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Banana Ice Cream
To the crushed pulp of six bananas add one cup sugar, one-half teaspoon salt, and one quart milk and cream mixed. Mix well and freeze.
A Philadelphia-style ice cream: no eggs, no cooking, just fruit, dairy and sugar frozen down. It stands or falls on how ripe the bananas are.
- Use overripe bananasFreezing dulls sweetness and aroma, so bananas that are heavily speckled or nearly black are what the recipe assumes. Six medium bananas give roughly 2 to 2 1/2 cups of pulp; underripe fruit tastes starchy and chalky once frozen.
- Crush, do not liquefy"Crushed pulp" means mashed with a fork or passed through a sieve. Banana worked in a blender or food processor tends to go slack and gluey, which can give the finished cream a gummy body.
- The salt is seasoningThe half teaspoon of salt goes into the mixture, not the freezer. The rock salt used to pack an old crank freezer is a separate thing entirely and never touches the cream itself.
- Milk and cream mixedA quart of "milk and cream mixed" is left to the cook. Half milk and half heavy cream gives about 20 percent butterfat, richer than ordinary commercial ice cream; all milk will freeze hard and icy because there is no egg yolk or stabiliser to soften it.
- BrowningMashed banana oxidises within minutes. A tablespoon of lemon juice stirred into the pulp keeps the colour pale and sharpens the flavour, which the sugar otherwise flattens.
- FreezingIn a modern churn, chill the mixture thoroughly first and churn 20 to 25 minutes, then harden in the freezer for two hours. Without a machine, freeze in a shallow pan and beat hard with a fork every 30 minutes for about three hours to break up ice crystals.
- Yield and servingMakes roughly 1 1/2 to 2 quarts. Banana ice cream sets very firm; let it stand 10 minutes at room temperature before scooping.
Banana recipes multiply in American cookbooks from the later nineteenth century onward, and the reason is shipping. Faster steamers and a rail network reaching inland turned the banana from an expensive novelty into a cheap and widely available fruit, and household writers looked for uses for it beyond eating out of hand. Collections of this kind -- a whole section devoted to a single fruit -- belong to that moment; some such books were issued or encouraged by the fruit trade, though that cannot be assumed of any particular one. The recipe is Philadelphia-style ice cream, meaning uncooked and eggless, as distinct from the French style built on a stirred custard; it needed no double boiler and no judgement about when a custard has thickened enough. Freezing would have meant a hand-cranked bucket packed with cracked ice and coarse salt, then the whole thing repacked and left to ripen under a blanket or a layer of newspaper.