February 23rd annually recognizes a well-known food holiday, National Banana Bread Day.
A moist, sweet, cake-like quick bread, banana bread is made with fully ripe, mashed bananas. Some recipes call for yeast, and then the finished banana bread is sliced, toasted and spread with butter.
- With the popularization of baking soda and baking powder in the 1930s banana bread first became a standard feature of American cookbooks.
- It appeared in Pillsbury’s 1933 Balanced Recipes cookbook, too.
- Banana bread later gained further acceptance with the release of the original Chiquita Banana’s Recipe Book in 1950.
- One early recipe came from The Vienna Model Bakery. It advertised banana bread as something new in the April 21, 1893, edition of St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
- A new restaurant/bakery chain owned by Gaff, Fleischmann & Company, The Viena Model Bakery was known for its baked goods and was likely one of the first to produce banana bread in the United States. The recipe was made with banana flour, which is made by drying strips of the fruit, then grinding it to a powder. This process had long been used in the West Indies.
- In Hawaii during World War I, a surplus of bananas resulted from very few ships available to export the fruit. To prevent waste, alternative uses for bananas were developed. For example, bakeries started incorporating the fruit into their bread.
- This recipe was printed in The Maui News on April 12, 1918, for banana bread:
- 2/3 banana
- 1/3 flour
- Yeast, coconut milk or water
- There was also rationing of staple food items such as flour. Banana flour was a suggested substitute. It was touted as a health food and recommended for a vegetarian diet.
- A recipe submitted by Mrs. Dean in the February 18, 1918, issue of The Garden Island paper for a banana muffin might more closely resemble the quick bread we think of today.
- In 1927, Unifruit (a wholesale produce company) offered a free cookbook called From the Tropics to Your Table. The book offered recipes full of bananas as ingredients including banana muffins and breads.
- This little cookbook would have been handy during the Great Depression which was just around the corner. At the time, families utilized every scrap of food, including overripe bananas. They cooked overripe bananas, as well as other fruits and vegetables, into breads, stews and other dishes when flavor and texture were not as appealing raw.
- By definition, banana bread is a quick bread because it contains no yeast but does contain baking powder. Cooking experts claim that it is actually more a cake (or, to be more precise ‘tea cake’) than a bread. This is due to the fact that it contains quite a lot of sugar. They believe that it is called bread because it’s cut into slices and served with butter, unlike traditional cakes that are cut in wedges and usually richly frosted.
- Banana bread is very good for your heart and bananas take all the credit for this. They are very rich in potassium, a mineral that regulates blood pressure and normalized heart function.
- Today, bananas are the most consumed fruit in the States; over 90% of households in the US buy bananas at least once a month.
- The most searched-for bread recipe online isn’t white sandwich bread. It’s not whole wheat bread, or baguettes or no-knead bread or even anything with yeast in it. No, the most sought-after bread recipe across America is (drum roll, please): banana bread.
- Each American consumes, on average, 53 pounds of bread per year.
- An average slice of packaged bread contains only 1 gram of fat and 75 to 80 calories.
- Bread is closely tied to religious expression and communion. Hot cross buns commemorate Lent and Good Friday, Greek Easter breads are set with eggs dyed red to denote the blood of Christ, and Jewish families celebrate the coming of the Sabbath on Friday evening with challah.
- In 1997, Kansas wheat farmers produced enough wheat to make 36.5 billion loaves of bread, or enough to provide each person on earth with 6 loaves of bread.
- Farmers receive approximately 5 cents (or less) from each loaf of bread sold.
- Napoleon gave a common bread its name when he demanded a loaf of dark rye bread for his horse during the Prussian campaign. “Pain pour Nicole,” he ordered, which meant “Bread for Nicole,” his horse. To Germanic ears, the request sounded like “pumpernickel,” which is the term we use today for this traditional loaf.
- In Britain, the ceremony of First Footing is traditionally observed in the early hours of New Year’s Day. A piece of bread is left outside a door, with a piece of coal and a silver coin, and is supposed to bring you food, warmth and riches in the year ahead.
- The “pocket” in pita bread is made by steam. The steam puffs up the dough and, as the bread cools and flattens, a pocket is left in the middle.
- The fastest “bun” in the West goes to a team of bakers from Wheat Montana Farms and Bakery who reclaimed the Guinness World Record in 1995. They harvested and milled wheat from the field and then mixed, scaled, shaped and baked a loaf in exactly eight minutes, 13 seconds.
- Scandinavian traditions hold that if a boy and girl eat from the same loaf, they are bound to fall in love.
- In Russia, bread (and salt) are symbols of welcome.
- Superstition says it is bad luck to turn a loaf of bread upside down or cut an unbaked loaf.
- Legend has it that whoever eats the last piece of bread has to kiss the cook.
- Jules Verne introduces his readers to bananas with detailed descriptions in Around the World in Eighty Days (1872).
- The banana is actually a berry, botanically speaking.
- The word banana is thought to be of West African origin, possibly from the Wolof word banana, and passed into English via Spanish or Portuguese.
- Bananas are naturally slightly radioactive because of their potassium content and the small amounts of the isotope potassium-40 found in naturally occurring potassium.
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