[Sca-cooks] Plantains: Period for Old World?

[otsisto]

Plantain are similar to bananas how would they have been exchanged with
potatoes?
oh I see
From
http://tinyurl.com/m2oj4k

"The sweet banana is very easily digested, but the plantain must be boiled,
steamed, roasted, or deep fried to make it soft and palatable."

"Linnaeus created the name Musa, which is similar to several Arabic words
for the fruit, but the name may also be linked to Antonius Musa, a Roman
medical man of the first century B.C., or to honor the Muses. The Koran
called this the "Tree of Paradise," so Linnaeus named one form Musa
paradisiaca, and Pliny the Elder noted how the sages in India ate this
fruit, "the plant of the wise," hence the other Linnean name Musa
sapientum."

History
http://bananas.bioversityinternational.org/files/files/pdf/publications/focu
sen_earliest.pdf

http://tinyurl.com/lbnotf

the John Gerard "The Herbal", p. 1514 to 1517, Chap. 136, "Of Adams Apple
tree or the West Indian Plantaine."
So it is old world in the late 1500s.


Wouldn't people go by taste then by starch? Does plantain taste like a
potato? I have understood the in "Germany" that the potatoe replaced the
turnip in many dishes.

De

-----Original Message-----
(snip)
So. I know bananas are Old World (Period for Asia, Africa, and the
Middle/Near East). I was reading on Joe Pastry blog
(http://joepastry.web.aplus.net/?blog=1&page=1&paged=2
) that plantains are often for a lot of the things that normally use
potatoes. I'm wondering if potatoes, when first brought back from the  New
World, were used in ways that they would have normally used plantains.

This is confusing as I try to word it, so let me try again. Here's a
supposition (which I'm not married to, and I'm just as happy to have it shot
down as to have it triumphantly confirmed):

1. The Old World had recipes, techniques, or treatments that used
plantains as the starch.
2. Potatoes were brought from the New World to the Old World.
3. People weren't sure what to do with potatoes, so after a bit of
suspicious glaring, they started to use them in the dishes that had
originally used plantains.
4. Plantain use waned while potato use waxed.
5. Recipes evolved as time passed, sometimes very slowly and sometimes
rapidly.
6. Now a dish that uses potatoes COULD conceivably be made with
plantains instead, and it MIGHT be Period. (Documentably? Probably  not, or
someone would have surely crowed about it and done it by now,  right? But it
might be "reasonably Period" or "Peri-oid," right?)

Shoot me down fast, please, before I get really excited about trying
something like this. Start with whether plantains are Old World, or  whether
they're a species of the Musa genus that only developed after bananas made
it over to the New World, so I know whether this weird thought may have any
basis whatsoever in reality.

Judith