[Sca-cooks] RE: SC - bananas

[Decker, Terry D.]

<clipped>
> So, to recap, Gerard, on or slightly before 1597, received a
> banana fruit
> shipped from Syria.  It was preserved in a pickle solution.
>
> Johnson, on April 10, 1633, received a live banana plant with
> fruit cluster
> shipped from the Bahamas. He picked the fruit stalk and hung it in his
> shop.  The fruit ripened about 3 weeks later, and didn't rot
> until June.
>
> We have, therefore, two viable methods for an intentional circa-1500s
> import of a banana into England. Pickling of the ripe fruit,
> or shipment of
> a fruiting live plant.
>
> Comments?
>
> Cindy

Was the banana listed in the first edition of the Herball or was it added in
a later revision?  IIRC, the Herball was revised for a later edition and
incorporated notes and occurrences from after the original publication.

Quite a bit of the Herball was presumably taken from Rembert Dodoens'
Cruydeboek (1554).  Do you know whether or not the banana appears in the
Cruydeboek?  (I suspect not, but I've never seen a copy of Dodoens' work).

Banana seeds are sterile.  Banana trees reproduce by growing shoots from the
root.  Individual stalks die after producing one crop of bananas.
Transplanted shoots account for bananas in the Canaries and in the New
World.  This is the first account I've seen of transporting a full banana
stalk.  I would think transporting a fruiting plant might be more difficult
than transporting bunches of bananas, which may be why commercial production
didn't appear in the 17th Century.

The fact that it took 3 weeks for the fruit to ripen suggests that it was
picked very early and that it may have been a cool spring.  I also wonder if
what was shipped wasn't a banana shoot and what arrived was a fruiting
plant; however, since we don't know anything about the preparation or
transit time from the Bahamas, that's pure speculation.

Bear