welcome friends welcome back to Sunday morning and the old cook book show today
we're gonna go back to the Walsh County cookbook and we're going to do a recipe
called banana bread now this cookbook was published in 1936
and a couple of weeks ago we did a recipe for a banana cake and in that
video I talked about how banana cakes started to show up in recipe books
in the late 1920s early 1930s and banana bread starts to show up in the early
1930s and the first published recipe that a lot of people can point to for
banana bread was 1933 so this is 1937 not too long into the history of banana
bread and I find this recipe to be very interesting because it's sort of a
combination of date and nut bread recipes that you can find in this same
book so what a lot of people probably at this point we're doing was they've heard
about banana bread and so they're looking around and they're saying okay
so this banana bread it's a quick bread what other quick breads do I make
date nut loaf let's put some bananas in it and so this also has nuts and dates
and we're gonna see how this works out so in here I've got some butter and some
sugar and I'm gonna cream that together
and the next into this Kremes mixture are two eggs and you want to beat them
in one at a time a lot of people ask me why you can put them both in at the same
time it's definitely if you want to but you're gonna have to mix it a lot longer
to get them creamed in consistently what you'll find out is that your your
mixture gets really sloppy and doesn't cream together very well put them in one
at a time it'll mix in better it's just the way it works that's it the first
ones mixed in go right ahead with the second one okay
before we go much further I'm gonna move on to the bananas so in the banana bread
recipe I used the Cavendish banana this is the banana that is most often found
in most grocery stores where we live it is the most produced banana on the
planet it's a monoculture banana it came in in around the 1950s for industrial
production although it was bred in the 1800's in a greenhouse in England which
I find very interesting so this is the most prevalent banana because it's easy
to grow it's easy to ship it's easy to store it's just easy and profitable for
the big banana to grow this banana I used it in the last recipe and I got a
lot of stick in the comment section from people saying I didn't make the recipe
correctly because I didn't use the extinct banana that they would have had
in the 1930s which is true and not true all at the same time this was developed
in the 1800s quite possibly could have been available
to anyone in North America in the 1930s because it was being grown on
plantations at that time so it could have been available not quite likely
more likely it was the Grouse Michel or Big Mike banana that ran into trouble
in 1950s with a blight that that ravaged the the giant plantations and so they
needed us they needed a replacement because they couldn't grow at scale
anymore which is where that banana came in but it's not extinct you can still
buy it it's still out there it's still available still available across Asia
and there's still at least one plantation in Florida that grows it
commercially so if you're in the right place at the right time you can't get
that banana from the 1930s but I couldn't get it but what I can get here
where we live in Toronto are a wide range of much more flavorful bananas you
see these in the grocery store they take up an entire section and they're dirt
cheap and then hidden over in the corner of most produce sections where we live
are a whole selection of these tiny bananas varying colors varying sizes
varying flavors this one is called the Manzano and so the deal with these
bananas is they were also available in that time period and you can't really
tell what was out there because we don't know who exactly what was in the grocery
stores at that time but this could have been a banana in the 1930s it's
definitely been around that long it's definitely got a flavor that is similar
to the gross Michel banana who knows so I'm gonna use them because they are more
banana than banana to quote Blade Runner and for those of you about to ask yes
these bananas these little Manzano bananas they do have seeds so they're
not cloned they are they're grown from seed it's not a monoculture so I'm gonna
put the banana into the creamed butter mixture get that in there get it mixed
in and then we'll add the rest of the wet and dry ingredients
next ingredient is some baking soda mixed into hot water this was common in
in recipes from this time period to dissolve the soda in water and put it
into the recipe rather than mixing it into the flour you actually get a better
mix this way then putting it in with the flour although with a mixer wholly
unnecessary next ingredient is the recipe calls for sour milk and I know
there's gonna be a little bit of disagreement about this in the comment
section and it's open to my interpretation of the recipe
sour milk is milk that's left out and sours and bacteria lactobacillus
bacteria and a bunch of other things get in there thicken it a little bit and
cause an acidification of the milk making it sour which in terms of nitin
have 19 sorry 20 20 the closest thing you're going to get to that in grocery
stores in Canada in the United States is led the burr or buttermilk and so
buttermilk in this context is actually 1% skim milk that has been inoculated
with bacteria in order to thicken and sour it this has nothing to do with the
production of butter this is not the liquid left over from making butter and
that's a hard one to get your head around because it's just another one of
the ways of marketing speak that hinder us with the use of English in 1937 if it
had called for butter milk it would actually be the liquid left over from
churning butter and that liquid is real butter milk is clear yellow kind of
looks like apple juice a little bit it is very acidic but there is no fat in it
because all the fat is in the butter so in the context of sour milk just like it
says here in the recipe today you'd use cultured buttermilk so what I'm going to
do now is boon in some of the flour and mix that
in and alternate back and forth between flour and buttermilk until it's all
mixed together
and the last two ingredients are chopped walnuts and chopped dates just get those
mixed in and distributed and as is customary with these recipes
I got no mixing instructions whatsoever the only instruction is right at the end
bake one hour in a moderate oven it doesn't say he use a loaf pan but I
assume since it's called banana bread it's a loaf pan so we're gonna get this
into a loaf pan I've got a moderate oven going and we'll put it in for an hour
and we'll see what happens you know what there's no instructions it doesn't
really tell me much but I'm thinking this might have made two loaves see what
happens it's a very thick slice you've cut us Oh Julie so this is it's a quick
bread so it's banana bread it's 19 clearly 1937 banana bread but it is so
near as I can tell at this point in the development of banana breads what a lot
of people are doing is just taking quick breads that they already have motion
some bananas in so in this case this is a date and walnut bread I was gonna say
there's dates in there so it's a date and walnut quick bread that Olga Hansen
has shoved some bananas into okay so it is going to be a very it well it is a
very dense mmm it smells wonderful mm-hmm you know
it's soft and moist inside mm-hmm it is incredibly dense and part of that
is there's very little baking soda in it the amount of baking soda is very tiny
maybe a little bit more baking soda to get more loft when definitely it should
have been cooked in two smaller loaf tins loaf tins in 2020 are
smaller no today's loaf Chin's are a lot bigger than that would have been in 1937
yeah so in 1937 they would have been much smaller which would have made my
cooking time better because it did not cook in an hour so that the the tin was
too big chooses margin it's got great flavor
though mm-hmm Scott great flavor so it it called for four large bananas now I'm
curious which bananas did you use so I I didn't use the Cavendish okay I used
these Manzano and these are quite small but I don't know what bananas Olga was
using in 1935 1937 know that it's at the Cavendish no capitis well the Cavendish
could have been because the Cavendish was developed in the 1800s okay but it
wasn't as as it was probably the Grouse Michel which is called the Big Mike
mm-hmm which is a banana that's not quite as big as the Cavendish but not
quite as small as that so I used eight of those little bananas sure and I mean
the banana flavor is absolutely credible crack that open let's taste that banana
okay do you think it's gonna taste different I mean we are I mean let's
face it we all eat Cavendish bananas for the most part here in in North America
yeah unless you are once you live in banana country you live in Vietnam where
a different species of banana that's right but any given time in the year
every few weeks there's a different species wasn't there and it was great
and depending on where you were in the north of the South that's a great banana
flavor the texture is different there there it looks like it looks like
there's actual little seeds inside there are seasons when I mustered up I could
see the seeds mm-hmm um yeah so the texture is different it might not be as
sweet but it's got more banana flavor to me Oh
have another mmm but it seems if they're gone they're gone
that's it it's just a wee snack so this is not banana bread as we would think of
banana bread today but someone's got to make the first version and hey but it's
great oh they certainly did it's it's it's a great alternative to just a plain
Jane banana bread comes with a better story
yeah thanks for stopping by so you can soon
you