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Bananas and Cream No. 2
6 bananas 1 tablespoon sugar 1/2 pint cream Peel, and slice the bananas into two-inch lengths; put into a glass dish; sprinkle over the sugar. Whip the cream, and cover the bananas. Serve with any cold milk mold. The slices may be moistened with sherry or kirsch.
A three-ingredient assembly whose only real technique is the cream. The points below cover the archaic measures and the one problem the original ignores: cut bananas brown fast.
- Half a pint of creamIn American measure that is one cup, which whips up to roughly two cups. Use heavy or whipping cream, around 30 percent fat or more; single or light cream will not hold peaks.
- Two-inch lengthsThese are chunks, not thin coins — a banana yields three or four pieces. They hold their shape under the cream rather than dissolving into it.
- Assemble at the last minuteCut banana oxidises and greys within about fifteen minutes. Slice directly into the serving dish, sugar, cover with cream, and take it to the table; a squeeze of lemon juice over the pieces buys you a little time if you must hold it.
- The sugarOne tablespoon for six bananas is a light dusting, and it draws a thin syrup from the fruit. The cream here is unsweetened — sweeten it slightly if you are serving without the milk mold.
- "Any cold milk mold"This most likely refers to a set, turned-out milk pudding -- blancmange, cornstarch mold, junket -- served chilled alongside. A panna cotta or a plain set custard fills the same role.
- Sherry or kirschAbout a tablespoon or two total, spooned over the fruit before the cream goes on. Kirsch is a dry cherry brandy and reads as almond-cherry against the banana; a cream sherry will push the dish sweeter.
- YieldSix bananas and a cup of cream serve four to six as written, more if a milk mold is doing half the work.
Recipes of this kind mark the moment bananas stopped being a luxury in American and British kitchens. Regular refrigerated steamship traffic from Central America and the Caribbean brought the fruit into ordinary greengrocers' stock in the decades either side of 1900, and cookbooks responded with a run of near-identical entries — bananas and cream, bananas with orange, banana salad. This one asks for no cooking at all.