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Banana Ice Cream
Add the pulp of four bananas and two tablespoons lemon juice to Philadelphia Ice Cream. Freeze.
A one-line variation that assumes you already have the book's base recipe in front of you. Everything that matters here is in the two words "Philadelphia Ice Cream" and in the freezing method the original takes for granted.
- What Philadelphia Ice Cream isAn uncooked, custard-free base: cream (or half cream, half milk) with sugar and vanilla, stirred until the sugar dissolves. No eggs, no cooking. Proportions vary between books, so work from the base recipe as printed. If you are using a modern base, choose a plain sweet-cream one rather than a rich egg custard, which will bury the fruit.
- Ripeness is the hingeBananas that are merely yellow give a starchy, faintly green flavor once frozen. Use fruit that is heavily freckled and soft, and press the pulp through a sieve or blend it smooth so no fibrous strands survive freezing.
- Why the lemon juiceTwo tablespoons is enough to keep the pulp from browning to a dull gray and to sharpen a flavor that otherwise turns flat and cloying at freezing temperatures. Add it to the banana, not the cream, and combine the two at once.
- "Freeze" meant a crank freezerIn 1907 this is a wooden bucket with a dasher, packed with crushed ice and rock salt in a ratio of about three parts ice to one of salt, turned for 15 to 20 minutes. A modern machine does the same job; the frozen-bowl type wants the mixture thoroughly chilled first.
- Do not still-freeze itPoured into a pan and left in the freezer, this base sets into a solid ice. It needs the churning to build texture, since there are no eggs or stabilizers to help.
- RipeningStraight from the churn it is soft. Period practice was to pack the canister in fresh ice and salt for an hour or two to firm up; a covered container in the freezer for two hours does it now. Let it stand a few minutes before scooping.
- YieldWith a quart of cream, about a quart and a half finished, serving eight.
Philadelphia ice cream was the American name for the plain uncooked style, cream and sugar and flavoring frozen without eggs, distinguished in nineteenth-century cookbooks from the richer French custard ices; the name is generally traced to the reputation of Philadelphia's confectioners, who were widely held to make the best of it. That a household book of 1907 could treat four bananas as an unremarkable pantry item says a good deal about the period: steamship traffic from Central America had, over the preceding decades, turned the banana from a curiosity sold singly at fairs into cheap everyday fruit in American cities. This particular book was issued by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and its frozen-dishes chapter is built exactly this way, with a handful of full base recipes followed by short variations that lean on them.