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Bananas and Cream No. 1
6 bananas 1 ounce sugar 1 ounce of butter 1/4 pint cream Teaspoon rum Peel, and cut the bananas into rather thick slices, put them into a glass dish, and sprinkle over the sugar. Warm the cream and butter together, add the flavoring, let it stand in the saucepan about five minutes; then pour over the bananas, and serve with finger biscuits.
A five-minute dessert that depends entirely on the temperature of the cream: warm, never simmering. Everything else is assembly.
- The hingeThe butter is meant to melt into warm cream and stay emulsified. If the cream reaches a boil the butter will separate into a greasy film on the surface. Warm it only until the butter has disappeared, then let it sit off the heat the five minutes specified.
- Ounces are weights1 ounce of sugar is about 2 tablespoons; 1 ounce of butter is 2 tablespoons, or a quarter stick. Both are small amounts by modern dessert standards, which suits fully ripe fruit.
- The quarter pintIn a British book a pint is 20 fluid ounces, so 1/4 pint is 5 fl oz, a generous half cup. If you read it as a US pint it is 4 fl oz. Either works here; the larger measure gives a sauce rather than a coating.
- Finger biscuitsThese are ladyfingers, sold as savoiardi. Any crisp, dry sponge finger or langue de chat serves the same purpose, which is to give something to scoop with.
- Bananas brownSlice them last, directly into the dish, and pour the cream over within a few minutes. Sliced bananas standing in sugar for half an hour turn grey at the edges and go slack.
- RipenessUse fruit that is fully spotted. Firm, pale bananas have a starchy edge that this sauce is too mild to cover.
- YieldSix bananas serves four to six as written, depending on whether it follows a substantial meal.
Recipes like this belong to the moment when bananas stopped being a luxury. Refrigerated steamship transport in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries brought Central American and Canary Islands fruit into British and American shops in quantity, and cookbooks responded with numerous simple banana preparations: sliced with cream, with custard, with sugar and lemon, baked in their skins. The numbering "No. 1" indicates the book carried at least one further variation. In a meatless cookery book the dish sits comfortably with the vegetarian and food-reform movements of the period, which made much use of fresh and dried fruit for dessert courses.