Why there is no such thing as a straight banana
I_ have just peeled and eaten a banana. Now that indeed is an exercise in natural luxury: the ease with which the stem is snapped open and the warm
yellow skin is drawn away from the gently curving fruit; the beauty of the soft inner shaft, with its sculpted flutes which look as if they have been carved by the immensely skilful Egyptian masons of the 18th dynasty; the delightful dilemma of whether to peel the skin off completely at first or to proceed pani passu with the eating, so that one holds the open fruit like a flower in the hand; the sumptuous first bite, the shaft yielding gracefully to the teeth and dissolving sensuously and effortlessly in the grateful mouth; the joy of taking bite after bite without the smallest trouble, down to the sweet end, and in the sure knowledge that all will be painlessly digested, and the skin tidily deposited in the bin in one swift, uncomplicated motion. In short, if there were a synod of mechanical experts summoned to design an item of food perfect in its trouble-free simplicity and from every viewpoint 'consumer-friendly', they would not come up with anything better. No wonder Christians in India believe that bananas were the forbidden fruit of Eden and that Adam and Eve used banana leaves, not fig leaves, to hide their nakedness. And some believe, also, that the Three Wise Men brought the baby Jesus gifts of bananas — very suitable, too.
Yet bananas are despised. I have only just begun to eat them again, in my 75th year, and if I now mention how delicious they are, I get supercilious smiles and tart remarks. 'Baby food, geriatric diet, just right for the very young and the ancients.' Full of sugar and no problems for the tyro tummy or the worn-out digestive system.' 'Perfect pap.' Doctors do not recommend them: 'They fill your bowels but are not nutritious.' They are said to come originally from south Asia, and explain why natives there are thin and lacking in energy. They are the 'Asian potato', easy to grow and often big — in East Africa they can be two feet long and thick as a man's arm — but not much good. 'No quality — you can't improve them.' In places like the Celebes a banana is large enough to provide a sizeable meal for three adults, cooked, of course, and spiced up, but not eaten from choice nowadays. In the tropics they are pounded into flour and baked as a staple food, but those who live thus, it is said, have distended stomachs: 80 bananas
are required daily to provide energy for a normal adult and twice as many for the necessary protein. In the Thirties, a fashionable 'banana-and-milk' slimming diet proved disastrously painful: Nancy Rodd used to tell horror stories about it, ending in 'shrieks'.
It's true about the babies. When Quentin Hogg, whose wife had just given birth, came down from his suite at the Imperial Hotel, Blackpool, during the 1963 Tory party conference, to address a rumbustious mob of journalists, he was absentmindedly carrying in his hand an open tin of Banana Delight with which he had been feeding the tiny Hogg. Pausing at the foot of the stairs, he signified that he would run for the succession to Harold Macmillan by abruptly raising his hands in a boxer's gesture of triumph, and showered the press with the offensive glutinous mixture, a great gob of the stuff going straight into the angry eye of the vast and ferocious Derek Marks, panjandrum of the Daily Express. It was one of those moments, which seemed to cluster round the portly progress of Lord Hailsham, reminding us that democratic politics is essentially a comic business.
I remembered then that, when I was a boy at the beginning of the second world war, an Irish neighbour of ours used to complain, whenever her own tiny tot Sean howled, 'Sure, it's missing the bananas he is, poor little soul.' I don't know exactly when bananas became a much-prized food for babies in England. Post-Dickens, certainly, for he never mentions them, I think, and, given their possibilities for mirth and anthropomorphic comedy, he must surely have done so had they been common in his day. But in the last quarter of the 19th century, with advances in refridgeration, commercial firms, especially British — led by Fyffe's — planted bananas on an enormous scale in Central America, thus creating banana republics, and brought them to Europe in specially designed boats. I remember being taught of this industry by the nuns at my convent school — they described it as a 'blessing'. When war broke out, these boats were needed for other more urgent duties, so no bananas came, to Sean's distress, or they arrived in dehydrated form (to save weight), disgusting-looking brown tubes about the size of a penis, thus enlarging the banana's propensity to provoke obscene jokes, especially in girls' boarding schools.
I don't know why chefs have taken a snooty view of bananas. Even slicing them up for fruit salad is regarded as naff. In fact, they can be effectively used with shellfish or pork chops, in a chicken stew (Bolivian and Vietnamese versions), in a pie with passion fruit, as a soufflé, as a 'Colombian Omelette', in cakes, puddings and tarts, as well as flambe, baked or split. Even the dried stuff makes useful toppings for cereals and curries.
Yet after the war proper bananas were slow to make their reappearance, though the highly intellectual John Strachey, minister of food, occasionally allowed a boat in.
This produced Bron Vv'augh's most damaging story about his father, in which Evelyn ate the entire family's banana ration in front of the hungry eyes of his children. I have never believed this tale because my recollection is that bananas were not put on the ration but simply sent to the shops in what Strachey called a 'donation' and sold on a first-come, firstserved basis. But it is too good an anecdote to die in the interests of truth, and will continue to identify Waugh as a monster of selfishness till the Holy Ghost clears it up at the Last Trump.
Europe's first bananas came from Guinea in Africa in the mid-16th century and became a Portuguese joke-word. Shakespeare missed some good tricks there. They crop up in both Southey and Byron, but as eaten abroad, Why are bananas funny? Because they suggest a bent penis, like Bill Clinton's? One of the greatest moments in the movies occurs towards the end of the Laurel and Hardy silent Fight of the Century, when a beautiful stately lady slips on something squashy, realises what she has done to her rear view, and retreats off-screen shaking her legs elegantly — a superb bit of comic acting devised by Stan Laurel. But this was actually a custard pie, and is an example of Laurel's inventive gift in marrying the custard pie to the banana-skin joke to produce a sexual frisson as well as a laugh.
Once, making a television movie in Kenya, I was introduced by the Kikuyu trackers on safari to their home-made tea, a nauseating liquid. 'What did you put in this stuff?' 'Bananas, bwana, ha ha!' They all laughed. They said bananas could be turned into a fiery hooch 'which de women don't like, ha ha!' In the Naughty Nineties, young men would spread a banana skin on the pavement and wait for results from a concealed place. Was this the source of the song, 'Let's all go down the Strand — Have a banana!'? But I would like this excellent fruit to go straight. It is no joke. Not only is it the food of geriatrics; old age is the banana-skin of life.
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