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The Simplest Banana Dessert
To eight sliced bananas add one cup of sugar, the juice of one lemon, and serve with shaved ice in tall glasses or dainty dishes, adding a teaspoonful of whipped cream or white of egg to top off each one. A little white wine may be added if desired, or a sprinkling of chopped nuts.
A macerated banana dessert of the sort that filled the fruit chapters of turn-of-the-century American cookbooks. It works, but the sugar is calibrated to fruit far less sweet than what you will buy today.
- Cut the sugarA full cup of sugar to eight bananas is very sweet by modern taste. Start with a quarter cup and taste, adding more only if the lemon overwhelms.
- The lemon is structuralThe lemon -- Besides the flavour, lemon juice slows the browning of cut banana. The recipe does not say in what order to combine, but tossing the slices in the juice before the sugar coats every cut surface.
- Maceration timeThe recipe implies immediate serving. If you do let it stand, keep it short and chilled: sugared banana slices soften and collapse fairly quickly, so this is not a dish to assemble hours ahead.
- Shaved iceOriginally scraped or shaved from a block. A few seconds of ice cubes in a blender or food processor gives a roughly similar snowy texture; crushed ice from a machine is coarser but acceptable. Add it at the moment of serving or it waters the syrup.
- "White of egg"Raw egg white, presumably beaten, as an alternative to the whipped cream. Uncooked white carries a small salmonella risk; use pasteurized whites if you want it, or simply take the whipped cream option, which the recipe offers first.
- The white wineA dry-ish wine such as a Riesling or a Vouvray, a tablespoon or two per glass, poured over just before the ice. Anything oaky fights the banana.
- YieldEight bananas fill roughly six to eight tall glasses. "Dainty dishes" presumably means small individual serving dishes, an alternative vessel rather than a different dessert.
Bananas were a novelty turned staple within a single generation: barely seen in American cities before the 1870s, they were being sold cheaply from carts and grocers by the 1890s as steamship and rail networks reached the Caribbean and Central American plantations. Cookbooks of the period are often said to have responded with banana recipes, most of them, like this one, doing little more than slicing the fruit and dressing it, because the flavour was still the point of interest. The shaved ice and tall glasses arguably place it alongside the soda-fountain fashions of the same years, when ice was newly cheap and household enough to be scraped into a dessert rather than reserved for the icebox. The egg white as a substitute for whipped cream is a thrift habit found throughout nineteenth-century fruit and jelly cookery.