The Food Maven Diary
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Italian Tastes and Banana Pudding
My partner in what we like to think of as "cooking and culture" tours in Southern Italy, Cecilia, La Baronessa, was visiting for a few weeks with three of her sisters. Did I tell you that she bought a small apartment in my co-op in Brooklyn? She and her family go back and forth often enough for it to be worthwhile. Also, given the low real estate prices of the moment, and the still-excellent value of the strong euro against the lame dollar, it seemed like a good investment. It takes the pressure off of me a bit, too. Cecilia usually comes with at least one other guest and sometimes an entourage. Now, most of them can sleep downstairs, and I just get the overrun.
Anyway, with her sisters in tow, who don't get here that often, I wanted their final meal to be something totally American. I was considering buying barbecue brisket from Kings County Barbecue, the kitchen truck now parked in both Bed-Stuy and Dumbo, by Brooklyn Flea. But when I realized they had not eaten even one bagel while in New York, I decided to do a bagel, smoked and pickled fish, cheese, and salad spread. You can't get more New York Jewish. I added Bert Greene's Ziti Salad, however, a vestige of the barbecue menu that, once I had it in my head that I was going to get to eat it, I was still craving. And I thought I knew my girls. They love pasta and they are very adventurous women. Even though cold pasta is abhorrent to most Italians, I figured they'd be interested in American macaroni salad. They weren't. The sisters Baratta took small polite portions. But I was relieved to see that they happily dove into the various fish, the egg salad, the cheeses, the bagels. And dessert!
For that, I also stuck to my original plan (and craving) and made a southern U.S.-style banana pudding. I'd been aching to make one since returning from my road trip south. (You can see how once I get an urge I can't let go.) Practically every down-home restaurant and barbecue joint we went to had banana pudding. It should be vanilla custard layered with vanilla wafers and sliced bananas, all topped with plenty of whipped cream (or sometimes meringue), but most of them were clearly made with packaged vanilla pudding mix and sometimes non-dairy whipped topping instead of real cream. Unfortunately, you can't get around the artificial vanilla in the Nilla or other supermarket vanilla wafers that are essential to the recipe. Oh, I suppose you could do those from scratch, too, but I am not that ambitious.
For a great formula, I turned to my friend Jean Anderson's latest cookbook, A Love Affair with Southern Cooking, which won a James Beard award last year. Jean's books - and I have every one of them - are invaluable not just for their recipes, which are admirably succinct and precise, not to mention delicious, but for their history, folklore, and recollections. "A Love Affair with Southern Cooking," for instance, has a timeline of important culinary developments, events and notable people running down the sides of the pages. Plus there are short essay sidebars and informative head notes. There may not be any pictures in "A Love Affair" but the 434-page book is a truly great read and is packed with unbelievably good recipes. Jean grew up in Raleigh and now lives in Chapel Hill, so she knows how everything should taste. Her web site, JeanAndersonCooks.com, also known as "Ask the Recipe Doctor" because Jean is a food scientist, as well as a food historian (and the U.S. expert on Portuguese travel and food). Since I returned from the south, I've been cooking from the book. Her family's version of Country Captain, the curried chicken dish, is my next challenge - not that it's difficult. I've been needing a change of pace from my usual Southern Italian and Yiddish repertoire.
Here's Jean's Banana Pudding, which Cecilia and her sisters could not eat enough of. It is based on a custard - a pastry cream -- that you would happily eat for its own sake without the bananas and vanilla wafers. To give my Italian ladies some perspective, I called it Zuppa di Banana, making the connection between banana pudding and the Southern Italian dessert, Zuppa Inglese, which is based on the English trifle. Zuppa can be translated as "sop," and although most zuppe (plural) are soups or brothy stews poured over bread to sop up their liquid, a dessert where cake replaces bread can also be called a zuppa. In fact, although Jean specifies a 9-inch square cake pan, I used a glass trifle bowl to great effect.
JEAN ANDERSON'S BANANA PUDDING
Serves at least 10
3/4 cup sugar
1/3 cup unsifted all-purpose flour
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 quart (whole) milk
1 cup half and half
3 large eggs, lightly beaten together
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract
About 75 vanilla wafers (about 3/4 of a 12-ounce box)
6 medium firm-ripe bananas (about 2 1/4 pounds)
Plus:
1 cup heavy cream, whipped to soft peaks with
2 tablespoons confectioners' sugar
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
Combine the sugar, flour and salt in a large, heavy saucepan.
Whisk in the milk and half and half, then set over moderate heat, and cook, stirring constantly, for 7 to 8 minutes, or until the mixture simmers, is thickened and smooth. Remove from the heat.
Whisk a few spoonfuls of the hot mixture into the beaten eggs, then pour the heated eggs into the saucepan with the remaining hot mixture. An instant read thermometer should read 160 degrees. If not, place the pudding over medium heat for another minute or so, stirring constantly. Do not let it boil. It will curdle. Stir in the vanilla.
Assemble the pudding while the custard is still hot.
Skim coat a 9 by 9 by 2-inch baking dish or a glass dish with similar volume, such as a trifle bowl, with about 1/2 cup the hot custard. "Pave" with about 25 of the vanilla wafers, arranging the cookies side by side.
Peel the bananas and slice about 1/4-inch thick. Add a layer of about a third of the slices over the cookies, again arranging them side by side.
Spread with a third of the remaining pudding. Add another layer of cookies, then bananas, then half the remaining custard. Spread with a final layer of cookies, bananas, and the remaining pudding.
Cover the dish with plastic wrap and refrigerate for several hours, until the custard is well-chilled, or overnight.
To serve, whip the cream with the confectioners' sugar and remaining vanilla until it holds soft peaks. Spoon the whipped cream on top of the pudding and serve.
Leftovers hold well in the refrigerator for 1 day.
