Banana Whip
Three bananas Juice of one lemon One-half package of Larkin Gelatine One pint of freshly boiled water One-half cup of cold water One cup of sugar One-half package of pink coloring-powder Remove the skins and indigestible portion of the bananas. Cut fine, add lemon-juice and beat to a creamy mass. Moisten Gelatine in cold water, add sugar, bananas and coloring, and beat again until foamy. Pour into a mold and serve with cream.
A whipped gelatine dessert from a company cookbook, written for cooks who already knew how gelatine behaved. The printed method leaves out a step, and the beating has to happen at the right moment or nothing sets foamy.
- The missing stepThe ingredient list calls for a pint of freshly boiled water that the method never mentions. Bloom the gelatine in the half cup of cold water, then dissolve it in the boiling pint with the sugar; the fruit and coloring go in after that.
- Timing is the hingeChill the dissolved mixture until it is the consistency of raw egg white before the final beating. Beat it warm and it stays liquid; beat it fully set and it breaks into curds instead of foam.
- Half a package of gelatinePeriod package sizes varied and Larkin's is not recorded; where a package was about half an ounce and set a quart, half a package works out at roughly one modern envelope, 1/4 oz or about 2 1/4 teaspoons. The total liquid here is 2 1/2 cups (the pint of boiled water plus the half cup of cold).
- "The indigestible portion"This means the fibrous strings and the tough central core of the banana, both of which nineteenth-century writers regarded as hard on the stomach. Scraping the strings off is worth doing for texture regardless.
- Pink coloring-powderThe recipe wants a packaged powder dye, presumably one of the company's own line, though unlike the gelatine it is not named as Larkin's. A few drops of modern liquid or gel food coloring does the same job, or leave it out; the whip is a pale cream color on its own.
- SugarA full cup with only three bananas is very sweet by current taste. Two-thirds of a cup holds the set perfectly well and lets the lemon read.
- Molding and yieldRinse the mold with cold water before filling so the whip releases cleanly. Allow at least four hours in the refrigerator; this makes about six servings. The recipe says only 'serve with cream' and does not say whether it was sweetened.
Good Things to Eat is generally traced to the Larkin Company of Buffalo, a soap manufacturer that grew into a mail-order household empire and published cookbooks whose recipes conveniently called for Larkin gelatine and Larkin coloring-powder cand and the Larkin origin here rests on the branded ingredient rather than on any statement of authorship; several booklets and books of the period carry the same title, the best-known being Rufus Estes's 1911 book, which is unconnected to Larkin. Whipped gelatines like this one spread quickly once granulated gelatine came in packets and no longer had to be rendered from calves' feet at home, turning a laborious dish into an afternoon's work. Bananas play the same role: cheap refrigerated steamship cargo had made them an everyday fruit in American cities by the early 1900s, at a time when the older medical caution about their "indigestible" fibers was still being repeated.