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Banana Cream Pie
Two cups milk, one-third cup cornstarch, one-half teaspoon salt, three teaspoons honey, one-half teaspoon vanilla, two eggs, three teaspoons maple sugar, two bananas.
In a double boiler heat the milk, and when hot add the cornstarch mixed with a little cold milk or water. Stir until thick and smooth, then let cook 15 or 20 minutes. Separate the yolks and whites of eggs, beat the yolks until smooth then add the honey, salt and vanilla to them. When the cornstarch mixture is cooked, add a little to yolks, stirring quickly, then add to the hot mixture; cook a minute or so to cook egg, then pour into a pastry baked previously.
Peel the bananas, scraping off all the bitter substance on the outside of fruit, then slice thinly over the top of pie Beat the whites of eggs until stiff; add the grated maple sugar; beat all until smooth; spread over top of pie; brown in oven, cool and serve.
A cornstarch custard pie from an era when honey and maple sugar were often preferred to refined white sugar. The proportions are unusual by modern standards and worth reading carefully before you start.
- The filling is very stiffOne-third cup cornstarch to two cups milk is noticeably more than most modern cream pies, which use around a quarter cup, giving a firm, sliceable, almost blancmange-like filling rather than a spoonable custard. Three tablespoons will give a softer, more familiar texture if that is what you want.
- It is barely sweetThree teaspoons of honey in the filling and three of maple sugar in the meringue is a fraction of what a modern cream pie carries. Taste the hot custard and adjust; you may want 1/3 to 1/2 cup of sweetener in the filling and 1/4 cup in the meringue.
- Maple sugarHard cake maple sugar, grated fine, was a common pantry sweetener in New England households. Granulated maple sugar sold today can be used spoon for spoon; it dissolves less readily in egg whites than white sugar, so beat it in slowly and keep going until the meringue feels smooth rather than gritty between your fingers.
- Double boiler timingFifteen to twenty minutes over simmering water is not padding. Cornstarch needs sustained heat to lose its raw, chalky taste and to set fully; stir often and keep the water below a hard boil so the custard does not catch at the edges.
- Tempering the yolksThe instruction to add a little hot starch to the yolks first, then return everything to the pan, is the hinge of the recipe. Skip it and the yolks scramble. After they go back in, cook only a minute or two, stirring constantly, or the starch bonds break down and the filling thins.
- The "bitter substance" on bananasThis most likely means the pale phloem strands clinging to the peeled fruit. They are harmless but slightly astringent; pull them off as the recipe says. Slice the bananas at the last moment, since they darken quickly once cut.
- Browning the meringueThe recipe says only "brown in oven" and gives no temperature. A steadier result is 350F for 12 to 15 minutes, which sets the whites through as well as colouring them. Spread the meringue so it touches the crust all the way round or it will shrink and weep.
- YieldThe recipe gives no pan size; this amount of filling suits an 8- or 9-inch baked shell, six to eight servings. Cut with a wet knife and refrigerate any leftovers, as this is a milk-and-egg filling.
Banana cream pie belongs to the first decades of the twentieth century, when steamship refrigeration and the Central American banana trade made the fruit cheap and reliably available in American cities for the first time; a fruit that had been a novelty in the 1870s was an everyday grocery by the 1910s, and cookbooks filled with banana fritters, banana salads and banana pies. What marks this particular version is its sweetening: honey in the custard and maple sugar in the meringue, with no white sugar at all. That choice puts the book in the orbit of the health-reform cookery that circulated widely at the time, which held refined sugar to be inferior to what were considered more natural sweeteners. The underlying technique — a cornstarch-thickened milk custard poured into a pre-baked shell and finished with a browned meringue — is the standard cream-pie formula of the period, adaptable to coconut, chocolate or, as here, sliced fresh fruit laid under the meringue.}