Banana Cake
Mix and bake Fig Éclair mixture; put between layers White Mountain Cream covered with thin slices of banana, and frost the top. This should be eaten the day it is made.
This is an assembly recipe: it borrows a batter and a frosting from elsewhere in the cake chapter and asks you to put them together with fresh fruit. The whole thing hinges on timing, not technique.
- The cross-referencesBoth the Fig Éclair mixture and White Mountain Cream are given elsewhere in the cake chapter, and neither is repeated here, so you need both recipes in front of you before you start. White Mountain Cream is the boiled-syrup frosting made by pouring hot sugar syrup over beaten egg whites; the Fig Éclair mixture supplies the cake, which here is baked in layers.
- OvenThe recipe gives no temperature, time or pan size; you are working from the Fig Éclair recipe elsewhere in the book. A modern cook baking the batter as layers would treat it like any butter cake, judging doneness when the center springs back and the edges have just begun to pull from the pan.
- The frosting temperatureWhite Mountain Cream depends on the syrup reaching the stage the original describes, boiled until it threads from the tip of the spoon. Undercooked, it will slide off the cake; overcooked, it turns grainy and sets before you can spread it.
- Slice the bananas lastCut them thin only when the layers are cooled and the frosting is beaten and ready. Sliced banana browns within minutes on the cut surface; a light brush of lemon juice slows it, though it also shows in the flavor.
- Why same-day is not a suggestionBoiled frosting weeps where it meets wet fruit and crusts hard on the outside overnight, and the banana slices darken and soften between the layers, which is presumably why the original insists on eating it the day it is made.
- Do not refrigerateCold makes boiled frosting sticky and does the banana no favours. Keep the finished cake covered at room temperature and serve it the day it is made, as the original directs.
- YieldThe original leaves the number of layers and the yield unstated; it depends entirely on how you divide the Fig Éclair mixture.
Banana cake belongs to the moment when bananas stopped being a novelty in American kitchens. Through the 1870s and 1880s they arrived in the United States as an expensive curiosity, sold singly at fairs and fruit stands; by the 1890s regular steamship traffic from the Caribbean had made them cheap and common in northern cities, and cookbooks began folding them into desserts as casually as they used strawberries. The treatment here is telling: the banana is not baked into the batter, as it would be in the banana breads of the 1930s, but sliced raw between layers of an existing cake. The instruction to eat it the day it is made is the honest admission of a recipe built on raw fruit and an egg-white frosting, with no refrigeration assumed.