No. 3541

Bananas in Surprise

Bananes en Surprise

The proportions for eight large bananas is one quart of cream, the pulp of four bananas and one pound of sugar; press through a fine sieve and freeze. Pare and cleanse the peels nicely; freeze them in a freezer for one hour and fill with the above cream, putting inside of them a salpicon of candied fruits macerated in maraschino. Put the bananas into a freezing box well packed in ice and leave to harden for several hours. Dress on a folded napkin and serve.

← No. 3540 Asparagus Ices & Ice Creams No. 3542 Blidah →

For the Modern Kitchen

A Philadelphia-style banana ice cream — no eggs, no cooking — served back inside the fruit's own skin. Everything here is straightforward except the vessels, which are the whole point of the dish and need to be handled quickly.

The hinge: work fast with the pulpBanana purée browns within minutes of being sieved. Have the cream and sugar already combined and cold, sieve the pulp directly into it, and get the mixture into the machine at once. A tablespoon of lemon juice slows the discoloration without reading as lemon.
"Freeze" and "freezer"Ranhofer means a hand-crank pail churning against ice and coarse salt. A modern ice cream machine does the same job; a frozen-bowl unit will take 20 to 30 minutes for this quantity. The "freezing box well packed in ice" is simply hardening — the freezer at its coldest setting, three to four hours.
ProportionsOne quart cream, the pulp of four bananas (about 1½ cups), one pound sugar — that is roughly 2¼ cups of sugar, a generous amount. Two-thirds of it gives a cleaner banana flavour and still freezes soft enough to scoop; sugar here is doing structural work, so do not cut it much further.
The peelsSplit each banana lengthwise along one seam rather than quartering it, so the skin holds together as a boat. Scrape the inner membrane clean, wipe dry, and chill them — an hour in the freezer stiffens them, but they will darken regardless. That blackening is expected.
SalpiconA salpicon is simply a fine dice, here of candied fruits — cherries, apricot, citron, angelica — soaked in maraschino until softened, half an hour is enough. Drain them before burying them in the cream or the liqueur will keep that pocket from freezing.
MaraschinoHe means the dry Italian cherry-kernel liqueur, not the syrup from a jar of bright red cherries. Luxardo or similar; kirsch is a workable stand-in.
Yield and serviceEight filled skins from a full quart of ice cream will leave you a good deal over — count on twelve to sixteen servings' worth of ice cream, or scale the cream down by half if you only want the eight. The folded napkin on the platter is not decoration: it keeps the frozen skins from sliding.

A Little History

This comes from Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), the enormous compendium he assembled from more than thirty years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and it sits in a section of ices arranged alphabetically — the neighbouring entries here are asparagus and Blidah. Fruit served en surprise — hollowed out, filled with its own ice or a sorbet, and presented looking untouched — was a standing device of nineteenth-century French service, applied to oranges, pineapples, melons and, in this instance, a fruit that had only become reliably available in eastern American cities in the 1870s and 1880s with steam shipping from the Caribbean. That novelty is part of the point: the banana was still faintly exotic, expensive enough to be worth showing off, and a kitchen with an ice house could afford to freeze eight of its skins simply for effect.