Bananas Page 12
“Bananas and Bacon: Guaranteed to start conversation,” The New Banana (New York: Fruit Dispatch Company, United Fruit, 1931).
United Fruit also promoted bananas as a between-meal snack, both raw and in combination with ice cream and other soda fountain confections. A soda fountain treat that made a hit in the 1920s and remains popular today is the banana split. Latrobe, Pennsylvania, is credited with creating the first banana split in 1904.41 Made with a banana cut in half lengthwise, two or three scoops of ice cream, chocolate sauce, strawberry sauce, whipped cream, and a maraschino cherry, it has become a perennial favorite with teenagers. Students at Garringer High School in Charlotte, North Carolina, put together the world’s largest banana split in the gym in 1967 using 500 bananas, 45 gallons of ice cream, and 12 gallons of toppings plus an unnamed quantity of whipped cream. It was 250 feet long and fed 300 students.42
In 1976 the Ladies Home Journal published an article on bananas with the question “Is there anybody anywhere who doesn’t know how to make a banana split?” In case there was, the article continued, “the neat thing about that sinfully fattening, wonderfully delicious dish is there is no recipe,” instructing readers to assemble bananas, at least three flavors of ice cream, plus an assortment of toppings, whipped cream, chopped nuts, and maraschino cherries and then construct their own.43 Special oblong banana split dishes are sold to accommodate the sweet and messy treat. Other gooey ice cream and banana combinations are called banana boats or banana barges. Every ice cream store and soda fountain advertises the banana split but it is rare to see a person eat one. With growing adult concern over cholesterol and calories, banana splits are left to the teenagers. Banana splits are still a special concoction, expensive, and only consumed on special occasions, perhaps to share on a date.
Banana bread is said to have been invented by a Depression-era housewife in search of a way to make some extra money at home. It is curious that it took so long to discover, for since the 1930s, banana bread has taken its place on the menu in millions of homes. Grocery stores often provide customers with banana bread recipes when bananas have begun to brown, in a last-ditch attempt to sell their produce. Faced with overripe bananas, many cooks turn them into banana muffins or banana pancakes. Homemade banana bread is considered a thoughtful hostess present, good for breakfast, with a cup of coffee or tea, with lunch or dinner.
In the twenty-first century, as fewer women have the time to bake, banana bread is quick and easy, and it satisfies the urge to bake something fresh. There are even packaged banana bread mixes available for people without the time or inclination to mash their own bananas. Carlene Jolley, a resident of Fulton, Kentucky, and veteran of thirty years of banana-cooking contests, claimed banana bread as her specialty. At Thanksgiving, she filled a wicker turkey with banana muffins and banana breadsticks as a table centerpiece.44
Banana pudding has also become an American staple. Made with layers of sliced bananas, vanilla cookies, and vanilla pudding, it is seldom found in fancy restaurants but is a favorite family dessert. For many, it is comfort food—sweet and soft, reminiscent of childhood. It is often found in diners and other restaurants featuring “home cooking.” Boxes of Nabisco ’Nilla Wafers and Sunshine Vanilla Wafers picture a dish of banana pudding with slices of fruit and the wafers prominently displayed. The boxes do not carry a recipe for the pudding; everyone is expected to recognize the combination and to be able to recreate it without help. Banana pudding with vanilla cookies embedded in it is a favorite that can also be found in the take-out food section in many supermarkets. It is homey and comfortable and appeals to customers looking for a simple meal.
At the turn of the century, bananas were often referred to as the children’s fruit: easy and fun to eat. Parents did not have to worry about seeds or pits. The banana even came with its own holder when the peel was pulled back halfway. Suggested recipes for children’s parties often included bananas. An article in a 1911 issue of American Homes and Gardens suggested that bananas and other fruit could be arranged to look like pigs, elephants, birds, and tramps. “Let the reader prepare a few such “banana animals” and arrange them upon plates with a little colored paper shaving, and she will be surprised at the wild delight which her handiwork will call forth.”45 Children today enjoy frozen bananas with chocolate coating. The coating kit can be purchased in the supermarket, often displayed in the produce section with the bananas. Other lasting childhood favorites are banana pudding, and peanut butter and banana sandwiches.
New Tempting ways to serve bananas (New York: Home Economics Department, Fruit Dispatch Company, 1939).
Chiquita Banana’s Recipe Book (New York: Home Economics Department, United Fruit, 1956).
The owners of the Elvis Is Alive Museum and Cafe in Wright City, Missouri, claim that peanut butter and banana sandwiches fried in butter were a favorite of the King. According to one nutritionist, such a sandwich would have 815 calories and 60 grams of fat, equal to the daily total recommended intake of fat for an adult male. Elvis is said also to have enjoyed glazed donuts, cheeseburgers, and frosted brownies. According to registered dietitian Chris Rosenbloom, “the diet might have killed him if other causes didn’t.”46
Despite the short shelf life of raw bananas, the processed banana industry was slow to develop. Once planted in rotation on acreage in Central America, the fruit can be harvested every seven to ten days throughout the year and then sold locally or exported by ship.47 Temperature control can aid in prolonging the ripening time, but the fruit will inevitably ripen and eventually rot. Since the fruit is available throughout the year, efforts to preserve bananas have not met with much support although attempts have been made to process the fruit in order to include it in the daily diet in new ways.
In the 1886 Grocers’ Handbook it was explained that bananas could be preserved with sugar and with vinegar, used as bread, and when pressed and fermented would yield “a spirituous drink resembling cider. The sap also makes an excellent wine.”48 United Fruit experimented with various ways to use overripe or scarred bananas that were not fit to be sold on the American market. In 1929 the company announced that laboratory experiments conducted by Harry von Loesecke showed that cider and vinegar could be made from bananas. “Unfortunately, circumstances did not permit the work to be carried beyond laboratory-scale production, but it is hoped the present results may at some time serve as a nucleus for further work on a semi-commercial scale.”49 The idea lay dormant but has not died. A French patent was awarded in 1972 for banana wine and vinegar.50 Fermented bananas are used in making low-alcohol beer in East Africa and in Central America, but the drink has not achieved popularity in the United States.
Other banana products can be divided into two types: those made from green, starchy bananas, and those made from ripe bananas. Banana sugar is powdered ripe banana; banana meal is usually made from unripe bananas.51 Additional processed banana products include banana puree, canned slices, banana figs (dried ripe fingers), banana flour made from dried whole green fruit, banana chips (green slices fried in vegetable oil), and banana essence or extract used as a flavoring. In the Philippines spicy banana catsup is a popular condiment. In addition bananas can be powdered, flaked, freeze-dried, and made into jam and juice.
In 1885 dried bananas were touted in a New York City newspaper as
among the latest novelties. They are said to be an entirely new food product, and are certainly delicious. The rind of the ripe fruit is removed, and it is dried without sugar, forming dark-colored firm preserve of slightly softer consistency than citron, and having the flavor of a ripe banana. The fruit retains about one-third of its original size, and may be either eaten from the hand, stewed or cooked in cake or pastry. Banana fritters from them are superior to the natural fruit, which comes to this market green and is ripened in hot rooms.52
Dried bananas weighed one-ninth of fresh fruit and took up less space so that it was estimated that they would offer large savings in transportation, handling, and storage c
osts.53 Dried bananas might be pressed into barrels or boxes, or chopped up fine “with a large sausage-meat cutter” and packed in attractive one-pound paper packages. “In the latter shape, they will make an excellent breakfast food, and can be used for cakes, puddings, ice creams, and numerous other purposes. Also, if heavily compressed in a small space, they will make an ideal ration for soldiers or travelers on long inland tours.”54
Ten years later, Scientific American announced that “dried bananas, or banana figs, as they are called, are now in the market, and will undoubtedly be a great article of trade as soon as found by the schoolboy. They are sweet, wholesome and nourishing.”55 Dried bananas are available today in health food stores, but they never really caught on, perhaps owing to their unprepossessing brown, shriveled appearance, or to the development of a commercial candy industry that caters to the schoolchild’s sweet tooth in other ways.
Other entrepreneurs experimented with banana flour. An article in Scientific American in 1891 suggested that the “hundreds of thousands of discarded bunches each year” in Jamaica might be processed into banana flour. The rejected fruit might be undersized, undeveloped, or too ripe for American buyers. The author pointed out that two types of inventions were sorely needed in the West Indies: a desiccating process and a flour- or meal-making process. “Wherever one travels in the banana-producing regions, from Demerara to British Honduras, from Colon to Samana Bay, the cry will be heard at every large plantation, ‘Oh! if someone would only invent and perfect a drying or preserving process that could be depended on.’ ”56
Part of the problem was discrimination by the wholesalers and railroads against small bunches. In the 1890s railroads charged by the bunch instead of by weight, making it more cost effective for companies to deal with large bunches. An article in Scientific American complained that “to the man who buys a nickel’s worth of bananas it ought to be immaterial whether they come off a six hands bunch or a ten hands.”57
The invention of the steamship and refrigeration, as well as the expansion of the American market, helped to reduce some of the waste in the banana-growing industry. Articles in Scientific American in 1899 and 1900 continued to promote the notion of dried banana flour based on the new ideas of nutrition rather than availability. The first noted that banana flour had the potential to “prove to be the basis of a very valuable industry,” and went on to explain that “since flour can be produced from [bananas] at less expense than that obtained from wheat, it is permissible to believe that the products of the banana plant will furnish the working classes of many countries with wholesome, nourishing food at the lowest possible cost.”58 The author admitted that “the flavor of the dry banana is somewhat strange at first, but the palate soon adapts itself to the taste.” An article the next year noted that the banana
is very nutritive, and forms a nearly perfect food. It contains more than 25 percent of assimilable organic matter. According to Humbolt, it is forty-eight times more nutritious than the potato, while Crichton Campbell has stated that the banana is twenty-five times more nutritious than the best wheaten bread.59
In Venezuela it was said that banana flour was fed to children, aged people, convalescents, nursing women, and “is of great service in the feeding of those suffering from complaints of the stomach.” Banana flour “may be used in the same way as wheaten flour, except for the preparation of bread, for which it is unsuitable, inasmuch as it contains no gluten.”60
During World War I, entrepreneurs in Jamaica suggested that banana flour would make an excellent substitute for wheat and rye flour, arguing that it would cost less than wheat flour and “has a nutritive value equal, if not superior, to any cereal flour.”61 It was proposed that banana meal could be mixed with wheat flour and made into bread and cake, particularly ginger bread and ginger cakes, and that scones could be made entirely from banana meal in place of wheat flour. Americans were assured that “the high sugar content makes the banana flour much more palatable and certainly more nutritious than the plain starch flour produced by the German government from potatoes and used as a war bread.”62
The U.S. Department of Agriculture with the cooperation of United Fruit experimented with the manufacture of banana flour and announced in 1917 that, with the proper facilities at Caribbean seaports, “it should be entirely feasible to manufacture into flour an enormous quantity of bananas that are ordinarily too ripe or otherwise unfit for shipment to the United States.”63 However, when the war ended in 1918, the nation forgot the high price of bread, and commercial banana flour processing facilities were never built. This may have been partly due to pressure on the federal government from American wheat growers who had expanded production during the war and were not interested in competition from imported banana flour.
In 1922 improvements in banana-drying technology promoted a revival of interest in dried bananas in the United States.64 Dried banana chips, made from large bananas rich in starch (plantains?), could be ground into a fine flour and used by biscuit manufacturers to “produce through it a highly palatable, fine flavored, aromatic baked product. It is also used for the baking of cakes, pies, and for confectionery.”65 Proponents of the new industry suggested that “in some ways the properly dehydrated banana is to be preferred to the freshly picked fruit. The food value cost is considerably lower than that of fresh bananas.”66
Another reason put forward for dried bananas was that only the two or three varieties that traveled well ever appeared in North American ports. A drying process would make a wide variety of bananas available to northern consumers.67 However, as delicious as they may have been, dried bananas never caught the imagination of the American public nor did they become a culinary staple in the United States. This may be because fresh bananas were widely available at low prices and there was no need for preserving bananas so that they would be available throughout the year.
United Fruit continued to experiment with new banana products that would use otherwise discarded bananas. Company laboratories invented a banana powder, called Melzo, that was approved by the American Medical Association as baby food, combating “an ancient prejudice against the fruit.”68 In 1933 Melzo, produced by the Chase Williams Corporation of New York, was introduced to the American public as a home and soda fountain drink. It contained the new banana powder, along with maltose-dextrin, skimmed milk, yeast, vitamin D, and vanilla.69 Melzo was marketed as a health food for children and the elderly, as an aid to indigestion, and “as a revitalizer for all who are sluggish mentally or physically.”70 It was advertised in newspapers and through soda fountain promotions. Free samples were distributed to soda fountains and $100 cash prizes were offered “to induce soda jerkers to work out alluring combinations and actively to sell the public.”71
Yes, We have bananas and in powdered form (New York: Nulco Meloban, The Nulomoline Company, 2d ed., 1936).
World War II again renewed interest in dried or processed bananas to permit “preservation and storage of the fruit during periods when banana stems cannot be shipped.”72 But bananas continued to be eaten fresh or in confectionery such as pies, cakes, and ice cream, when they could be had, with “some consumption, insignificant in volume, of dried bananas for medicinal purposes.”73
Part of the reason for the experimentation with dried banana products was that peeled fresh bananas within half an hour soften and turn brown, becoming unpalatable. Nutritionists in schools, hospitals, and cafeterias struggled with the problem of how to use the popular, nutritious, and economical fruit since banana dishes enjoyed at home were difficult to serve in institutional settings. In the 1930s experiments were made using cream of tartar and a glucose solution with pineapple and grapefruit juices to coat sliced bananas in order to preserve their color and firmness.74 This was a reasonably successful solution but added expense and preparation time.
Although Americans seldom cook bananas or serve them with meat, the fruit import companies have managed to expand consumption in other ways. Most processed bananas are use
d in the manufacture of commercial food products rather than in the home. United Fruit built a modern factory to produce banana puree in Honduras in 1966.75 Initial demand for this product was low, and only 15,000 tons of Cavendish bananas were processed out of a total of 6.5 million tons exported in 1972.76 The volume increased considerably in the 1980s with Honduras alone exporting about eight thousand tons of banana puree and one thousand tons of canned banana slices in 1983.
United Brands developed the first commercial, all-natural banana extract that appeared on the market in 1982. Some 3,200 ripe bananas are needed to produce a 3.8 liter bottle of clear, colorless liquid that smells like banana. Banana extract is used in desserts, toppings, juices, and drinks.77 In 1991 bananas were available in twenty-seven different forms and researchers were working to develop yet more to supply “that little extra flavor, specific product textural qualities, and ease of handling ingredients in the processing plant.”78
Today banana puree is used to flavor sherbet, ice cream, eggnog, yogurt, and cottage cheese. It is a popular ingredient in banana bread, cake, tarts, muffins, doughnuts, icing, and banana cream pie. Banana puree is also found in a wide variety of baby food products. Gerber and Heinz baby foods include mashed bananas; bananas with tapioca; bananas and strawberries, or bananas and pineapple with tapioca; mixed fruit dessert; banana apple dessert; mixed cereal, oatmeal, or rice cereal with applesauce and bananas; mixed fruit juice; banana pudding; apple banana juice; banana juice medley with low fat yogurt; and banana cookies. In a letter in the newspaper advice column “Hints from Heloise,” a reader from Struthers, Ohio, suggested that when making banana bread or cake, two small jars of baby food equal one cup of mashed bananas. “Baby food is easy to store and is always handy.”79