The Simple Pleasures of Bananas and Cream

Growing up in a two-family house in Brooklyn, I spent a lot of time in my grandmother’s kitchen—downstairs from my own home. What was amazing about Grandma Molly’s kitchen is that she included me in everything. Thinking back, I realized it’s where I first learned to cook. I don’t remember her ever serving me anything that I watched her make; instead, we’d always make it together.

Grandma Molly had a special way of making every dish we created together feel gourmet. I remember pounding out the veal to make breaded veal cutlets and learning how to “plate” our meals. Even the boxed instant Jell-O chocolate pudding we would make together during our Saturday night sleepovers felt glamorous when she’d place it in her bright-green bowls, allowing me to spray the whipped cream on top all by myself. After the pudding cooled in the fridge, we’d take the bowls out, grab the nice spoons, and sit together at her kitchen table to share our dessert creation.

Since she was so close to us physically, and my grandfather died when I was 9 years old, Grandma Molly and I spent a lot of time together. I became my grandma’s little buddy. We’d hang out, watch TV, take naps, have sleepovers, clean, and cook together.

From a very young age, I was used to eating exotic foods. Both Ashkenazi and Sephardic foods were staples at our family meals since three out of four of my grandparents were immigrants. Except Grandma Molly—she was from Manhattan. My other grandparents would make dishes like malabi and baklawa for dessert. But Molly would make “regular” food, like chocolate pudding. In reality, she was a first-generation American, a little Jewish babushka from the Lower East Side of New York City. To me, she was so fancy. She had perfect diction and impeccable handwriting. She had a way of making everything feel and taste special.

One of our favorite dishes—one that I hadn’t thought about until last month—was bananas and cream. As a kid, after day camp, I’d go to my grandmother’s house to have a snack before going home. It was after lunch but before I’d have dinner with my family, so we had to have something light. Oftentimes, we’d make bananas and cream. It was the simplest, most refreshing dish, with just the right amount of sweetness. I vividly remember standing on her kitchen stool, slicing the bananas into the bowl, scooping out the sour cream on top, and whisking in the sugar. In fact, I think that making this dish was when I first learned how to use a knife. We’d then sit at her kitchen table chatting about our days, eating bananas and cream until my mother would call to say it was time to come upstairs.

It’s been about 30 years since I last shared bananas and cream with my grandmother and 14 years since she died. Recently, since becoming a parent myself, many of these memories with my grandmother that were tucked away for so long have been resurfacing. Last month, during the heat wave on the East Coast, I found myself standing in our kitchen with my 5-year-old daughter. I had just picked her up from camp, and she wanted a snack. Having exhausted all of my post-camp snack ideas, I stared out the window wondering what in the world I could come up with to serve her that would be light, filling, and refreshing. At that moment, my memories of my grandmother’s bananas and cream suddenly came back to me. “I have an idea,” I shouted excitedly to my daughter. “Want to make something I used to eat as a little girl with my grandma?” Her face lit up; she was already intrigued by my excitement. “Let’s have bananas and cream.” Before I could even finish my sentence, my daughter was pulling up her kitchen stool.

And so we stood in my kitchen making bananas and cream. The recipe is super simple, including just three ingredients: bananas, sour cream, and sugar. We always have bananas on hand, as they’re a staple for breakfasts, and easy-to-grab fruits. We had some leftover sugar on hand from a cake we baked, but we didn’t have any sour cream. I realized it’s not something we often eat or cook with, and I wasn’t even sure if my daughter had eaten it before. We asked my husband to grab some while he was out, and we got started. Just as I did around her age, my daughter had her first try at using a knife. She sliced the bananas, scooped the sour cream, and put just a little too much sugar on top. Then we whisked it all together, ate, and talked about our days. “Why haven’t we ever eaten this before?” my daughter asked. “I honestly forgot about it,” I said sadly. I told her how I used to eat this dish with my grandmother and how she used to make even the simplest dishes feel special. “Is it a Jewish food?” she asked.

It had never occurred to me that bananas and cream would be considered a Jewish food. But thinking back, even the “regular” food that I thought my grandma learned to eat in Manhattan was ethnic to her Austrian Jewish heritage.

“I honestly have no idea,” I said, but vowed to find out. Where did bananas and cream come from? Did other people eat this? Is it considered a Jewish dish? And, most important, why did it vanish from our home and memories?

A few conversations with friends and a quick Google search showed me that there were other Jewish people who ate bananas and cream with their grandmothers, bubbies, aunts, and other Jewish relatives when they were young. Clearly it had a connection to Jewish culture, but I couldn’t figure out why.

I reached out to Joan Nathan, a Jewish food expert and longtime Tablet contributor, who I thought may know more about the history of this mysterious dish. “Sour cream and sugar were some things that Eastern European Jewish immigrants loved,” she told me. “And bananas were a new fruit to them, something they didn’t have in Europe.” While Nathan didn’t eat this dish herself while growing up, she was able to brainstorm about the heritage of it based on her decades of Jewish cooking: Bananas were available all year long, were cheap, and could be bought individually, Nathan explained. At that moment, I remembered a story my grandpa Harry (Grandma Molly’s husband) would tell me. On the boat from Poland to Ellis Island, my grandpa was handed a banana. He’d never seen one before and was so intrigued by it, so he took a bite right through the peel. “Jews have always been adapters,” said Nathan. “Because they had to move to new places all the time, they’d take what they would eat and adapt it to what was available to them. And when they came to the Lower East Side, bananas were available and easy. And they just loved sour cream …”

I didn’t have to look very far to learn more about why Jews had a love affair with sour cream. In a recent Tablet article, Carol Ungar wrote about it: “In those pre-hummus, pre-tahini, and pre-sriracha days, sour cream was everywhere: in supermarkets, in specialized Jewish dairy shops like Daitch’s (the ancestor of the Food Emporium), on starched tablecloths at Grossingers (the now-defunct paradisiacal Catskill Mountains resort), and at New York’s beloved and also long-gone Jewish dairy eateries such as Ratner’s, Steinberg’s, Famous, and Farm Food, where it was served in dainty white ceramic bowls.”

Ungar’s explanations began to make sense. While I thought of my grandmother as a fancy Manhattanite, she really was a shtetl Jew who rarely went above 14th Street. “Shtetl Jews didn’t eat much meat—generally not on weekdays and, if times were especially tough, possibly not even on Shabbat,” Ungar wrote. “Sour cream provided a cheap source of protein along with vitamins A and D, as well as calcium and protein, and it added a zippy flavor to a potato-heavy diet and could be easily made at home.”

Nathan also led me to one of her earlier cookbooks titled Jewish Cooking in America, published in 1994. “The names ‘Bagel Aristocracy,’ ‘Sour Cream Sierras,’ ‘Derma Road,’ and ‘Borscht Belt’ did not just happen by chance,” she wrote. Nathan gives history and context for the love affair between Jews and sour cream. “In 1882 Isaac and Joseph Breakstone, Jewish immigrants from Lithuania, opened their first dairy store on New York’s Lower East Side to sell butter, soft cheeses, and sour cream.”

I clearly understood the connection. My grandmother was born and raised on the Lower East Side, then moved to the Bronx in her mid-twenties. And it was where Grandpa Harry moved after emigrating from Poland. The Lower East Side, its culture and, most important, its food were ingrained into their hearts. In my early twenties, when I finally emigrated from Brooklyn to Manhattan, I’d wander the Lower East Side, calling my grandmother afterward to tell her which stores still stood and which were gone. I’d buy her bialys from Kossar’s and chocolate from Economy Candy.

I’m not exactly sure how bananas and cream came to be as a dish, or why it vanished. But I know why my grandparents used sour cream and why they used bananas. And why wouldn’t they use sugar? “The sweeter, the better,” Grandma Molly would always say. And even though I’ve rarely, if ever, bought sour cream as a staple in our home, I will now. I’ll look forward to reminiscing about Grandma Molly, and Grandpa Harry, over bananas and cream with my kids after camp this summer. And I can confidently say yes when my daughter asks if it’s a Jewish food.