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Caribbean Food and Drink, Products, Market Overview of Ethnic Foods

Bananas

Elisabeth Luard pays tribute to this succulent, versatile fruit, whose global popularity has placed it at the centre of a political storm. Photographs by David Loftus   The Cinderella of the fruit bowl, miraculous with cream, mandatory with morning cornflakes, marvellous at the midday break, the banana has no fixed season. As with all tropical fruit, we may enjoy it when we please. And what better time than now, when winter’s fruits have lost their sparkle and the first spring berries have yet to ripen on the stalk? So transportable, so digestible, so satisfying, the banana is the victim of its own perfection. If it weren’t so cheap, so universally obtainable, we’d value it as a tropical luxury. Its merrily priapic shape - God’s gift to the bar-room comedian - contributes to its charm. Carmen Miranda flaunted it; Elvis came to sticky end on it (fried in a sandwich, with peanut butter and bacon); President Reagan’s son unzipped it on tv to demonstrate how to put on a condom. Now peel it and savour its fragrance, complex as designer perfume - a hint of vanilla, a touch of spice, a whisper of jasmine. The texture is unctuous, offering little resistance to the teeth. The taste is buttery, honeyed, robust, with an underlying sweetness. To those not intimate with its habitat, the banana tree can come as something of a surprise. In fact, it’s not a tree at all but a gigantic grass, an ancient cultivar of the genus Musa. It has a rhizome rather than a root, a trunk formed from its own overlapping leaves, and a flowering stalk with a remarkably sexy-looking male blossom - huge scarlet bracts which peel back to expose a pointed ivory bud. In comparison, the female blooms seem small and insignificant, but it is they that produce the fruit, semicircular ‘hands’ which cup the stem like elegant emerald bracelets. Left to its own devices, the plant can grow to ten metres, although the insecurity of its footing and the weight of the fruit - as many as 200 per stalk - can cause it to topple before its time. The mat, the carpet of shoots sent out by a single rhizome, can live for 50 years or more, creating a jungle of broken stalks and dried-out leaves which snap and rattle underfoot. The Cavendish is the main dessert banana, but there is a great deal of variety to be found in size and colour. The pretty baby bananas, known as ladies’ fingers, are exquisitely scented and very sweet - children love them. The red-skinned variety often has flesh with an orange tinge - a good cooker, delicious roasted in the skin, split and sprinkled with cinnamon and brown sugar. When very ripe, the flesh softens and browns - perfect for banana bread. Heating the ripe fruit emphasises its starchiness, making the flavour more robust, the flesh more chewy. The plantain, a green (unripened) banana, is inedible raw, but when cooked it’s more like a root than a fruit, starchy and bland, the ideal background for Creole stews and West Indian curries. As with all unripe fruit, it’s difficult to peel: you need a sharp knife and a strong wrist. Politically, the banana is something of a hot potato. Most of the world’s exports come from central and southern America - Panama, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Colombia - which produce what are known as dollar bananas, a trade controlled by two us corporations, Dole and Chiquita. The pair wield considerable political clout, and it’s their objections to the agreements reached in the postwar years by Europe’s ex-colonial powers to favour their own dependents which triggered the recent trade war between Washington and Brussels. Europe’s bananas traditionally come from the non-dollar or acp (African-Caribbean-Pacific) countries. Much of the fruit on uk shelves is grown in the Windward Islands, where some 3,500 small farmers work thin volcanic soil on steep slopes in uncertain weather conditions, conditions which permit the fruit to develop more slowly - resulting, the producers maintain, in bananas with thinner skins and a finer flavour than those grown in flat fields under constant sunshine. The Dominican Republic leads the way producing increasingly popular organics, delicious little fruits, well worth the premium. Many of the Windward farms are already in transition, although organic certification is still at least a year away. It is to be hoped the Caribbean producers survive the current politico-economic onslaught for long enough to achieve organic status, if only for the sake of our taste buds. Windward bananas have a natural succulence and delicacy of flavour not shared by the dollar-bananas - by comparison fat, floury and flavourless. But don’t take my word for it. Suck one and see. Then vote, like those who put the thumbscrews on our politicians, with your purse.

Source: Waitrose.com