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Banana Pudding
One box of gelatine, one pint of cream, one quart of milk, two cups of sugar, five bananas. Dissolve gelatine in a cup of water, add sugar to the milk and let it scald, take some of the hot milk and thin the gelatine, strain and let it simmer ten minutes, pour in a bowl to cool. Peel bananas and break in small pieces with a fork and stir into the mixture, when cool but not stiff. Serve with whipped cream on top flavored with vanilla. Mrs Charles Sherlock.
A gelatin cream from the era when a boxed, granulated gelatine was still a novelty worth building a dessert around. Two things need attention: how much gelatine a "box" was, and the instruction to simmer it.
- Do not boil the gelatineProlonged boiling breaks down gelatin's setting power, so the ten-minute simmer works against the recipe. Dissolve the softened gelatine into the hot milk off the heat, stir until no grains remain, and stop there.
- "One box of gelatine"Period boxes of granulated gelatine seem generally to have held about an ounce, often divided into papers or envelopes, though sizes varied by maker; a modern envelope is 1/4 oz (about 7 g). For a quart of milk plus sugar you want 3 to 4 envelopes, but the original amount is genuinely ambiguous and worth erring on the lower side for a softer set.
- ScaldingScalded milk means about 180F, when the surface trembles and a rim of bubbles forms at the edge. It need not boil.
- The cream is not in the puddingRead the list against the method and the pint of cream appears only as the whipped topping. A pint whips to a generous quantity; a cup is plenty for eight servings unless you want it piled high.
- SugarTwo cups in a quart of milk is very sweet by current taste, and the bananas add more. One cup to a cup and a quarter gives a dessert that still sets and tastes of fruit.
- Bananas and browningMash or break them at the last moment, just as the mixture begins to thicken. Bananas stirred in early both sink and darken; a squeeze of lemon juice slows the discoloration without being tasted.
- Setting"Cool but not stiff" is the point at which the mixture coats a spoon and mounds slightly. After the fruit goes in, chill four hours or overnight in a bowl or mold.
- YieldAbout two quarts of pudding, serving eight to ten.
Packaged granulated gelatine, sold in boxes of pre-measured papers, reached American kitchens in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and replaced the long labor of boiling calves' feet or shaving isinglass; the molded cold dessert became something a household cook could attempt without a day's work behind it. Bananas moved from expensive curiosity to common grocery item as steamship trade with Central America expanded in the 1880s and 1890s, and cookbooks of the period show them turning up in exactly this way, sliced or mashed into creams, custards and jellies rather than treated as a cooking fruit. The recipe carries a contributor's name, Mrs Charles Sherlock, in the manner of collections assembled from readers' or members' own household receipts.