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INDIVIDUAL (Pounds of banana pulp pound)
3 pounds of banana pulp. 1/2 pound of sugar. 6 ounces of butter. 1 pint of cream. 12 eggs. Pinch of salt. 1/4 pint of West India rum. 1/2 teaspoonful of ground mace. 2 pineapples.
Peel the bananas and mash them to a pulp; weigh; put into a saucepan with the sugar and butter and stir over the fire till at boiling heat. Take it off, add the cream and flavorings, then the yolks of the eggs and lastly the whites whipped to a firm froth. Bake in custard cups or tin gem pans of handsome shape, and well buttered, about 10 or 15 minutes. Slice the pineapples very thinly and make hot in a syrup of sugar and red wine. Serve the little puddings upside down on a slice or two of pineapple in a saucer and the syrup poured over.
A hotel-scale banana soufflé pudding, baked in individual moulds and turned out over hot pineapple. The quantities assume a professional kitchen, and the oven temperature is left to the cook's judgement.
- ScaleThree pounds of pulp with a dozen eggs will fill roughly eighteen to twenty custard cups. Quartering the whole recipe gives four to five servings and is far more manageable at home.
- How many bananasThree pounds of pulp means roughly four and a half to five pounds of fruit as bought, or somewhere between a dozen and sixteen medium bananas. Use them well speckled; underripe fruit is starchy and will taste flat under the rum.
- MeasuresHalf a pound of sugar is a generous cup; six ounces of butter is a stick and a half. A pint of cream is two cups, and the quarter pint of rum is half a cup. Weigh the pulp after mashing, as the recipe insists.
- OvenNo temperature is given. A moderate oven, 350F, suits this; the small moulds set in ten to fifteen minutes. Standing them in a pan of hot water gives a smoother set, though it adds a few minutes.
- The hingeLet the banana, sugar and butter mixture cool below scalding before the yolks go in, or they will scramble. Fold the whipped whites in last with a light hand -- the lift in these puddings comes entirely from them, and beaten-out whites give a heavy, damp result.
- Turning outButter the moulds heavily and to the rim, and unmould while still warm. Left to cool in the tin, the pudding contracts and sticks.
- MaceGround mace is the aril, the lacy covering around the nutmeg seed; it is usually described as more delicate and floral than the nutmeg itself. It is still sold ground, but loses its perfume quickly; buy small quantities.
- The pineappleSlice fresh pineapple paper-thin and warm it in a syrup of sugar and red wine; if the syrup is hot enough it will also deactivate the fruit's bromelain. Canned slices work but may need less sugar in the syrup.
The American Pastry Cook belongs to the run of late nineteenth-century Chicago manuals aimed at hotel and restaurant kitchens rather than households, which is why the quantities run to three pounds of pulp and twelve eggs at a stroke. The recipe is a period marker in itself: bananas only became a routine American ingredient after steamship traffic from the Caribbean made them cheap in the 1870s and 1880s, and cookbooks of the following decades are full of attempts to treat the novelty seriously rather than just eat it out of hand. The West India rum, the pineapple and the banana all arrive on the same trade route, and pairing them was the obvious flourish. In form the dish is a soufflé pudding in the French manner -- a sweetened purée bound with yolks, lightened with whites, baked in buttered dariole moulds and served turned out with a sauce -- applied to a fruit still relatively new to American kitchens.