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Bananas Sliced in Cream
Peel three good-sized, ripe, sound bananas, then slice them into thin slices. Dress on a dish and serve with powdered sugar and cream separately.
About as short as a recipe gets, and it lives or dies on the fruit and the timing. Two details in the wording are period usage rather than modern shorthand.
- "Powdered sugar" is not confectioners' sugarIn cookbooks of this era powdered sugar usually meant sugar ground finer than granulated but without added starch — closest today to superfine or caster sugar. Modern confectioners' sugar contains cornstarch and will turn cloudy and slightly pasty against the cream.
- Cream means pouring creamServe unwhipped heavy or single cream in a pitcher, not whipped; the recipe says nothing about whipping. "Separately" means the sugar and cream go to the table in their own dishes so each person dresses the fruit.
- Slice at the last momentCut bananas begin browning within minutes as their phenolic compounds oxidize. Peel and slice immediately before the dish goes out; a squeeze of lemon works but changes the flavor, which is presumably why the original does not use it.
- "Ripe, sound" is doing real workFully yellow with some flecking, firm enough to hold a slice. Green-shouldered fruit is starchy and astringent; fruit past the heavy-speckle stage collapses into mush under the cream.
- ThicknessThe recipe says only "thin." Slices on the thin side hold the cream better; thick coins eat more like a fruit salad than a dessert.
- YieldThree bananas serve three, or two generously. Chill the serving dish and the cream; nothing here benefits from being at room temperature.
Bananas were a novelty-turned-staple in exactly the years this recipe belongs to. Regular steamship shipments from Central America and the Caribbean, ripening rooms in northern cities, and rail distribution had by the early 1900s taken the fruit from an expensive curiosity to something a household cook could buy by the hand. That shift is why a cookbook might bother to print a recipe that is really just an instruction to slice fruit: many readers had only recently met the ingredient. Serving raw fruit with sugar and cold cream passed separately is often said to have been a genteel treatment of the period, applied to strawberries, peaches and raspberries alike, and bananas were simply admitted to the same company.