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Banana Cream
4 bananas (ripe) 1/2 cup pecan meats (cut up) 3 tablespoons lemon juice 1/2 cup sugar 1 cup cream (whipped) Mash bananas with lemon juice, add sugar and nut meats. Fold in whipped cream and chill well to serve. Serves 6.
A no-cook fool that depends entirely on the ripeness of the fruit and on the lemon juice going in first. Both are easy to get wrong.
- Lemon juice first, alwaysMash the bananas directly into the lemon juice rather than adding it afterward. The acid slows the browning that begins within a minute of the fruit being crushed, and the difference between the two orders is the difference between pale cream and grey.
- What "ripe" means hereHeavily freckled, soft to the thumb, sweet-smelling. Four medium bananas give roughly 1 1/2 cups of pulp. Underripe fruit is starchy and chalky and no amount of sugar corrects it.
- CreamUse heavy cream (36 percent fat or above); one cup whips to about two. Whip to soft peaks only, since the folding will stiffen it further and an over-whipped base turns grainy against the wet fruit.
- SugarHalf a cup is generous by current taste. With very ripe fruit, a third of a cup is usually enough; taste the mashed bananas before deciding.
- PecansToasting them at 350F for 6 to 8 minutes and cooling before cutting is optional; the recipe does not call for it. Raw pecan meats soften in a chilled cream, while toasted ones hold some crispness longer.
- Chilling and holdingAn hour in the refrigerator is enough to set it. It does not keep -- the mixture weeps and darkens by the next day, so make it the day it is eaten.
- YieldSix portions, roughly two-thirds of a cup each.
Dishes like this one resemble the invalid-and-convalescent cookery found in American household books well into the twentieth century, where chapters of high-calorie, easily swallowed preparations were aimed at people who needed to gain weight. Whether this particular recipe comes from such a chapter cannot be established from the page itself. Cream, sugar, nuts and ripe fruit do deliver a great many calories in a form that requires little chewing. Bananas had by the early twentieth century become comparatively cheap and widely available in American cities through the growth of the refrigerated fruit trade, and they appear often in such diets: soft, sweet, needing no cooking, and widely regarded as digestible. The technique is that of the fruit fool -- crushed fruit folded into whipped cream -- a form generally traced to English kitchens long before.