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Banana Custard
Arrange slices of bananas in bottom of serving dish, sprinkle with lemon juice, and cover with soft custard.
A two-line recipe that assumes you already know how to make the soft custard it rests on. Everything that can go wrong is in that custard.
- What "soft custard" meansA stirred, "boiled" custard rather than a baked one. A typical formula of the period runs about 2 cups milk, 4 egg yolks (or 2 whole eggs), 1/3 cup sugar and a pinch of salt, cooked in a double boiler until it coats a spoon; the book's own soft custard recipe may differ in proportion. Better cooled before it goes over the fruit.
- The hinge: 175FStirred custard thickens between about 170F and 180F and curdles a few degrees above that. Pull it from the heat the moment it films the back of a spoon and strain it into a cold bowl to stop the carry-over cooking.
- Cool the custard firstWarm custard poured over sliced banana will soften and discolour the fruit. Chill the custard thoroughly, then assemble shortly before serving.
- Why the lemon juiceThe acid slows enzymatic browning, though it seasons the fruit as well. A teaspoon or two tossed through the slices is enough; more and the dessert reads as sour.
- BananasUse fruit that is fully yellow with no green at the shoulder but no brown freckling either. Overripe bananas break down into the custard and make it watery.
- Vessel"Serving dish" most likely means a single shallow bowl brought to the table and spooned out rather than individual cups, though either works.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities; about two cups of custard and three bananas would serve four to six.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907), written by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney chocolate company, belongs to the genre of manufacturer-sponsored cookbooks that filled American kitchens in the early twentieth century — chocolate recipes were the selling point, but the volume had to function as a general household manual, hence a full dessert chapter of custards, gelatines and fruit dishes. Bananas by this date were no longer a novelty: steam shipping had brought them within reach of northern American kitchens, and cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s put them to work in exactly this way, layered raw under a cooked custard or whipped cream so that no fuel was spent on them. The soft or "boiled" custard underneath is the older element by far, belonging to a tradition of stirred cream custards that runs back well before the eighteenth century, and its brevity here likely reflects a cross-reference to the book's own custard recipe.