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Banana Pudding
Mash six bananas and add one tablespoon cornstarch rubbed smooth in half a cup of cold milk. Add a half cup of sugar and a pinch of salt and place a layer of this in bottom of baking-dish. Over this sprinkle crisp bread or The blossom to the left shows the formation of the fruit, successive and progressive: each leaf curling back as the rows of little bananas become mature enough to do without protection
The text breaks off mid-sentence, where a caption describing the banana blossom has been set into the column by mistake. What survives is enough to work from: a simple cornstarch-thickened banana pudding layered with dried crumbs, in the manner of a brown betty.
- The missing instructionsThe recipe stops after "sprinkle crisp bread or"; the lost words were probably "cracker crumbs" or similar. Betty-style puddings of the period generally alternate fruit mixture and crumbs and finish with a crumb layer, so baking until set and browned is a reasonable reconstruction, but the original text does not survive to confirm it.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature or time is given. In a modern oven, around 350F for roughly 30 to 40 minutes should set the cornstarch and colour the crumb top.
- Smooth the cornstarch firstThis is the hinge. Cornstarch rubbed into cold milk until no lumps remain will thicken evenly; dropped into the mashed fruit dry it forms pale knots that never dissolve. Half a cup of cold milk to one tablespoon starch is the correct ratio here.
- "Crisp bread"Not the Scandinavian crispbread but stale bread dried in the oven and crumbled, or broken crackers. Panko is too soft and uniform; coarse dried breadcrumbs behave the way the original intends.
- The bananasThe banana of this period would have been Gros Michel rather than the Cavendish sold today, and is generally reported to have been more strongly perfumed. Use six very ripe Cavendish, well speckled, or the pudding will taste starchy rather than sweet.
- SugarHalf a cup for six bananas is modest, and about right for fruit that is fully ripe. Taste the mashed fruit before adding all of it.
- Butter and finishingThe surviving text mentions none, but a layered crumb pudding wants two tablespoons of butter dotted over the top layer to brown it. Serve warm with cream.
- YieldSix bananas should roughly fill a shallow two-quart dish and serve about six.
Bananas were still something of a novelty ingredient when this was printed. Regular steamer traffic from Central America and the Caribbean, and the refrigerated rail cars that followed, turned the fruit from a luxury sold singly at fairs into a cheap staple within about thirty years, and American cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s responded with a rush of banana recipes — fritters, salads, ices and puddings. The layered form of this pudding is older than the fruit in it: alternating stewed fruit with buttered crumbs is the brown betty method, applied to apples for generations before anyone tried it with bananas. The stray caption about the blossom shows the book teaching readers what the plant looked like as well as what to do with it.