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Banana Cream
5 bananas 1/4 ounce vegetable gelatine 1/2 pint milk 1 tablespoon sugar 2 oranges 1/2 pint cream Peel the bananas, and pass them through a sieve, and add the sugar and whipped cream; soak the gelatine in two tablespoons of cold water, when dissolved, add it to the milk, and let it just come to the boil, then add it to the cream and banana, and mix lightly. Turn into a mold, and let it stand in a cold place. When set, turn out, and put the oranges--cut into thin slices--round, and serve.
A moulded banana fool set with agar rather than animal gelatine. The whole thing hinges on getting the seaweed gel properly dissolved before it meets the cold purée.
- Vegetable gelatine is agar"Vegetable gelatine" in this period usually means agar-agar, sold now as agar powder, flakes or bars. Use powder for reliability: 1/4 ounce is about 7 grams -- closer to three or four teaspoons of powder than two -- which is a firm set for a pint of liquid plus fruit.
- Agar must actually boilThis is the instruction that decides whether the dish works. Agar does not dissolve in cold water — it only swells — and it needs a genuine boil of one to two minutes in the milk, stirring, before it will gel. "Just come to the boil" is the bare minimum; give it a little longer and check that no gritty specks remain.
- Work fast once combinedAgar begins to set at around 100F, far warmer than animal gelatine, so a hot milk mixture poured into cold banana and cream can seize into threads on contact. Have the purée and cream at room temperature, pour the hot milk in a thin stream while folding, and get it into the mould immediately.
- Pints and half-pintsIf the book is British, a half pint is 10 fluid ounces; if American, 8. Either reading works here, but keep the milk and cream equal in volume as written; that is about 2 cups of liquid on the American reading and about 2 1/2 cups on the British, before the bananas go in.
- Sieving the bananasA food mill or a fine sieve gives the smooth texture intended. A blender works but incorporates air and darkens the purée faster; either way, add the sugar at once, though a single tablespoon will do little to slow browning.
- SettingAn agar mould sets at cool room temperature and does not need the refrigerator, though an hour in the fridge does no harm. It will be firmer and less wobbly than a gelatine cream, and it will not melt on the plate.
- Turning outRinse the mould with cold water before filling rather than oiling it. To unmould, loosen the edge and invert onto a chilled plate.
- YieldSomething over a quart of mixture, serving six. Slice the oranges over a bowl and use the juice as it collects; the recipe itself says only to arrange the slices round the turned-out cream.
Vegetarian cookery of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had a practical problem: gelatine is boiled out of bones, hides and calves' feet, which ruled it out of a meatless kitchen. The answer was agar-agar, an extract of red seaweeds long used in Japan as kanten and adopted in Europe as "vegetable gelatine" or "Japanese isinglass"; in the same years it had become the standard medium for growing cultures in the bacteriology labs. Irish moss, or carrageen, served the same purpose in households that could gather it from the shore. Bananas in a moulded cream mark the period as much as the agar does, the fruit having gone from a curiosity into an everyday grocery item by the 1900s, cheap enough to sieve five of them into a pudding.