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Banana Pudding
Place in a bowl four ounces granulated sugar, one ounce butter, three egg yolks, a teaspoon vanilla essence, and briskly stir with a wooden spoon five minutes. Add four ounces sifted flour, three finely sliced, peeled, sound bananas, and gently mix. Beat up whites of the three eggs to a stiff froth, and gradually add to mixture, place preparation in a lightly buttered pudding mould, set to bake in a moderate oven for forty minutes, remove, unmould on a hot dish, pour a raspberry sauce over and serve.
A light egg-foam batter rather than a custard pudding: no liquid, no leavening, and no baking powder, so the whites are the only lift. Fold them in gently and get it into the oven at once.
- Weights in cupsFour ounces granulated sugar is a generous 1/2 cup; one ounce butter is 2 tablespoons; four ounces sifted flour is about 1 cup measured by the sift-and-spoon method. If you have a scale, use the ounces as written.
- Moderate ovenUsually taken as 350-375F. Forty minutes should be about right for a mould of a quart or so; a skewer in the centre should come out clean and the cake should be just pulling from the sides.
- The pudding mouldA 1- to 1.5-quart charlotte mould, small tube pan or deep cake tin. Butter it well and, if the tin is not nonstick, line the base with a round of parchment. There is no water bath here, despite the word pudding.
- Creaming without a mixerThe five minutes of brisk stirring is not filler. Sugar, butter and yolks need to lighten and pale before the flour goes in, since that aeration plus the whites is all the rise you get. A stand mixer does it in three minutes on medium-high.
- Choosing the bananas"Sound" means firm-ripe, yellow with no brown mush. Overripe fruit collapses into wet streaks and the batter, already flour-heavy and liquid-free, will not set around it.
- FoldingAdd the whites in three additions with a spatula, cutting down and turning over rather than stirring. The batter is stiff, so slacken it with the first third of the whites before folding in the rest.
- UnmouldingLet it stand 5 minutes off the heat, then run a knife round and invert onto a warmed plate. Straight from the oven it is fragile; fully cooled it sticks.
- Raspberry sauceThe book assumes you already have one: crushed raspberries, fresh or frozen, warmed with sugar to taste and pushed through a sieve to remove seeds. Serve it warm, not hot enough to melt the cake.
- YieldFour to six servings.
The International Cook Book (1906) was the work of Alexander Filippini, long a chef at Delmonico's in New York, and its pages gather dishes from wherever he thought a cook might want to look. That a banana pudding appears at all is a mark of the date: bananas had gone from a curiosity — their American debut is often traced to the 1876 Centennial exhibition — to a cheap staple of American cities within a generation, carried north in quantity by the ventilated steamship trade out of Central America and the Caribbean. The construction is European rather than Southern — this is a baked sponge of creamed butter and yolks, turned out of a mould and sauced, not the layered wafer-and-custard banana pudding that later became a fixture of the American South. Raspberry sauce over a warm moulded cake was a familiar finish, and Filippini uses it here.