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Banana Ice Cream
1 quart cream 1⅓ tablespoons lemon juice 4 bananas 1 cup sugar A few grains salt Remove skins and scrape bananas, then force through a sieve; add remaining ingredients; then freeze.
A custard-free Philadelphia-style ice cream: raw cream, fruit purée, sugar, no eggs and no cooking. It stands or falls on the bananas.
- Cream"Cream" in Farmer's day covered a range, and the book itself distinguishes thin from thick cream; it was often closer to today's light cream than to heavy. A quart of modern heavy cream (36%+) freezes very rich and dense; splitting it as three cups heavy to one cup whole milk gives a lighter texture.
- Scraping the bananasPeeled bananas were scraped to remove the fibrous strands clinging to the flesh. It still matters here, since nothing is cooked to mask off flavors. Use bananas that are heavily freckled but not blackened.
- Lemon juiceThe lemon keeps the purée. Note that 11½ tablespoons is nearly three-quarters of a cup and would read as distinctly lemony; the figure looks like it may be a misprint for 1½ tablespoons. Add the juice to the bananas the moment they are sieved, before the cream goes in.
- SievingForcing through a sieve gives a smoother result than mashing and a less foamy one than a blender, which whips air into the purée and can turn it gluey. A food mill or fine sieve and a stiff spatula is the closer equivalent.
- Dissolve the sugarWith no cooked base, undissolved sugar stays gritty. Stir the cup of sugar into the banana and lemon and let it stand ten minutes until it has gone syrupy before adding the cream.
- FreezingThe original assumes a hand-cranked bucket freezer packed with ice and rock salt, roughly three parts ice to one part salt by volume. In a modern machine, chill the mixture thoroughly first, churn 20 to 25 minutes, then ripen in the freezer for two hours.
- YieldAbout a quart and a half, serving eight to ten. Banana ice cream is best the day it is made; the fruit dulls and darkens after a day or two even with the lemon.
Philadelphia ice creams, the uncooked kind made from cream, sugar and flavoring alone, filled the ices chapter of American cookbooks throughout the nineteenth century and stood in contrast to the French style built on egg custard. Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book gives both, and a banana version may suggest how ordinary the fruit had become: bananas arrived in quantity in northeastern markets in the 1880s and 1890s on refrigerated steamers from the Caribbean, and by the time this book appeared they were cheap enough to pur e four of them into a quart of cream without comment. The recipe also reflects the era's ice-and-salt freezer, a bucket, a paddle and a crank that most middle-class households owned and that made cold desserts a summer routine rather than a luxury.