February 23rd annually recognizes a well-known food holiday, National Banana Bread Day.
It was with the popularization of baking soda and baking powder in the 1930s that banana bread first became a standard feature of American cookbooks and appeared in Pillsbury’s 1933 Balanced Recipes cookbook. Banana bread later gained further acceptance with the release of the original Chiquita Banana’s Recipe Book in 1950.
The Vienna Model Bakery advertised banana bread as something new in the April 21, 1893, edition of St. Louis Post-Dispatch. An early restaurant/bakery chain owned by Gaff, Fleischmann & Company, The Viena Model Bakery was known for their baked goods and was likely one of the first to produce banana bread in the United States.
In Hawaii during World War I, there was a surplus of bananas due very few ships to export the fruit. In order not to waste the fruits, alternative uses for bananas were developed. The bakeries started incorporating the fruit into their bread.
There are many different variations of the traditional banana bread, a few of which include Banana raisin bread – Banana nut bread – Chocolate chip banana bread.
- Banana trees are considered giant herbs, not ‘trees’ at all.
- A cluster of bananas is known as a hand, each banana are fingers.
- Rubbing the inside of a banana peel on bug bites are said to relieve itching and inflammation.
- Over 95% of American households purchase banana at least once a month.
- Bananas are one of the only fruits harvested every day of the year. They do not grow in regions that have dramatic seasonal changes.
- In 2001, there were more than 300 banana-related accidents in Britain, most involving people slipping on skins.
- 2012 statistics show that India led the world in banana production, producing around 18% of the worldwide crop of 139 million metric tonnes.
- Bananas are naturally slightly radioactive, more so than most other fruits, because of their potassium content and the small amounts of the isotope potassium-40 found in naturally occurring potassium.
- Bananas were noted by Arab traders as small, about the size of a man’s finger, and so called them banan, which means “fingertips” in Arabic.
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