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Cream Plombiere with Bananas
Peel some ripe bananas, and rub them through a fine hair-sieve into a basin. Mix with the fruit puree about one and one-half pints of thick vanilla cream, then pass the whole once more through the fine hair-sieve. Turn the cream into a freezer and leave it until thickened, whisk one pint of cream with sugar to taste, mix it with the frozen cream and add one wineglassful of Madeira. Arrange the cream, rock-shape, on a folded napkin, and serve.
A frozen banana mousse in the French plombière style, written for a kitchen with a hand-cranked freezer and a brigade to do the sieving. The steps translate cleanly, but two of the vessels and one of the measures need explaining.
- The hinge: keep it softThe whipped cream and Madeira go in after the base has thickened in the freezer, not before. Whipped cream folded into an already-frozen custard base is characteristic of a plombière; the finished mixture is meant to be scoopable and slightly slack, mounded rather than sliced.
- "Thick vanilla cream"This means a cooked vanilla custard (a rich crème anglaise), not cream flavoured with extract. The recipe gives no proportions, so the richness is left to the cook. One and a half pints is 3 cups.
- Hair-sieveA fine sieve of woven horsehair, the standard fine sieve of the period and non-metallic, so it would not taint acidic fruit. A fine-mesh nylon or stainless strainer does the same job; a blender then a strainer is faster and gives a smoother purée.
- "A freezer"The ice-and-salt churn of the period. An ice cream machine churned until thick but not set gives the same result; without one, freeze in a shallow pan and beat it smooth two or three times as it stiffens.
- WineglassfulAround 2 fluid ounces in period usage. Madeira is not optional decoration — the alcohol lowers the freezing point and keeps the mixture from freezing hard, so adding much more than the recipe calls for risks it not setting.
- Bananas brownNo lemon is called for, and banana purée darkens within minutes. Work quickly and get the purée into the cold custard, or the finished cream turns a dull grey-pink.
- "Rock-shape on a folded napkin"A service convention: the cream is piled into a craggy mound on a dish set on a folded linen napkin, the usual period presentation for an iced dish.
- YieldThe recipe leaves the quantity of banana to the cook, so this is approximate: on the order of two quarts of finished cream, perhaps twelve to sixteen servings. Halve it for a home table.
Plombière — in English often "plombiere" or "plombieres" — is a French frozen dessert of custard enriched with whipped cream and usually flavoured with fruit, nuts or kirsch, generally traced to the town of Plombières-les-Bains in the Vosges, though the association is traditional rather than documented and the name may instead come from the tin-lined (plombé) moulds such creams were frozen in. By the 1890s it was standard grand-hotel repertoire. The banana is the telling detail: cheap, year-round shipments of Central American fruit had reached New York only in the previous couple of decades, and a fruit often said to have been a curiosity at the 1876 Centennial was, by the time this book appeared, common enough to be folded into a French luxury dessert without comment.