Week 42: Banana Split

The book: How To Boil An Egg (Jan Arkless)

The recipe: p180, "Banana Split"

The random.org selection of the student cookbook from the very first week of the Random Kitchen project prompts an immediate but not unwelcome LeAnn Rimes earworm, because that's how my brain works. At least that's a good start.

First impressions suggest that this week's recipe is going to be insultingly simple, not only because of the book it's taken from, but because, well, it's a banana split. We're not exactly talking haute cuisine here. Still, I'm lagging behind a bit following a long weekend in Sofia, and while this probably wouldn't be the first thing on my wishlist after four days in a country where even the coffees are desserts...

My lovely chocolate lumps

...I am emphatically on board with the "simplicity" part of the equation.

And come to think of it, it must be years since I last had a banana split. It wouldn't be my first port of call when it comes to ice cream treats nowadays (and I suspect my childhood encounters with Chinese restaurant banana fritters have scarred me by association - hot oil and sugar, yum), but it's something I'm willing to welcome back into my culinary life for the purposes of this project, so let's see how the student-/idiot-friendly Jan Arkless version pans out.

The prep: I am confused. Jan claims to have written How To Boil An Egg "specifically for the person who knows absolutely nothing or very little about cooking", explaining "the simple things that one is supposed to know by instinct". Why, then, is she so reluctant to actually tell me what to use in this recipe? I'm supposed to buy ice cream (no flavour specified), chopped nuts (no variety specified), and have free choice as to whether to buy chocolate sauce or use Jan's home-made variety from the previous page - which, it transpires, involves melting a "chocolate bar" (cooking/regular chocolate not specified) with a little cold water.

You're supposed to be making life easy for the kitchen novice, Jan, not introducing unnecessary layers of choice and complexity. Get it together.

(In any case, I went for posh vanilla, almonds, and cooking. Since you didn't ask.)

The making: The bananas are split in half lengthways. Even with a sharp knife this proves problematic, with some undesirable crossways splittage also occurring, but I suppose it won't be too noticeable once everything's been squidged together.

I'd arrange the banana pieces in a boat if I had one, but a regular shallow bowl will have to do instead. Jan wants me to "sandwich the banana halves together with spoonfuls of ice cream". I get the idea - make it so the banana, its footprint duly widened, stands up nicely in the bowl - but in reality the ice cream doesn't have the desired adhesive effect, and it would have made more sense to just let the banana halves lie splayed and pile the other ingredients on top. Ho hum. Maybe a boat-shaped receptacle would have helped.

Anyway, once the banana sandwich is vaguely intact and upright (albeit slowly starting to fall apart), the chocolate sauce à la Jan is spooned on top - or "glooped", more like, since her non-starter of a recipe yields a product with the displeasing consistency of mud.

Next, I am supposed to "decorate" the split with thick cream - again, with no indication as to what I should actually do. Thick spooning cream being what it is, I have little choice but to follow the "unattractive dollop" school of decoration. None of which matters all that much, since the above sins are promptly masked by a scattering of nuts and sprinkles. (Hang on - it's "nuts or sprinkles", according to the method. Yet the ingredient list calls them both "optional". STOP CONFUSING ME, ARKLESS.)

Fuck's sake. Anyway, guess what - a basic recipe with a flawed concept and little guidance in terms of ingredients or method ends up looking pretty crap.

The non-sticky sticky stuff

At least give me the option of camouflaging the edges of the rapidly diverging banana halves with squirty cream or something. That's just miserable.

The eating: You know what it tastes like, so I'm not going to insult your intelligence by describing it any further. It's nice. It's fine. It's a banana with ice cream, cream cream, and some toppings. It's a banana split. Fin.

I just can't get over the sheer futility of the endeavour. Even allowing for the kitchen n00b focus adopted by How To Boil An Egg, I have no idea how this "recipe" is meant to benefit anyone - it doesn't impart any useful kitchen skills or ingredient insights, and if your imagination is so limited that you can't come up with a way of serving fruit and ice cream without needing to be talked through it (and come up with a better way than this, frankly), then maybe you need to accept that ready meals and Just Eat are your future.

Am I being cruel? The book is from 1986, after all, and I get that we weren't quite as sophisticated in our tastes back then, but even as a 7-year-old I'm quite sure I managed to invent more interesting desserts armed only with an ice cream scoop, a can of squirty cream and copious quantities of those tooth-destroying silver balls. It's not hard. Unlike the balls. (Ouch.)

Oh well. Fine.

One-word verdict: Superfluous.