The regional table / Tennessee
Banana Pudding
The custard is poured hot, the wafers go in dry, and the whites left over from the yolks go on top and into the oven. Nothing here is a shortcut for something better.
Banana pudding is a documentary problem, because the fruit in it was an exotic import before it was a staple and the biscuit in it came out of a factory. Both halves can be dated. The earliest banana pudding I can reach in print is a household column credited to the New York Observer and syndicated through the weeklies in the summer of 1889: a north Georgia paper, the Dade County Weekly Times, ran it on 27 July, and the Knoxville Journal ran the same column on 3 August. It is not this pudding — it is tapioca cooked until it looks like boiled starch, layered with thin-sliced banana in a glass dish and served with cream, whipped if you want the trouble. The architecture we would recognise turns up a year later in the Barnesville Gazette of 9 October 1890: slices of sponge cake and sliced bananas in alternate layers in a glass dish, a soft custard of three or four yolks to a pint and a half of milk poured over, and the whites beaten stiff with sugar and heaped over the whole. Cake, custard, banana, meringue, 1890. Only the biscuit is missing. A verified absence pins the other end for this state: the Tennessee and Virginia Cook Book of 1911 puts bananas in salads, in lemon-banana sandwiches and in a "Highland" trifle of lady fingers, macaroons and sliced bananas under whipped cream, and prints no banana pudding at all.
The wafer is older than the box people credit it to. A. M. and C. W. West of 159 Liberty Street were advertising vanilla wafers in small tins in the Savannah Morning News in January 1877, and Peek, Frean and Company's vanilla wafers were on the same city's import lists by October 1878 — two decades before the National Biscuit Company existed, and no brand name appears beside banana pudding in these papers until an N.B.C. advertisement of 1949 and a Nabisco one of 1954. What dates the modern dish is not a brand but a habit, and a grocer's advertisement dates it better than any origin story: the Walker County Messenger of 13 April 1928 offered loose vanilla wafers at 32 cents a pound and told readers they were fine to make banana pudding. Loose, by the pound, out of a barrel. By then the church cookbooks had it — the Central Cook Book of 1924, printed by Circle Number Three of Central Methodist Church in Raleigh, gives two versions, both wafers and boiled custard under browned whites, and the Anson County Cook Book of the First Baptist Church in Wadesboro, 1928, has Mrs. Fred Wall's with eighteen or twenty wafers and butter the size of a walnut. The quantities below follow the version a Georgia weekly, the True Citizen, printed on 26 September 1930: two dozen wafers, six bananas, a pint of sweet milk, three eggs, meringue of the whites, ten minutes in a moderate oven, serve hot or cold. That is inside the public domain by a year, and it is still the recipe.
Why this version works
The wafers go in dry. A vanilla wafer is a keeping biscuit, baked hard and low in moisture so it will sit in a tin. Layered dry and flooded with hot custard it takes up liquid for about an hour and turns to cake; softened first, or layered under cold custard, it stays a sodden biscuit with a crumb line through it. This is why the old recipes assemble while the custard is hot and why the dish is better an hour old than five minutes old.
Cornstarch as well as yolks. A custard held together by egg alone has to be taken within a few degrees of curdling and still sets soft. The North Carolina church books already knew the answer — two tablespoons of cornstarch to two cups of milk in the Anson County book — because starch lets the custard come to a full boil without breaking, and a boiled starch custard holds a clean layer instead of running into the wafers as soup.
Ripe fruit, and not the fruit they had. Hawaii Agricultural Experiment Station Bulletin 55, published under the USDA in December 1926, puts about 12 per cent starch in a green banana and reports that most of it disappears during ripening along with the tannin and the organic acids. Flecked brown means the starch has gone to sugar and the astringency with it. The same bulletin names the commercial variety of the American trade — Martinique, Jamaica, Gros Michel, Bluefields, all one banana — which is not the Cavendish on sale today, so the fruit in the 1930 recipe was sweeter and stronger-smelling than yours.
Meringue because the custard took the yolks. This is the whole of the meringue-against-whipped-cream argument and it is an argument about thrift, not taste. Every custard version in the record reaches for the whites: the Barnesville Gazette in 1890, the Jesup Sentinel in 1891, Raleigh in 1924, Wadesboro in 1928, the True Citizen in 1930. Whipped cream turns up where nothing has used the yolks — the tapioca pudding of 1889, the gelatine one of 1893, the Lanier County News version of 1926 that takes only two. Both are documented. Only one of them uses up what the custard leaves.