Banana Cream
INGREDIENTS for small mould. - 6 bananas, 1/2 pint of cream, 1 lemon, sugar to taste, 1½ oz. of gelatine, a little water, flavouring of Benedictine. AVERAGE COST, 2s. 3d. Dissolve the gelatine in 1/2 a teacupful of water, and put it with the bananas, skinned, the lemon rind and juice, and a little loaf sugar, and simmer for about 10 minutes. When cold, beat up with the cream, flavour with the liqueur, and pour in a wet mould. Set the mould in a very cool place, or on ice.
TIME. About 10 minutes to simmer.
SEASONABLE in autumn and winter.
A moulded gelatine cream of the sort that filled Edwardian dessert tables. Two things need attention before you start: the gelatine quantity, and the fact that the bananas have to be reduced to a smooth purée before they meet the cream.
- The gelatine is far too much1½ oz in this quantity of mixture will give you something closer to a gum sweet than a cream. Modern gelatine is more consistently refined and more reliable in strength; around ½ oz (two 7 g sachets, roughly 4 teaspoons) is ample to set this quantity, and less if you want it barely trembling.
- Measures½ pint of cream is imperial: 10 fl oz, about 1¼ US cups. A teacupful is 5-6 fl oz, so half a teacupful of water is a scant ⅓ cup. Loaf sugar was cut from a hard cone; use ordinary granulated or caster sugar.
- Purée the fruitThe instruction to "beat up with the cream" appears to assume the simmered bananas have first been pushed through a sieve, which was common practice for fruit creams of this kind. Blend or sieve them smooth and fish out the lemon rind first, or the finished cream will be stringy and studded with peel.
- Fold, do not beatWhip the cream separately to soft peaks and fold it into the cooled, just-thickening banana purée. Simply beating unwhipped cream into the fruit mixture, as the wording suggests, gives a dense set rather than a light one.
- BenedictineA sweet herbal liqueur, still made and widely sold. Two tablespoons is enough for this quantity. Dark rum or brandy substitutes well; both suit banana.
- Setting"A very cool place, or on ice" means the refrigerator. Allow at least 4 hours, and overnight for a large mould.
- Turning out"A wet mould" means one rinsed with cold water and not dried -- the film of water lets the cream slip free. Dip the base in warm water for a few seconds before inverting.
- YieldA "small mould" of this size serves 4 to 6. Bananas discolour, so make it the day you intend to serve it.
The note that this is "seasonable in autumn and winter" says less about bananas than about shipping. Fruit reached Britain green on steamers from the Canaries and later the Caribbean, and the seasons attached to imported produce in household books of the period may have had more to do with when cargoes arrived than with when the plants fruited. Bananas had only recently ceased to be a curiosity in British kitchens -- the trade in them expanded rapidly around the turn of the twentieth century -- which is why they turn up here in the most fashionable dessert format available, a gelatine cream set in a mould and perfumed with liqueur. Benedictine, produced at Fécamp in Normandy and commercially marketed from the 1860s, is traditionally traced to a recipe of the Benedictine monks there; its presence in a domestic banana pudding is a fair measure of how confidently the period mixed the exotic with the expensive.