What Well Known 1872 Book Introduced Bananas To Its Readers?

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.

• 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 bread. This is because 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 rich in potassium, a mineral that regulates blood pressure and normalizes 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.
• 8000 BC – Possibly the world’s first cultivated fruit, bananas are domesticated during this era by people in southeast Asia.
• 327 BC – When Alexander the Great takes his army to India, he discovers crops of bananas in the Indian Valley. From this trip, bananas make their way back to the Western world
• 1872 – Jules Verne introduces his readers to bananas with detailed descriptions in Around the World in Eighty Days (1872).
• 1870s – Captain Lorenzo Baker brings bananas back from Jamaica and begins selling them in New Jersey. The effectiveness of this endeavor led to the formation of the Boston Fruit Company–and bananas are in America to stay
• 1893 – 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.
• Early 1900s – Thanks to the invention of refrigeration techniques, transporting bananas to the U.S. became much easier.
• 1918 – 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
• 1918 – 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.
• 1927 – Unifruit (a wholesale produce company) offered a free cookbook called From the Tropics to Your Table. The book offered recipes full of bananas, including banana muffins and breads.
• 1929 – Money was so tight during the Great Depression that people refused to throw away rotten food — thus ushering in the era of overly ripe bananas in banana bread.
• 1930s – With the popularization of baking soda and baking powder in the 1930s banana bread first became a standard feature of American cookbooks.
• 1933 – It appeared in Pillsbury’s 1933 Balanced Recipes cookbook, too.
• 1950 – Banana bread later gained further acceptance with the release of the original Chiquita Banana’s Recipe Book in 1950.
• 1995 – 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• It’s estimated that the average American eats around 30 pounds of bananas per year!

Sources:

National Day Calendar

Mobile-Cuisine

Days of the Year

National Today