Banana Pie
2 eggs 1 tbsp. butter 1 cup sugar 1 cup boiling water 2 tbsp. flour pinch of salt 1 tsp. vanilla Put butter, flour and sugar in sauce pan, add boiling water and stir until it thickens. Then add beaten yolks and salt. Cook five minutes and cool. Add vanilla. Slice two bananas and arrange a layer of cream, then bananas, then cream. Make one crust and use the whites of the
— May Wiley
eggs for a meringue.
A one-crust banana cream pie built on a flour-thickened custard rather than a milk one, which is why it reads so lean. The instructions assume a good deal of unstated knowledge, chiefly about the shell and the meringue.
- The crust is blind-bakedThe crust is almost certainly baked before filling -- "Make one crust" means a single bottom shell, and since the filling is cooled before it goes in, the shell must be baked and cooled first; the only later heat is the meringue bake. The recipe gives no oven instructions at all. A modern approach: line the pastry, weight it, bake at 425F for about 15 minutes, remove the weights and finish 10 minutes more until dry and pale gold.
- Water, not milkThe filling is thickened with flour and water, enriched only by butter and yolks. It will taste lighter than a milk-based banana cream pie; substituting milk for the boiling water gives a richer result, but it is not what May Wiley wrote.
- Cook the flour outTwo tablespoons of flour in a cup of liquid is a thin bind, and the five minutes after the yolks go in matters as much for taste as thickness. Keep it at a bare simmer, stirring constantly, or the flour reads raw and pasty.
- Temper the yolksThe direction to "add beaten yolks" to a hot pan is an invitation to scrambled egg. Whisk a ladle of the hot mixture into the yolks first, then return everything to the pan.
- Cool before the bananas"Cook five minutes and cool" is not optional padding. Hot custard poured over sliced banana turns the fruit grey and slippery; the filling should be at room temperature, with a sheet of plastic on its surface to stop a skin forming.
- Meringue proportions and bakingThe recipe says only to "use the whites... for a meringue" and gives no sugar, temperature or time. Two whites will take about 4 tablespoons of sugar, beaten to stiff glossy peaks. Spread it so it seals to the crust edge all round; around 350F for 12 to 15 minutes will brown the peaks. Hotter, shorter bakes brown faster and are often blamed for weeping.
- Yield and keepingNo pan size is given; the quantity of filling suits a small pie, roughly an 8- or 9-inch shell. It is best the day it is made: meringue beads and the bananas darken by the second day, even under refrigeration.
Community cookbooks of the early twentieth century are full of cream pies like this one, and the water-based version is worth noticing. Flour, sugar, butter and boiling water made a filling that required no milk at all, and the two eggs were split, yolks in the custard and whites on top "u2014 though whether thrift or convenience lay behind either choice is not something the recipe records. Bananas themselves were the modern touch: by the 1900s and 1910s steamship and rail networks had made them a cheap, reliably available fruit in American towns, and cookbooks of the period start slipping them into puddings, salads and pies. Philathea cook books were compiled by the Philathea classes, young women's Bible-study groups of the Baraca-Philathea movement, Baptist in origin, and were sold to raise funds; the signed contributions, like May Wiley's here, are the point of the genre as much as the cooking is.