Teresa, I love that pudding cake too, Grandma called it hot fudge pudding cake. I didn't open this either, because I detest bananas and so I'll never make or eat "Nanner Pudding". Or Banana Pudding either! However, I do think I know why the meringue goes on top instead of whipped cream. Things didn't used to be "wasted" or thrown away, and refrigeration was not as abundant or reliable as it is now. So, when something took a lot of egg yolks, like lemon pie or custard/pudding desserts, the whites were naturally used for meringue so they were not wasted. It's not a northern OR a southern thing, it's a old farmer thing, from times when everyone was much more frugal than we are today. Annie

So happy to read this wonderful report on your DS and family! I know that area well. The drive from Roanoke to Lexington is so gorgeous. If your children can't be close by, then pray that they live in a beautiful place to visit. You scored big time! I attended a wedding brunch there years ago. It was charming then. Would love to revisit. Great news, trail! Marti

way back in the day (long ago and far away).....my mom, grandmother, aunts etc all made banana pudding with the cooked pudding using only egg yolks, milk, cornstarch, and sugar, the cooked pudding was layered with bananas and vanilla wafers, the whites (not to be wasted) were used for the meringue, placed on the pudding and browned under the broiler. The bananas always had a "cooked" kind of taste and I never really liked it. It was usually made and served the same day and leftovers were put in the fridge which really made the bananas bad IMO. If you put it together with warm pudding, the wafers will get kinda soft by the time it is served. Now when I make it I use instant pudding, vanilla extract, cool whip, vanilla wafers, and bananas. NO MERINGUE! Quick, easy, and good. Perfect summertime dessert. It must spend the night in the fridge so those wafers get soft. Oh this is from BELOW the mason dixon line! LOL I can't remember the last time I saw banana pudding with meringue on it...not even at family reunions, church socials, and other places that southern folk gather.

About 10% of my dishes are flops in one way or another. Fish course for SWMBO's surprise dinner was kind of floppy. Indifferent cod is not greatly improved with hollandaise sauce. Cooking bacon on the gas grill was a flop. Too much grease and flareups, result was 2 lb of bacon that tasted like a house fire. Come to think of it, much of the stuff I make on the grill is a flop. I just don't ''get'' grilling, and probably lack the patience for a two-level approach. My experiment with sweet sauce on halibut was a flop. Tried making a hazelnut sauce, didn't know how so ended up basically making a custard suitable for hazelnut ice cream. SWMBO said, thoughtfully and gently, ''well, this would have been really good ice cream . . . '' When I first started simmering fish for a Japanese-style dish, I thought that it was like meat - longer simmering at lower temperature would make for the tenderest fish. Silly. Ended up with fish-flavoured rubber. Learned that less is more. Now I simmer fish for at most 3 minutes. So far all of my attempts at xiao long bao (dumplings filled with broth) have been floppy. I don't have ''the touch'' when pleating the dumpling skins, end of pinching them too hard resulting in dense, tough pleats. The broth is tasty but you have to gnaw through the pleats to get at it. I am determined to persevere. Last holiday, I spent untold hours (days, actually) making aspic for a big dinner. I liked it, but some guests looked askance at jiggling cubes of meat jelly. Some of it ended up being recycled into soup broth, which is a disappointing reward for that much work. Along the same lines, there is a soup I've had in Taiwan which is sort of aspic, cubes of jellied meat broth that stand up in little piles on the bowl, but are perfectly calibrated to dissolve into scrumptious soup as soon as it touches your warm tongue. I've not succeeded in making that. I think I can, but will need to get the consistency just right. So far, I end up chewing my soup which is Just Not Right. I went through a phase of bringing home and cooking up various organs and other peculiar animal parts. Hearts, kidneys, tongues, livers, spleens, tendons, necks. Cost me the trust of my children that summer. For months they would interrogate me on the precise nature and source of any meat dish. You'd think I was serving the family cat or something. Oddly, I have a hard time making fluffy rice without a rice cooker. I know, it is supposed to be simple to make on the stovetop, but I get impatient and peek/stir/sample too much, resulting in pasty, mushy rice. The first time I made tomato pesto (pesto a la trapanese) I used a food processor. Results looked like stomach contents after a college drink-fest. I learned you have to hand-chop it, or have a much lighter touch on the button. Broiling is a fertile source of floppery. When 15 seconds makes the difference between perfect and burned, and you have to sit on the floor in front of an open oven door to monitor, well, sometimes I end up dumping a half sheet pan of stuff into the trash and starting over. And on and on. If you're not flopping, you're not trying!