Home › Fruit Desserts › Banana Pudding
Banana Pudding
6 bananas 3 tablespoons of strawberry jam Whipped cream Peel and mash the bananas; put the jam into a round glass dish, and place the bananas round it. Serve with whipped cream put round.
A three-line assembly rather than a pudding in the baked sense. The whole thing lives or dies on how the mashed bananas look after five minutes, so treat that as the hinge.
- Mash last, serve at onceMashed banana browns within minutes of contact with air. Assemble immediately before it goes to the table, or fold a teaspoon or two of lemon juice through the mash to slow the discolouring.
- What "pudding" means hereNothing is cooked and nothing sets. This is a cold composed dish in a glass bowl, in the same family as a trifle or a fool, and it will not hold shape if made hours ahead.
- BananasUse fruit that is fully yellow and freckled, since underripe banana mashes stringy and tastes chalky. Six is what the recipe calls for; adjust to the size of the fruit you have.
- The jamThree tablespoons of strawberry jam is the only sweetening in the dish. A loose, runny jam will bleed into the banana rather than sit as a centre, so stir it smooth and use one that is thickly set.
- Whipped cream"Put round" means spooned or piped in a border, not folded in. Whip heavy cream to soft peaks only. The recipe does not say whether to sweeten it.
- The glass dishThe arrangement is concentric: jam in the centre, banana round it, cream round that. Any clear bowl will do, and individual glasses make the browning problem easier to manage.
- YieldServes four to six as written, depending on the size of the bananas.
Banana desserts of this kind belong to a period when the fruit had become cheap and common in British and American cities but was still novel enough to be worth serving in a glass dish at the end of a meal. The growth of the Caribbean and Central American trade in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, together with improvements in shipping, moved bananas from a luxury curiosity towards an everyday fruit, and simple uncooked banana dishes are common in cookbooks of the early twentieth century. If the source is a meatless cookery book, that would be characteristic: vegetarian and reform cookery of the era leaned on fresh and dried fruit for its sweet course.