Home › Vegetable Gelatine › Banana and Orange Cream
Banana and Orange Cream
4 bananas 2 oranges 1 tablespoon powdered vegetable gelatine 2 tablespoons lemon juice 1 teacup of sugar 1/2 pint cream Soak the gelatine in half a cup of cold water over night, and next morning dissolve it in the same quantity of boiling water. Peel the bananas, and rub them through a sieve, add the juice and pulp of the oranges, and the lemon juice and sugar. Mix all well together, and add to the gelatine. Set the mixture in a cool place, until it begins to stiffen. Whip the cream till stiff, and stir all together; put into a mold, and let it stand on ice a few hours.
A cold fruit cream set with agar rather than animal gelatine, which changes the handling more than the ingredient list suggests. The hinge is the setting agent: agar must actually boil to hydrate, and it sets at a much higher temperature than gelatine.
- Vegetable gelatine means agarIn vegetarian cookery of this period "powdered vegetable gelatine" usually means agar-agar, from red seaweed; carrageen (Irish moss) was the other common option. Modern agar powder is generally more finely milled and stronger than the older product, so a tablespoon here risks a firm, sliceable jelly rather than a cream. Around a teaspoon of modern agar powder per cup of total liquid is nearer the mark, less for a soft set.
- It has to boil, not just meet boiling waterPouring boiling water over agar will not fully dissolve it. Agar needs to be simmered for a couple of minutes until no grains remain, then used before it cools. Overnight soaking, as directed, does help the grains swell and shortens that simmering.
- Agar sets hotUnlike gelatine, agar begins gelling at around 100-105F, so "until it begins to stiffen" happens quickly and then goes past the point of no return. Fold the whipped cream in while the fruit mixture is still barely warm and pourable; if it has set solid, beat it smooth before adding the cream.
- Teacup of sugarA teacup in these books is about 6 fl oz, so roughly 3/4 cup or 5 1/2 oz of sugar. With ripe bananas and sweet oranges you can cut that by a third without the set suffering — sugar is not doing structural work here.
- Half a pint of creamIf the book is British, that is 10 fl oz; American, 8 fl oz. Either works. Use heavy or whipping cream at 35 percent fat or above; single or light cream will not whip.
- Sieve the bananas, don't blend themRubbing through a sieve is worth doing by hand or with a food mill. A blender aerates the puree and greys it faster. The lemon juice will also help keep the banana from browning, so add it promptly.
- Chilling"Stand on ice a few hours" is a refrigerator now. Agar sets at room temperature, so two hours in the fridge is ample; longer chilling firms it further and improves unmolding.
- YieldUnmold by dipping the mold briefly in warm water — agar releases cleanly and, unlike gelatine, will not slump on a warm table.
Agar-agar is generally traced to European and American kitchens in the later nineteenth century through the Japanese trade in kanten, the dried seaweed jelly, and it was seized on by vegetarian cooks for exactly the reason this book exists: ordinary gelatine is boiled from the bones and hides of animals, which put every jelly, cream and aspic out of reach. Books of meatless cookery in the first decades of the twentieth century often seem to give space to vegetable gelatine, teaching cooks to reproduce the moulded set pieces that dominated the period's dessert course. The dish itself may be of its moment in another way: bananas and oranges together in a moulded cream plausibly signal cheap, reliable steamship fruit, still novel enough to be the point of the dish rather than a background ingredient.