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Banana Ice Cream
Peel six sound, ripe bananas, rub through a sieve into a bowl. Prepare an ice cream preparation and just before cooking add the banana puree. Sharply mix with the spatula, cook, let cool off, then strain through a Chinese strainer into the freezer and add two tablespoons curacao. Mix well with the spatula, then proceed to freeze and serve same as vanilla.
The recipe assumes you already know how to make the custard base — the book expects a cook who has a standing formula for it — and gives only the banana-specific steps. The details worth pinning down are the base, the strainer and the freezer.
- "An ice cream preparation""An ice cream preparation" means a cooked custard base, which the book assumes the reader already has to hand — no quantities are given here. A workable modern base for six bananas would be something like 2 cups milk, 1 cup cream, 6-8 egg yolks and 3/4 cup sugar. Cook only until it coats the back of a spoon (around 170-175F) and no further, or the yolks curdle.
- Purée before the custard is finishedThe instruction to add the banana "just before cooking" and then cook is the hinge. Bananas contain enzymes that brown the purée; heating the fruit along with the custard deactivates them and helps hold the colour. Work quickly when rubbing the fruit through and getting it into the base.
- Chinese strainerA chinois — the fine conical sieve. A regular fine-mesh strainer does the same job; press the pulp through with a ladle rather than letting it drain.
- "The freezer""The freezer" here is the bucket-and-dasher ice cream churn, not a compartment of a refrigerator. Chill the strained base thoroughly, ideally overnight, before it goes into any modern machine.
- CuraçaoTwo tablespoons of orange liqueur — Cointreau, Grand Marnier or a plain curaçao all work. The alcohol also softens the set slightly, which is welcome; much more than this and the mixture will not freeze firm.
- Ripeness"Sound, ripe" means heavily speckled but not fermented. Green-shouldered fruit gives a starchy, chalky ice cream with almost no banana flavour.
- Yield and servingYield depends entirely on the base used — very roughly a quart and a half. "Serve same as vanilla" points the reader back to the book's vanilla recipe. Churned ice creams of this period were commonly ripened, packed in ice and salt, for an hour or two before serving.
Banana ice cream belongs to the moment when bananas stopped being a luxury. Through most of the nineteenth century the fruit reached northern cities rarely and expensively; the growth of steamship traffic from the Caribbean and Central America in the 1880s and 1890s made them cheap and common enough that cookbooks began treating them as an everyday flavouring rather than a curiosity. The recipe's shape is thoroughly French-professional.