The Thursday night before the last day of school, I stood at the stove with a whisk in one hand and the kitchen timer in the other, waiting for a pot of pale yellow custard to do the one thing it hadn't done yet: boil. Not steam. Not shiver. Big, slow, thick bubbles that pop and spit at your wrist. Behind me Nora was laying vanilla wafers in rows across the bottom of my 2-quart Pyrex dish like she was tiling a bathroom, and Jack was eating every third wafer and calling it quality control.
My school has a potluck lunch on the last day, after the buses pull out. Every year somebody brings banana pudding made with instant mix and a tub of whipped topping, and every year it's perfectly nice. Mine is the slow way, the way Granny June made it for every church dinner I remember: stovetop custard, vanilla wafers, ripe bananas and a meringue browned on top. It takes about twenty-five minutes longer than the box. Here's why I think those minutes are worth it.
Why the custard has to boil
Granny's banana pudding card ends with two words in capital letters, BOIL IT, and for years I thought she was just being bossy. Then one spring I pulled my custard off the heat the second it looked thick, layered the pudding, and found soup in the dish the next morning. Here's the reason. Egg yolks carry an enzyme that breaks down starch. If the custard never gets hot enough to knock that enzyme out, it slowly chews through the flour that's thickening your pudding, and overnight the whole thing goes thin. A full minute of real bubbling after it thickens takes care of it. The flour also protects the yolks at that heat, so you can let it boil without ending up with scrambled eggs.
The other reason is taste. A box pudding tastes like vanilla flavoring. A cooked custard tastes like milk, eggs and real vanilla, and as it sits the wafers soak it up and soften into something close to cake. That's the dessert Granny meant.
Ingredients
- 3/4 cup sugar, plus 1/2 cup for the meringue
- 1/3 cup all-purpose flour
- 1/4 teaspoon salt
- 3 cups whole milk
- 4 large eggs, separated
- 2 tablespoons butter
- 2 teaspoons vanilla
- 1 box (about 11 ounces) vanilla wafers, minus whatever an eight-year-old eats
- 5 or 6 ripe bananas, yellow with a few brown freckles, sliced
- 1/4 teaspoon cream of tartar
How I make it
- Heat the oven to 350°F. In a heavy saucepan, whisk 3/4 cup sugar, the flour and the salt, then whisk in the milk and the egg yolks until smooth.
- Cook over medium heat, whisking constantly and scraping the corners, 12 to 15 minutes, until it thickens. Then keep going until it bubbles hard, and whisk through one full minute of bubbling. It's ready when it coats a spoon thickly and a finger swiped across the back leaves a clean line.
- Off the heat, stir in the butter and vanilla.
- In a 2-quart baking dish, layer wafers, banana slices and a third of the hot custard. Repeat twice, ending with custard.
- Beat the egg whites with the cream of tartar to soft peaks, then add 1/2 cup sugar a spoonful at a time and beat to stiff, glossy peaks.
- Spread the meringue over the hot pudding right away, all the way to the edges so it touches the dish all around. The hot custard cooks it from underneath and that seal keeps it from shrinking.
- Bake 12 to 15 minutes, until the peaks are golden brown. Cool 30 minutes on the counter, then refrigerate at least 4 hours.
Nora is the meringue person in our house now. She's twelve and has the arm for it. My only note to her was to spread it all the way to the edges. The first one she ever made pulled away from the glass and left a moat of weeping syrup around the outside. Still good. Not pretty.
Make-ahead and the potluck
Banana pudding is best the day it's made and still good on day two. After that the bananas darken and the meringue starts to bead. If you need to make it more than a day ahead, skip the meringue, chill the pudding with plastic wrap pressed on the surface and top it with whipped cream right before serving. Mine was made Thursday night, rode to school Friday morning in a cooler with an ice pack and went straight into the lounge fridge until lunch. It's eggs and milk, so it stays cold until it's served and goes back in the fridge after.
The whole dish cost about $9, with eggs from Deb's hens and the wafers as the biggest line. It serves twelve at potluck size. It came home scraped clean, and a coworker asked if the custard was "from scratch scratch." It was.
So school's out. Nora finished sixth grade, Jack finished third, and I finished my fourteenth year of teaching middle schoolers to read a recipe all the way to the end before they start. The bottom of Granny's card is a good example. Read it first.
