Banana Peel Blackening
Posted by Unknown in Banana and Plantain, History on Monday, 13 May 2013
Cultivation of bananas pre-dates that of rice
By Peggy Trowbridge Filippone
About.com Guide
Bananas are
the fruit of Musa acuminata. Acuminata means long-pointed or tapering,
not referring to the fruit, but to the flowers giving birth to the
fruit.
Antonius Musa
was the personal physician to Roman emperor Octavius Augustus, and it
was he who was credited for promoting cultivation of the exotic African
fruit from 63 to 14 B.C.
Portugese
sailors brought bananas to Europe from West Africa in the early
fifteenth century. Its Guinean name banema, which became banana in
English, was first found in print in the seventeenth century.
The original
banana has been cultivated and used since ancient times, even pre-dating
the cultivation of rice. While the banana thrived in Africa, its
origins are said to be of East Asia and Oceania.
The banana was
carried by sailors to the Canary Islands and the West Indies, finally
making it to North America with Spanish missionary Friar Tomas de
Berlanga.
Sweet bananas are mutants
These
historical bananas were not the sweet yellow banana we know today, but
the red and green cooking variety, now usually referred to as plantains
to distinguish them from the sweet type.
The yellow
sweet banana is a mutant strain of the cooking banana, discovered in
1836 by Jamaican Jean Francois Poujot, who found one of the banana trees
on his plantation was bearing yellow fruit rather than green or red.
Upon tasting the new discovery, he found it to be sweet in its raw
state, without the need for cooking. He quickly began cultivating this
sweet variety.
Soon they were
being imported from the Caribbean to New Orleans, Boston, and New York,
and were considered such an exotic treat, they were eaten on a plate
using a knife and fork. Sweet bananas were all the rage at the 1876
Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, selling for a hefty ten cents each.
