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Banana Floating Island
1 pint (2 cups) milk 3 egg yolks 1/4 cup sugar vanilla dash salt 1 tablespoon cornstarch bananas Beat eggs slightly, add to milk with sugar and salt, cook in double boiler with the cornstarch dissolved in cold water. When thick, add vanilla. Cool. Pour into a deep dish over sliced bananas. Place sliced bananas carelessly over top, and finish them off with dabs of meringue made from egg whites and brown in oven.
A stirred custard with soft meringue, given here in the shorthand of a menu book that assumed the cook already knew the technique. The hinge is the custard: it must thicken over water, never over direct heat, or the yolks curdle.
- Temper the eggsBeat the yolks with the sugar and salt before combining with the milk, and if the milk has been heated first, whisk it in a ladle at a time before returning everything to the double boiler. As written the eggs and milk go together cold and come up to heat slowly, which is itself a guard against curdling.
- Cornstarch slurryOne tablespoon in two cups of milk gives a pourable custard, not a pudding. Dissolve it in about two tablespoons of cold water and stir it in at the start; cook and stir until it coats a spoon and the raw starch taste is gone, roughly 8 to 10 minutes.
- Vanilla off the heatThe original says to add it once the custard is thick; adding it after the pan comes off the water preserves more of the aroma, as the volatiles in alcohol-based extract are driven off by prolonged heat.
- Cool before assemblingPour the custard warm over bananas and they go grey and slippery. Cool it to at least room temperature, with plastic wrap on the surface to stop a skin forming.
- Keeping the bananas paleSlice them at the last moment and toss with a little lemon juice.
- The meringueThree whites beaten to soft peaks with about 6 tablespoons of sugar, a tablespoon at a time, will cover the dish. "Dabs" means spoonfuls dropped in islands, not a sealed layer, which is the whole point of the name.
- BrowningThe original says only 'brown in oven.' A hot oven, roughly 400 to 425F, for a few minutes with constant watching; a moderate oven nearer 350F for longer sets the meringue more thoroughly.
- Yield and servingTwo cups of milk and three yolks serve four to six. Serve within an hour or two of browning; the meringue slumps and beads in the refrigerator overnight.