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Banana Cream Pie
Put a lump of butter in a basin and warm it together with a little crushed loaf-sugar, the yolks of two or three eggs, a little milk and sherry or angelica, and some pulp of bananas mashed thoroughly. Pour the mixture into a deep dish, stirring in the well-whipped whites of a couple of eggs; place the dish in a moderate oven and bake until done, taking care not to bake too quickly. Then remove and serve.
Oscar's instructions assume a cook who already knows how a baked custard behaves; the quantities are suggestive rather than fixed. The one thing to hold onto is that this is a slow-baked egg custard, and the whole success of it lies in low, gentle heat.
- There is no crustDespite the name, nothing here is a pie in the modern sense: the mixture goes straight into a deep dish (the recipe does not say to butter it, though it does no harm). If you want pastry you will need to blind-bake a shell separately and treat this as the filling.
- Moderate ovenUsually read as somewhere around 350F, though for a custard like this the lower end, 325F, is safer. The instruction not to bake too quickly is the hinge of the recipe: too much heat and the egg proteins tighten and the custard weeps and curdles. A water bath, with the dish set in a roasting pan of hot water reaching halfway up, is the surest insurance.
- Loaf sugarSugar was sold in hard cones or blocks and crushed as needed. Ordinary granulated sugar is the direct substitute; for a mixture this size, 3 to 4 tablespoons is about right for the sweetness of ripe bananas.
- AngelicaProbably not the candied stem used for decorating cakes but a sweet wine or liqueur of the same name; in American usage of this period "angelica" usually meant a sweet fortified California wine, which is why it stands beside sherry here. A tablespoon of sherry is the easier option, and Madeira works as well.
- Working quantitiesThe original gives none worth the name. For a dish serving four: 2 tablespoons butter, 3 egg yolks, about a cup of milk, 2 tablespoons sherry, and two ripe bananas mashed smooth, with the whites of 2 eggs whipped and folded in at the end.
- Warming the baseThe instruction to warm the butter in a basin is best taken as over hot water rather than direct heat, and only until the butter melts and the sugar dissolves. Take it much past blood heat with the yolks in and you will have scrambled egg before the dish sees the oven.
- Folding the whitesThe original says to stir the whipped whites in, but folding will preserve more of the lift. Expect some of the whites to rise into a lighter layer during baking.
- DonenessForty to fifty minutes at 325F. The edges should be set and the centre still trembling; a knife inserted an inch from the edge comes out clean. An instant-read thermometer at 170-175F in the centre is more reliable than the wobble.
- Bananas darkenMashed banana browns quickly and the custard will bake to a beige rather than a pale ivory. This is cosmetic, but mash the fruit last and get it into the mixture without delay.
Oscar Tschirky's 1896 volume was assembled at a moment when bananas had only recently become ordinary in American kitchens. Steamship lines running from Central America and the Caribbean into New Orleans, Mobile and New York through the 1870s and 1880s turned what is often said to have been an expensive curiosity at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition into a fruit sold from pushcarts, and cookbooks of the 1890s fill up with banana fritters, banana ice creams and banana custards as writers worked out what to do with it. This recipe is the older tradition absorbing the newcomer: strip out the fruit and what remains is a plain baked custard of butter, yolks, sugar, milk and fortified wine, a formula that would have looked entirely familiar a century earlier. The sherry or angelica belongs to a long tradition of fortified wine in baking, and "cream pie" here carries the older, looser sense of a rich baked dish rather than anything set in pastry.