SC - Balthazar's Sig file...

[CBlackwill@aol.com]

- --- RANDALL DIAMOND <ringofkings at mindspring.com>
wrote:

> Warning! Warning Will Robinson!  Andrea..... Bananas
> are
> period dating back to pre-Roman times.  Hannibals
> army
> were among the first Western Europeans to taste
> bananas.
> The reference to a huge bunch of grapes so big in
> Exodus
> in the Old Testement so large that two men carried
> it between
> them on poles has fairly universally been accepted
> as a King
> James mistranslation of a bunch of bananas.  They
> were grown
> in the Canary Islands by the Portugese before the
> discovery of the 
> New World.   A number of items now grown so
> extensively in the
> New World are actually Old World!  True, period
> bananas are not
> similar to modern breeds you get at the Safeway, but
> they are 
> absolutely period!  To find recipes, you will need
> to look at early
> Islamic and Judaic cookery (they will be hard to
> find I think).  Period
> bananas look more like those stubby reddish ones you
> see on 
> ocassion in some larger stores.
> 
> Akim Yaroslavich
> "No glory comes without pain"


Here is what the Oxford Companion to Food says about
bananas:

It seems likely that edible bananas date back several
thousand years in India.  There were certainly known
by repute to the Greeks in the 4th Century BC, when
the army of Alexander the Great encountered them on
trees in India.  PLiny the Elder, writing several
centuries later, recorded the incident and cited the
name "pala" for the fruit.  This name passed into
classical Greek and is reflected in some modern Indian
names.  The classical writer Theofrastus repeated a
legend that wise men sat in the shade of the banana
tree and ate its fruit, whence the pleasing but now
obsolete botanical name M. sapientium, meaning 'banana
of the sages.'

The banana reached China about AD 200, when it is
mentioned in the works of Yang Fu.  However, it was
grown only in the south, and was considered a rare,
exotic fruit in the north, an attitude that lasted
well into the 20th Century.

During the 1st Millenium AD, the banana also arrived
in Africa, probably taken directly from the Malay
region to Madagascar.  By the end of the 14th century,
the fruit was being cultivated right across the
continent to the west coast.

During the same period, it was take eastward through
the Pacific Islands.  The Arabs had spread cultivation
through their lands south of the Mediterranean before
AD 650, but no farther north than Egypt, the climate
of South Europe being too cool for the plant. 
Consequently, the banana remained unknown to most
Europeans until much later.

THe first serious European contact with the fruit came
not long after 1402, when Portuguese sailors found it
in West Africa and took it to the Canary Islands. 
That is why the European name 'banana' comes from a
West African word, the Guinean banema or banana.  The
Canaries have remained an important banana-growing
area ever since, and it was from there that a Spanish
missionary, later Bishop of Panama, took banana roots
to American in 1516, after which the new plant spread
quickly through Central America and the northern parts
of South America.  For some reason, the Spaniards saw
a likeness between the banana tree and the totally
different plane tree (plateno), which is how the
plantain got its confusing name.

Huette



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