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Banana Dessert
4 bananas 1 cup whipped cream Put the bananas through a colander. Beat the bananas to a stiff froth, and serve with whipped cream.
Two ingredients and one questionable instruction. The success of this depends entirely on how you interpret "beat to a stiff froth."
- The froth is the problemBanana pulp on its own will not whip to a stiff froth; it has no protein network to hold air. Related period recipes, often called banana snow, commonly beat the pulp into stiffly whipped egg white or fold it into the cream. As written the instruction is either an omission or wishful thinking, and the honest result is a light, aerated purée rather than anything stiff.
- "Through a colander"A colander here means a sieve or purée strainer, used to push the fruit through and break down its fibres. A food mill, a fine sieve and the back of a spoon, or a few pulses in a food processor all do the same job faster.
- Choose the fruit carefullyBananas that are fully speckled purée smoothly and are sweet enough to need no sugar. Underripe fruit stays starchy and slightly astringent, and no amount of beating will fix it.
- BrowningBanana pulp discolours within minutes of being exposed to air. A tablespoon of lemon juice beaten in slows it and sharpens the flavour; either way the dish should be made immediately before serving rather than held.
- "1 cup whipped cream"Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century books are inconsistent about whether this means cream before or after whipping. Read it as one cup of whipped volume, which is about half a cup of heavy cream beaten to soft peaks.
- YieldFour bananas and a cup of cream give four small dessert servings, or two generous ones. It is a light course meant to follow something substantial.
Bananas suited the purpose of a cheap, festive-seeming dessert precisely: by the 1900s steamer traffic from Central America had turned what had been an exotic novelty a generation earlier into one of the cheapest fruits on an American grocer's shelf, available year round when apples and berries were not. Desserts of this family — pulped fruit lightened with beaten egg white or cream, and generally called a snow, a sponge or a fluff — appear across the period under dozens of fruit names, and the technique is far older than the banana version, having been applied to apples and lemons for well over a century before.