Home › Boiled Puddings › Banana Pudding
Banana Pudding
1 quart milk 2 eggs 2 tablespoons cornstarch 1 cup sugar Pinch of salt Bananas.
Cook together the milk, eggs, cornstarch, salt and sugar. Color one-third with chocolate and one-third with fruit coloring. Line the bottom of pudding dish with bananas. Pour in the dark part, next the pink, and lastly the white part. Set on ice to get cold, and serve with whipped cream.
A stovetop cornstarch custard, divided into three colours and layered over sliced bananas. The original assumes you know how to handle cornstarch and eggs together; the notes below fill in what it leaves out.
- The hinge: cook the starch outBring the mixture to a full boil for at least a minute, stirring constantly, or the pudding will taste chalky and may not set. A double boiler or a heavy saucepan over medium heat both work; the double boiler is more forgiving with the eggs in it.
- Temper the eggsWhisk the eggs with the sugar, cornstarch and salt into a smooth slurry with a little cold milk, then stir that into the hot remaining milk. Adding whole eggs to hot milk directly gives you sweet scrambled egg.
- ConsistencyTwo tablespoons of cornstarch and two eggs to a quart of milk is a soft, spoonable pudding, not a sliceable mould. If you want the layers to hold sharp edges, use three tablespoons.
- "Color one-third with chocolate"About 1 oz of melted unsweetened chocolate, or a tablespoon of cocoa slaked in a little hot milk, is right for a third of this batch. Cocoa will thin the layer slightly and wants an extra teaspoon of sugar.
- "Fruit coloring"Probably cochineal or one of the red colourings sold for confectionery at the time. Modern red food colouring does the same job; two or three drops is enough for a pink, not a scarlet.
- LayeringPour each layer while still warm and pourable, over the back of a spoon so it does not tunnel into the one below. Let each set for ten minutes or so before adding the next if you want clean bands.
- "Set on ice"Refrigerate three to four hours until firm. Press plastic wrap onto the surface if you dislike a skin.
- BananasSlice them straight into the dish immediately before the first layer goes on. Exposed to air they brown quickly, so the pudding is best eaten the day it is made.
- YieldA quart of milk gives six to eight servings in a deep dish.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company to promote its Five Roses flour, and it was distributed cheaply and very widely across Canada, which is why it turns up in so many prairie kitchens. Cornstarch puddings of this kind were an early-twentieth-century staple, cheap, made from pantry goods, and easy to dress up; the three tinted layers here can be read as a domestic echo of the tricoloured moulds and Neapolitan ices of the period. Bananas were still something of a treat in Canada before the First World War, though arriving in increasing quantity by rail and steamer, and that novelty is part of the dish's appeal.