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With French Custard Sauce
3 pints or pounds of plantain pulp. 10 ounces of sugar. 6 ounces of butter. 1 pint of cream. 10 eggs. 1/2 cupful of sherry. 1 lemon, juice and grated rind. Plantains are not good for this purpose unless ripe. Peel and mash; stir over the fire with the butter and sugar till cooked semi-transparent; add all the ingredients, the eggs beaten separately, or at least very light. Bake in a buttered pan about half an hour.
A baked plantain pudding, rich with cream and ten eggs, meant to be sent to table under a pouring custard the book gives elsewhere. It is essentially a fruit-and-egg pudding, and it behaves like one.
- The plantains must be blackThe plantains must be well ripened -- "unless ripe" is the recipe's only guidance. Skins yellow to black and flesh soft enough to mash with a fork; green plantains are starchy and will not sweeten. Reckon on roughly 5 or 6 large plantains for 3 pints of pulp.
- "3 pints or pounds"The author is treating mashed plantain as weighing about a pound to the pint, which is close enough. Work by volume: 6 cups of mashed pulp, or about 3 lb.
- Eggs beaten separatelyThis means yolks and whites apart, the whites whipped to soft peaks and folded in last. It is the only leavening in the pudding, so fold gently and get it into the oven at once.
- Cook the pulp down firstThe hinge of the recipe. Stirring the mashed plantain with the butter and sugar over the heat until it turns "semi-transparent" drives off water and sets the starch; skip it and the baked pudding weeps. Let the mixture cool to warm before the eggs go in or they will scramble.
- OvenNo temperature is given. A moderate oven, around 350F, for the stated half hour in a buttered pan; the centre should be just set with a slight wobble. The mixture is bulky, so in a deeper dish it will need considerably longer, and a water bath will keep the custard from curdling at the edges.
- SherryA half cupful of dry or medium sherry rather than a cream sherry, which with 10 ounces of sugar would push the whole thing sweet. Some of the alcohol bakes off; the flavour does not.
- The sauce of the titleFrench custard sauce is crème anglaise, given elsewhere in the book: milk or thin cream, egg yolks and sugar stirred over low heat to about 175-180F, never boiled. It is served warm or cold, poured over the cut pudding.
- YieldGenerous for 12 to 16, in the manner of a hotel dessert. It cuts more neatly the day after and reheats gently, covered.
The American Pastry Cook belongs to the run of late nineteenth-century American manuals written for hotel and restaurant kitchens rather than for households, which is why the quantities begin at ten eggs and a pint of cream and why the finished pudding is expected to arrive with a separate sauce made to order. Plantains are generally said to have reached northern American kitchens in any quantity only after the steamship fruit trade with the Caribbean and Central America built up in the 1870s and 1880s, and cookbooks of the period often shelve them beside bananas without distinguishing the two clearly. The treatment here is thoroughly European in method: the pulp is worked like a chestnut or apple purée, enriched, lightened with separately beaten whites and baked as a pudding, then dressed with crème anglaise, the sauce that in English-language books is often called "French custard" to distinguish it from thickened boiled custard. The combination of a tropical import with a classical French finish is characteristic of American hotel cooking in these decades, where an unfamiliar ingredient was made respectable by putting it into a familiar form.