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Banana- and Jam-Pudding
In a buttered earthen baking - dish slice four good-sized bananas. Sprinkle them lightly with lemon-juice, and cover them with a layer of any kind of tart jam. Cream one tablespoonful of butter with four tablespoonfuls of sugar, and add the well-beaten yolks of two eggs, one cup of milk, and one cup of fine stale cake-crumbs, and a little salt. Fold in the stiffly beaten whites of the two eggs and pour the mixture over the bananas and jam. Bake in a moderate oven about half an hour. Serve at once.
A cake-crumb custard baked over fruit — a thrifty pudding that depends entirely on the crumbs being dry. Fresh, moist cake will turn the custard heavy and wet.
- Moderate ovenA moderate oven in period usage is roughly 350-375F; 350F is a safe choice. Half an hour will set the custard around the edges with a slight wobble at the centre; it firms as it stands.
- Stale cake-crumbsGenuinely dry cake, rubbed or pulsed to fine crumbs as the recipe specifies. Plain butter cake, sponge or pound cake all work; heavily iced cake will make the pudding cloying. If the only cake to hand is soft, dry the crumbs on a tray in a low oven first.
- Earthen baking-dishAny 1 to 1.5 quart ceramic or glass dish, buttered. Something shallow and wide gives a better ratio of set custard to fruit than a deep bowl.
- BananasRipe but still firm — spotted skins, no softness in the flesh. Overripe bananas collapse into the jam and the base turns to sludge. Slice them into the dish just before assembling so the lemon juice can do its work against browning.
- Tart jamThe tartness is structural, not decorative: bananas, sugar, cake and custard are all sweet, and without an acid layer the pudding is flat. Damson, sour cherry, apricot, redcurrant or a coarse marmalade. About half a cup, spread in a thin layer.
- Folding the whitesBeat the whites stiff as the recipe directs, and fold them into the crumb mixture in two additions. The custard base is loose, so a heavy hand knocks out everything gained. Pour rather than spoon it over the fruit so the jam layer stays where it was put.
- Yield and servingServes four to six. It is meant to be eaten hot from the dish — the crumb layer softens and the whipped whites deflate within twenty minutes or so. Cream or a thin custard sauce alongside if wanted.
The Cook Book of Left Overs belongs to a genre that flourished in American households in the early years of the twentieth century: whole volumes devoted to the second life of food already paid for. Cake-crumb puddings sit at the heart of that tradition, and they are the sweet cousin of the bread pudding — the same trick of binding stale starch with egg and milk, applied to whatever was left under the cake dome. Bananas mark the recipe as modern for its moment; refrigerated steamships are generally credited with making them cheap and ordinary in northern cities by the 1910s. The instruction to serve at once is not politeness but engineering, since a pudding lifted by beaten whites is at its best in the first few minutes out of the oven.