or raspberry jelly would all fit, and the term was loose. Because it goes on each piece rather than over the whole pie, it reads as a plated garnish, not a glaze.
- Not a cream pie in the modern senseToday the name implies a cooked pastry-cream filling. Here it is literally cream, uncooked, so there is nothing to set. Cut and serve within two or three hours of assembly; refrigerated overnight the cream slumps and the crust softens.
- YieldSix to eight slices, depending on the size of the shell and how narrow the wedges are cut.
Banana pies of this kind belong to the moment when the fruit stopped being a luxury in Canadian and northern American kitchens. Improvements in shipping brought Central American bananas north in quantity around the turn of the century, and by the 1910s — when the Lake of the Woods Milling Company's Five Roses Cook Book was said to be circulating in hundreds of thousands of Canadian households — a cook could reasonably expect to buy two large bananas without comment. The recipe's real logic is the pie shell: a flour-company cookbook existed to sell flour, so the pastry chapter is long and careful while fillings like this one are treated as afterthoughts requiring no cooking at all. The spoonful of red jelly dropped on each slice finishes the dish with a touch of colour.