SC - Bananas

[Huette von Ahrens]

- --- "Decker, Terry D." <TerryD at Health.State.OK.US>
wrote:
>   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
> 
> Huh?  The plantains are members of the family
> Musacea genus Plantago
> originating in Southeast Asia.  The banana is genus
> Musa.  The term is also
> used for members of genus Musa which require cooking
> before eating, while
> bananas can be eaten raw. Pliny mentions both
> bananas and plantains.  In
> Spanish, it is usually "platano" or "plantano",
> according to the quick ref.
> Plantains and bananas are both imports to the New
> World.  

You have misunderstood what I was copying from the
Oxford Companion of Food.  Alan Davidson was stating
that the reason that the plantain is called a plantain
and not a banana is that the Spanish confused the
plantain with the plane tree.  Not that the plantain
is not a banana.  Get it now? 

Huette

PS:   The Oxford Companion of Food has just won the
10th Annual James Beard Foundation Award for the best
reference book.

The best cookbook winner is "A Mediterranean Feast" by
Clifford A. Wright.  They commended the book's
"scholarly argument on the origins of Mediterranean
cooking". And call it "an important achievement in the
field of culinary history".  While the book does have
a lot of information about period cooking, it does not
have one recipe that is documentably period.  The
author mentions a lot of period cookbooks, he just
doesn't quote one recipe from any of them.  Sigh. 

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Send instant messages & get email alerts with Yahoo! Messenger.
http://im.yahoo.com/