Retro Desserts, Part I : The American Dream of Banana Cream

Banana cream pie is not what you might call a fashionable dessert. It contains no exotic ingredients, requires knowledge of no arcane methodologies for its preparation, and--God knows-- it's not low in either fat or calories. And yet, despite all of those factors, a hefty percentage of casual American restaurants still offer it on their menus. Why? Besides its obvious creamy lusciousness, there must be something more behind its perennial appeal. Personally, I think it's due to a pervasive nostalgic yearning. Let's call it Go to the Diner for a Piece of Pie Syndrome. Enjoying a nice slice of a traditional cream pie, especially if we're under the impression it's been made from scratch, satisfies a deeply rooted need of ours to believe that the Soul of Americana still thrives, despite fierce odds. Afterall, if little restaurants from coast to coast are still crankin' out the cream pies, then I guess everything can't be all bad, can it?

Banana cream pie even looks comfortingly retro, don't you think? There's all that soft, fluffy, whipped cream on the top. That's all, just whipped cream. No fancy spun-sugar garnishes. No bittersweet curls carved from chunks of pricey European chocolate. And I could be wrong, but as far as I know, there is no dessert wine that exists solely in order to be paired with it. Banana cream pie is humble. It doesn't discriminate. I'd wager it will never be the focus of a full-blown Food Network Challenge, but that's okay because you see . . . it doesn't care. Banana cream pie didn't seek fame; fame sought the banana cream pie.

And so begins a series of periodic posts I plan to do on retro desserts. That is, desserts that don't even come close to fitting into the ultra-modern mold but that still persist within the American psyche. What kind of stuff am I talking about? Well, maybe things like classic devil's food cake with chocolate frosting, Boston cream pie, chocolate bread pudding, cherries jubilee on vanilla ice cream, and so on. Maybe even baked Alaska, if that's not pushing the anachronistic envelope too much. Do you have any ideas or suggestions? Because I could really use some. I'd like to have a good-sized list to choose from. Let me know if you think of anything, okay? Seriously. :)

So now for today's recipes. There are actually two--one for the pastry cream, and one for the crust, which I made out of the crumbs of homemade cookies. The pastry cream recipe is from the King Arthur Flour Baker's Companion cookbook, and it's a very good one. I wouldn't hesitate to use it again. The cookie recipe, which I've included below directly after the pie recipe, is from the book Cookie Craft by Peterson and Fryer. It's the recipe I typically use if I am making the type of cookies that will be elaborately decorated. These cookies, ground into crumbs, are perfect for pie crust because they're not very sweet (thus I hesitate to call them sugar cookies, though that is in fact what they're called), they're very firm (these babies are built to be tough), and they have very little moisture.

If I do say so myself, my pie turned out to be extremely delicious. One might say it was a stark raving success, and that's the best kind of success to have in the kitchen.


Banana Cream Pie with Cookie-Crumb Crust

(For a printable version of this recipe, click here!)

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Have ready a 9" pie plate.

1/2 cup granulated sugar
2 Tbsp. unbleached flour
1 Tbsp. plus 1 tsp. cornstarch
1/2 tsp. salt
2 large eggs
2 cups whole milk (I didn't have whole so I used 1 cup 2-percent milk and 1 cup heavy cream)
6 Tbsp. unsalted butter, softened
1/2 tsp. vanilla extract or almond extract (I used vanilla)

3 medium-sized bananas, cut into pieces that are sliced on an angle (the recipe said 2 medium but I found that wasn't enough)

Enough cookies to yield 2 cups of crumbs
4 Tbsp. unsalted butter, melted
1/4 cup confectioner's sugar

To make the crust:

Place several cookies, broken into small pieces, into bowl of food processor. Pulse repeatedly until they're the proper consistency (not too finely; you don't want them to be like paste!).


In a medium bowl, place the cookie crumbs, confectioner's sugar and mix together.


Add in the melted butter and mix well with a fork until all the crumbs are a bit moistened.


Pour the buttery crumbs into your pie plate. Press them down evenly in the pan, and up the sides.

Bake the crust for approximately 10 to 12 minutes. Check the crust early to make it's not getting brown. You just want it to be golden. Set aside the baked crust to cool.


To make the pastry cream:
In a medium bowl, whisk the sugar, flour, cornstarch, salt, and eggs.


In a medium-size saucepan, over medium heat, bring the milk/cream to a boil.


Add the hot milk/cream to the egg mixture slowly, whisking constantly to ensure smoothness. Pour the liquid back into the saucepan and return it to the stove; bring it back to a boil. Stir continually with the whisk (if you don't, you'll get undesirable lumps!).



The pastry cream will thicken quickly. When you see it start to boil in the center, immediately remove it from the heat.


Add in the butter and vanilla and stir until smooth. Set aside.


To assemble the pie:

Place the sliced banana pieces in the pie shell in concentric circles, more or less.

Spoon or pour the warm pastry cream over the bananas and smooth out the top.


Cover the top with plastic wrap; the wrap should touch the pastry cream to help prevent a skin from forming.


Refrigerate the pie for at least a couple of hours before serving. If you like, top it with sweetened or unsweetened whipped cream.


Recipe for Sugar Cookies (to use as crumbs for pie-crust)

3 cups All Purpose flour
1/2 tsp. salt
1 cup unsalted butter, softened
1 cup granulated sugar
1 large egg 2 tsp. vanilla extract

Whisk together flour and salt in a medium bowl. Set aside. Using mixer, cream together the butter and sugar until light and fluffy, using the paddle attachment. Add the vanilla. On low speed, add in the flour mixture gradually, mixing until the two are thoroughly blended.

Chill the dough. Roll sections of dough out to about 1/4 inch thickness (or thinner if you prefer; adjust baking time accordingly if thinner). Bake on parchment covered cookie sheets, on middle oven rack, at 350 degrees for about 12 minutes--not until golden brown all over. They should just be light golden on the bottom. Cool on sheet for a few minutes, then remove from sheets to finish cooling on racks.


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Recipe full disclosure! Besides any changes mentioned in the post above, the only other change I made to the recipes was to reword the instructions for clarity.

The Queen of Hearts Overbaked those Tarts . . .

I took the plunge this week and made a fruit tart. I'm more of a cake/cookie baker than a pie/tart baker so it wasn't as if I was betting on a sure thing when I decided to do this. Granted, it was a pretty tart, all in all, but far from perfect. I didn't expect perfection, though, and maybe you shouldn't either, especially if you've never made one before.

The first problem I encountered involved the crust. Despite my anxious hovering, the outer edge obviously overbrowned, thanks at least in part to my recalcitrant oven. I can hardly wait for that old tin can to keel over so I can start combing the stores for a beautiful new convection oven. You know, one of those polished-nickel-finish professional-looking jobs that every food magazine is touting these days? It's only a matter of time, or so I keep telling myself. (We're going on fifteen years with the current oven. Can it really be that much longer??)

Forgive me, I digress.

Back to the tart. I had no trouble at all making the tart dough itself. Against my better judgment I used one of Martha Stewart's recipes; she and I are not always sympatico, if you know what I mean. There's a bit of a rift in the trust department, as far as her recipe reliability goes. I've been let down, and more than once. But yesterday, turning the other cheek, I gave the old gal another chance at bat and used the basic tart dough recipe from Martha Stewart's Baking Handbook. I wasn't wholly disappointed this time. In fact, the dough came together very smoothly and rolled out with no glitches whatsoever. It was an extremely cooperative dough, with an unexpectedly pleasing buttery color. (Leave it to M.S. to take the color palette of the unbaked dough into account when concocting the formula. She probably used paint swatches to get it just right.)

Using a French rolling pin, I rolled the dough out between two pieces of parchment on my cold marble pastry slab. (The slab had been in the freezer for about 20 minutes.) That worked like a charm and kept the dough from getting too soft. The paper peeled off cleanly and the dough settled comfortably into a nine- inch tart pan. After a little tucking, and the requisite docking with a fork, it resembled a cozy blanket, what with that pretty scalloped edge. And the warm golden glow it gave off had me mesmerized . . .

So I put the unbaked tart shell in the fridge to chill a bit before baking. Once cold enough, I laid a piece of parchment over the dough and filled it with dried beans to act as "pie weights" and keep the shell from puffing up in the oven since it would be blind baked. Put it in the oven.
















It soon became clear the outer edge of the crust was well on its way to browning, long before the rest of the dough could reciprocate. After about ten minutes of baking, I covered the edge with a larger sized, overturned tart-pan ring.

That helped, I'm sure, but ultimately the whole thing just got too toasty. The shell was usable, and use it I did, but it was certainly not as picturesque as I'd hoped it might be. I set the shell aside to cool.

Same breezy process with the pastry cream. (I used the recipe from the King Arthur Flour Baker's Companion cookbook; the King's never really let me down.) It blended together just as the recipe described, with no problems. The recipe didn't even mandate straining the pastry cream, and yet it ended up quite smooth. I put the hot pastry cream into a glass bowl, covered the surface of the cream with plastic wrap to prevent a skin from forming, and it went into the fridge to chill.






































At this juncture I started preparing the fruit. Shooting for a vivid tart, I used blackberries,
strawberries, and kiwis. I actually did a test run of the fruit placement on the inside of the tart pan ring, to see what arrangement would look best and to make sure I had enough pieces/slices of each fruit. (I thought I was leaving nothing to chance . . . how poignant.) After I sliced the kiwis, being obsessive, I rounded them with a cookie cutter to eliminate the uneven edges left from the knife. The stage was just about set.

It's amazing how little pastry cream you need to fill a shallow tart shell. After seeing the amount of pastry cream the recipe yielded--perhaps one and a half cups--I was afraid there might not be enough, but the opposite was true. After I'd poured and smoothed the cream in the shell there was actually some leftover. Fruit placement, the next step, was relatively stress free.

Now, as you probably know, the final touch on a tart like this is typically a glaze, both to add that beautiful sparkly quality and, in some cases, to help stave off deliquescence. (For the unitiated among us, deliquescence refers to something becoming soft, fluid, melty. Not a good thing when used in reference to a tart.) There are as many recipes for tarts as there are for pies, cakes, cookies, and every baking expert seems to have their own opinion on the best type of glaze to use on fruit.

There are those who advise using heated, strained preserves, typically either apricot, currant, or strawberry. There are those who advise using strained jam mixed with a liqueur like kirsch. There are those, Martha Stewart among them, who advise using a homemade sugar syrup comprised of granulated sugar, water, and lemon juice, boiled and left to simmer for a while. The latter is what I used. As I gently brushed the crystal clear syrup onto the fruit, its impressive shimmer warmed my heart. (Yes, yes, I used one of those new floppy silicone-bristled brushes, have no fear. No stiff old bristle brush for me. I didn't just fall off the turnip truck, you know.)

At this point, one could say I rested easy. Grabbing the camera, I photographed the tart for a few minutes and felt pleased with its overall appearance, despite the darkened crust. I put the tart, in a covered glass cake dome, into the fridge as it wouldn't be sliced for hours.

Perhaps three hours later I looked at the tart again, the way a new mother admiringly peeks in on her sleeping newborn. Sigh. . . Said newborn was looking alarmingly watery on top. Crestfallen, I delicately dabbed up the watery liquid with the corner of a paper towel, being careful not to mess up the cream. Long story short, the tart kept deliquescing throughout the evening. That sparkly glowing aspect, which in my hubris I had so coveted, was now sadly diminished . . . along with my dreams of a tarty triumph.
Postlude: The tart was sliced and eaten about six hours after it was glazed, and it certainly wasn't bad. But, next time, I'm holding off on the glazing until perhaps half an hour before serving. And, I'm going with the strained jam method instead of sugar syrup. I suppose I should have known there was a reason Ms. Stewart mandated the glazed tart should be served "immediately." But I find it disagreeable to admit she was probably right. Most disagreeable.


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