Banana pudding is a community dessert.
You don't make it for one person. You make it for a Sunday, for a cookout, for a holiday, for the cousin who just had a baby. So we make it in a half pan. Built for the table.
Real bananas. Vanilla wafers — actually just little wafers, not too sweet. Custard that's smooth, buttery, doing the quiet work in the background. The kind of banana pudding the ladies in my community would have set on the long table without saying a word, because they knew.
