Bananas Meringuées

Bananes meringuées (vanilla-poached bananas beneath meringue) teach the difference between tenderness and collapse. Poach the bananas whole, always. A raw roundel has exposed flesh on every side and will loosen into rags in the syrup; once the whole fruit is tender and cool enough to handle, it cuts cleanly and keeps its place above the vanilla rice.

The professional pastry kitchen assumed vanilla syrup, sweet rice, and ordinary meringue waiting at separate stations, plus a practiced hand to pipe a grand dome. Here, one saucepan, one mixer, and a 1½-quart gratin dish make four generous servings. Abricots Meringués (No. 2555) supplies the direct sweet-rice assembly, while Abricots Meringués (another method) (No. 2556) supplies the smoothed and piped finish. The flawn crust from the alternate method stays an alternative, because this treatment is the source's direct dish of fruit over sweet rice. Elaborate piping is brigade scaffolding. The whole poach, vanilla rice, meringue cover, light bake, and alternating jams are the dish.

A moderate home oven sets the meringue gently; it needs a pale biscuit tint, not a scorched broiler crust. One cook, one stove, one evening. The step that matters most comes first: don't put a knife through the bananas until they have left the syrup.