Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
an era when authors of cookbooks and home economics manuals pro-
moted fresh fruit consumption. For example, Maria Parola advised her
readersin1882thatfreshfruitswere''verynecessarytoperfecthealth''and
recommended apples, figs, dates, and bananas.
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Hester M. Poole's 1890
housekeepers' manual, Fruits and How to UseThem, praisedfruitsinan
agewhen society was threatened by ''too great concentration—whether it
befoundinsociallife,inwealth,orinfood.''
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Citingscientificdatarelated
to ''food values,'' Poole noted that a diet of fruits and grains was superior
to one based on animal proteins and fats. She also criticized the ''smother-
ing'' of fruit with sugar and cream as unhealthful and instead urged an
appreciation for the ''natural flavors skillfully compounded by the Great
Chemist in nature's own laboratory.''
Fruits and How to Use Them considered bananas to be ''among the
most important of all fruits.'' Poole praised the banana plant's produc-
tivity and the fruit's reasonable retail price, its ease of preparation, and
year-round availability before providing about a dozen recipes featuring
bananas. The majority of the recipes featured the banana as a breakfast
item or a sugary dessert such as banana fritters, baked bananas, banana
pudding, or banana pie. The author's concern about ''heavy foods'' not-
withstanding, most of the recipes also called for fat-laden dairy prod-
ucts such as cream and butter. Other recipes published around this same
time period combined bananas with sugar, eggs, and/or dairy prod-
ucts.
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MaryJ.Lincoln,principaloftheBostonCookingSchool,published
recipes for banana ice cream, banana fruit salad, Banana Charlotte, and
''Tropical Snow,'' a dessert consisting of oranges, coconut, sherry, lemon
juice, powdered sugar, and red bananas.
But the most popular way to eat bananas—as a fresh fruit—seldom
appeared in cookbooks. In fact, some late-nineteenth-century publica-
tions warned against eating raw bananas: ''In countries where the banana
is indigenous, only the most delicatevarieties are eaten uncooked; the ba-
nanas that are brought to our markets cannot be eaten safely until they
have been cooked.''
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Many nutritionists and health care professionals ex-
pressed particularconcern about feeding bananas to children. One source
urgedthatchildrenbefedbananasthathadbeencutormashedinorderto
facilitate digestion; another recommended cooking bananas for children
unless the fruit was very ripewith black skins. Entering the twentieth cen-
tury,concernsaboutthebanana'sdigestibilityremainedsucientlywide-
spread to prompt the United Fruit Company to produce booklets with
instructions on how to determine the ripeness of bananas. Although nu-
tritionists often compared the banana to the potato in terms of nutrient
