An email exchange last week with a family member who has taken in a Ukrainian family. The family have been very sweet in proudly cooking meals for her from their cultural repertoire, she emailed me to try and discern what might be considered traditionally English, what might be considered something we’d be proud to reflect us, and what might be considered simple enough to make and special enough for them to enjoy. My reply?
“Tough one. Especially tough to land on a pleasingly simple and purely British meal. Perhaps afternoon tea is the only true English meal left? I guess we are best at pies, fish pie, steak and ale pie, and butter pie from up north. I also reckon some of our puddings have stood the test of time better than anything else. Spotted dick, trifle, treacle tart, queen of puddings, eve pudding, Sussex pond pudding etc.”
To be candid, I’m not sure I stand by my answer. This exchange took place on one of the hottest days of the year, and when the weather is unseasonably warm, I find I lose my appetite for the classic mealtimes. I want salty snacks and cold drinks, and I want sugary little desserts, preferably ice cold. This might have skewed my answer.
This little conundrum has played in my mind though for the last week or so. I would certainly serve afternoon tea as a proudly English meal. I would more often than not find myself creating a pie appropriate to the season and my location. If I think back though, consider my childhood and the foods that I ate a lot, the foods I would consider to represent my personal English culinary heritage, classic savoury dishes don’t feature much. Cheese on toast comes up a lot, this morphs into welsh rarebit as my sophistication grows. Are jacket potatoes quite an English solution to a simple meal? I’ve never been drawn to them, but they feature quite aggressively in the mealtimes of my childhood. Crumpets. Sausages. A cooked ham. These things were consumed often and with gusto. Roast beef and horseradish, hot or cold. However, that’s all but off the menu nowadays.
I am skirting around the main issue here. The single most consumed ingredient, and by association, the group of most English dishes I consumed throughout my childhood were banana-based desserts. Banana custard, banana split, banoffee pie, banana milkshake, bbq banana with melted chocolate, the list is endless.
I know, I know. There is hardly a less English ingredient than the banana. And yet, at home or at school, bananas were ever present and popular. Yes, apples, pears and British berries might be more appropriate symbols of typical English foods, but I ate a fraction of those combined versus the banana.
At school, I once ate 36 individual portions of banana custard in one lunchtime. Even the cooks in the canteen were whooping and waving their wooden spoons above their heads as I rounded the proverbial corner and headed for the finish line and my thirty-sixth pot of custard. Did it put me off banana desserts for life, or even for a while? Not a bit.
As a kid, we used to be sent to a summer camp at a place called Squerrey’s Court. It was a strange affair, most of our time seemingly being taken up by marching from one end of a field to another, presumably under the auspice of moving between ‘activities’, chanting those awful childish marching songs that combine call and response with infantile machismo; yet the fact of being sent there at all has remained in my memory for one reason only.
Having survived a week of marching interspersed only occasionally by some tree climbing or creating a big tented bubble with some parachute fabric, we were treated to an end-of-camp barbecue. Having been left sorely disappointed by the burnt sausages and stale buns that had been offered as sustenance. As I was starting to agitate for the march back to the car park, and as such to the relative sanctity of our Toyota Privia and Meatloaf’s Bat Out of Hell II: Back into Hell, when we were all handed a blackened parcel of tin foil on a paper plate. Gazing out from under my bowl-cut fringe, I noticed some of the older kids tearing at their tin foil parcels with savage abandon. Such was my shock, most kids had finished entirely before I even commenced the unwrapping of this disgusting-looking parcel. The incinerated organ within turned out to be a steamed banana, a slash through its belly filled with cheap milk chocolate buttons which had melted to a perfect sauce. I can still feel the anticipation of that first swipe of a finger through the thing, the first taste of barbecued banana.
When I finished my entrance exams for secondary school, I was offered a celebratory meal by my mother. She offered to take me and my two best mates for a proper grown-up lunch wherever we might fancy. This being kent in the early 2000s, we chose the Little Chef just off the A21. Of course, I was a fan of their deep-fried sausages, their scampi and chips, their Chef’s grill, their gammon, egg and saute potatoes, who wasn’t, but more than that, the thing that drew us time and again to this strange plasticky dining room on the side of Kent’s busiest A-road, was the dessert menu. I’ve checked on their website and they still offer three ice cream sundaes amongst their dessert offering. Charlie’s Chocolate Dream Sundae, Very Berry Sundae, and Chef’s Banoffee Split Sundae. Whoever ‘Chef’ is, I trust implicitly that they are a wonderful human being, the proof being this concoction, “Chocolate and vanilla ice cream with banana and shortbread chunks mixed with toffee and chocolate sauces. Topped with a fan wafer and lashings of cream.” Lashings, what a treat!
Now I know that Little Chef was borrowing heavily from American diner culture. And I know ice cream sundaes are more redolent of 1950s small-town America and their Soda fountains in pharmacies, but to me, this was the English food of my childhood. Scampi, chips and peas, plenty of malt vinegar, maybe a couple of rounds of white bread and margarine, and then the main event, a banana-based dessert for the ages.
I noticed with much intrigue that Soft & Swirly, London’s finest purveyors of soft serve ice cream, were peddling a banana split from their hatch within Rambutan in Borough market this week. Does this suggest a return to the glory years of the banana-based dessert? Perhaps, perhaps not. Below though is an image of the offending spectacle, and doesn’t it look good?
I’m aware I’m prattling on, and this is largely due to starting an argument I can’t stand by, let alone win. Banana-based desserts are not the best representation of English food, they’re barely the best representation of the banana. They are the best representation of a very good time though, and a very delicious thing to consume.
My final word on banana desserts before I leave you with recipes for the best of them is saved for a dessert that was originally presented to me as something else entirely.
A large family with thousands of aunts and uncles and cousins on top of my own six brothers and sisters, we leant on a bit of ‘bring a dish’ at family functions. There was always a tray of braised red cabbage no matter the time of year, often a bowl of coronation chicken, sometimes a tray of deviled eggs or pieces of steamed fish with rounds of acrid lemon studded on top. For pudding there was always a fruit salad, often a trifle, sometimes a crumble and a massive jug of thick skin-covered custard. And, there was also always something called a pearoffi pie. That’s right, pearoffi. One aunt, in her infinite wisdom, had caught wind of a jazzy new dessert and had put her own spin on it. The new spin did not work. The cream would curdle and split where it met the acidic pears, and the caramel below would do the same. The pearoffi pie would often be left untouched on the table.
My conclusion? This pearoffi business didn’t have legs.
And then. One summer holiday at a place called the Saunton Sands Hotel in Devon, forced to choose something other than a banana split for pudding due to issues with freezers in the kitchen, or something similar, I found myself staring down the barrel of a dessert trolley and an impossible breadth of choice. ‘Look, pearoffi made with banana,’ I squealed. ‘Au contraire,’ the nice waiter was quick to correct me, ‘this Sir is banoffi pie,’ my first official sighting of it as such.
I still recall the nice waiter talking me, an eight-year-old boy, through the rigours of a good banoffi pie, and explaining that this: banana, caramelised condensed milk, whipped cream, shortcrust pastry and grated dark chocolate, was in fact the original form of the thing and that it was an invention from a little cafe in east Sussex, not far from where he (the waiter) grew up, and I (the child) lived. I took a slice, I took a bite, and I was in love.
It was only after having finished that gateway slice that a wave of anger washed over me, directed, of course, at my aunt. How dare she. How dare she take something as pure and noble as the great British banoffi pie and bastardise it with mucky old pear. It is an emotion that has stuck with me. I like to think I have channelled it slightly more productively since.
Anyway, below are my recipes for banoffi pie, banana custard and banana split. I suspect one recipe might get made by a few of you, the others are for pure whimsy. Sometimes that’s OK though, right? A little bit of whimsy.
Banoffi Pie:
The first slice of banoffi pie I ever tried had a shortcrust pastry base. That is how I prefer it. My Aunt's pearoffi pie had a biscuit base (sometimes using ginger nuts!?!?) and that has never been my preference. You do you. If you want a biscuit base, try this one here. If you want perfection, read on.
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