Partner suggested a few weeks ago that I make banana bread. I found a nice wholesome recipe for it in the King Arthur cookbook, and after tweaking it a little (more raisins, more walnuts), I have become very partial to it; I just baked my fourth loaf in ten days.
It is very aromatic and spicy and enticing. But it struck me the other evening that, apart from a little vanilla, there isn't any spice in it: just whole wheat flour, sugar, raisins, walnuts, eggs, butter. And bananas. “Well,” Partner said, “bananas do that.”
Do they? I suppose they do. I rummaged around on the bookshelf until I found a quote I remembered from a Dutchman named Pieter de Marees, who tried his first banana while traveling in Africa in the early 1600s:
“Very delicious to eat . . . Soft to bite, as if it were made from a mixture of flour and butter . . . The smell is like that of roses and very good, but the taste is even better.”
It's lovely to appreciate something familiar as if it were exotic and brand-new. How strange the banana is! It is, I find, a “parthenocarp”: the female flowers (see the outrageous picture above) develop into fruit without being fertilized. Thus, no seeds. (I still think those little black things inside the banana are tarantula eggs. At least that's what I tell small children.) Unlike its wild ancestors, the edible banana must be cultivated by human beings. (I had a nice potted banana plant in the house for a long time. It was about four inches tall when I bought it; it grew to a height of six feet, but then it faded and died. It was longing for the tropics, probably.) The leaves can be used in cooking, in construction, and to make fabric. In tropical Africa, a farmer can feed himself and his family with a hectare of banana plants - about two and a half acres. They can bear fruit year-round, if they get enough rain and the weather is warm.
And the smell is like that of roses. And the taste is even better.
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