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Banana pudding (sometimes banana cream pudding) is a dessert generally consisting of layers of sweet vanilla flavor custard, vanilla wafers or ladyfingers, and sliced fresh which are assembled in a dish and served topped with whipped cream or meringue.
It is commonly associated with Southern US cuisine, but it can be found around the country in specific areas.Richard Sax, Classic Home Desserts: A Treasury of Heirloom and Contemporary Recipes from Around the World (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, April 1, 2000), page 138.
Banana pudding can be prepared using a Baking or Refrigeration method, with the latter being the more popular, particularly among home cooks. Moreover, many recipes have been adapted using vanilla or banana pudding instead of a true custard. Other recipes omit the wafers.
Bananas began to gain popularity in the US after the Civil War. The first known reference to banana pudding came in an 1878 "Information Wanted" column from The New York Times, and the first recipe in an 1888 issue of the Massachusetts-based Good Housekeeping magazine—it was similar to an English trifle, utilizing layers of sponge cake with custard and bananas.
Recipes for banana pudding became very popular in the 1890s across the US, with the sponge cake approach being the most popular, though some used ladyfingers. In 1920, the use of vanilla wafers instead of ladyfingers first appeared, first seen in a recipe from Mrs. Laura Kerley in a Bloomington, Illinois local newspaper, The Pantagraph. Following the rise in popularity of using wafers, in the 1940s the Nabisco (later known as Nabisco) began printing a recipe for banana pudding on the Nilla Wafers box, whose marketing helped further boost the dessert's acclaim.
The Nabisco recipe closely resembled popular versions of today, calling for "lining a baking dish with layers of vanilla wafers and sliced bananas, pouring custard over them, and spreading meringue across the top." However, it called for baking the dessert at 325 degrees for 20 minutes.
It is clear that banana pudding did not begin with the strong ties to the Southern US that it maintains today, though there is no consensus on how the Southern identity developed. Some have theorized that it developed naturally through large gatherings such as church picnics, Family reunion, and barbecues, because the dessert is easy to scale up, requires no cooking, and keeps well.
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