This week on Lunchbox Envy. The phallic fruit that's actually 75% water, which coincidentally is the same as a newborn baby. Gordon Brown used to eat nine a day. and it's considered bad luck to bring them aboard a fishing boat. This week, we're going bananas! Hello and welcome to Lunchbox MV. I'm Manu and I'm here with my fellow elf, Jack. Hello, we're also joined by food writer and chef, Rosie McKean. Hey Rosie, how you doing? Oh, I'm doing very well, thank you for asking.
How is everyone else? Excellent, yeah. I'm buzzing, actually. We got coffee this morning. I walked from Broccoli today. Oh, really? What? Yeah, yeah. Don't dox yourself. Don't want myself? Dox yourself. What does that mean? One just revealing your address online. I don't live in Brooklyn. Oh, that's true. No, I know. What were you doing in Brooklyn? No, you're in Brooklyn. A lady never tells.
And have you had any bananas this morning? I have. Really? Yeah, I've had half a banana for breakfast. Oh, just half. What's the other half doing? It was eaten by someone else in broccoli. Oh, that's why you're in Broccoli, sharing a banana. It's sort of like Lady and the Tramp vibe, kind of like one in one mouth, one in the other. Oh, God, the banana was not that big. I thought you said a lady never tells so bananas etymologically do you know where it comes from
Banana is one of the few words in English that comes from the Wolof language of Senegal. Oh, that's really cool. Very nice. What are the other words? They are Senegal. That's one of them. And Senegalese. That doesn't sound very well off to me. Also, I only found out because we were researching this. A plantain is a banana. I thought they were different. for my entire life because one is massive and you eat it
normally like with a savoury dish. Yeah. So is it like how a chihuahua looks very different from a Great Dane, but they're both the same species? Yeah, no, that's a really good comparison. Before we get going, I just want to ask a very...
important question which uh has been a point of contention in my marriage i like to eat my bananas when they are spotty and almost on the turn and tom my husband likes to eat his bananas green and i think that's honestly insane and i just wanted to ask where do you guys land on that
I don't have them in my house because my wife literally won't touch them. So I have to eat them when I'm in the office or on special occasions. Out on a night out, you know, sneak one down me. Oh, gosh. No, I'm with Tom. I like them a little bit green.
too green but they're chalky though when they're green they're chalky and they like dry out your mouth i know what you mean but that's preferable to brown and mushy and stringy there's um actually a company in korea that sell bananas in one pack but at various stages of ripeness oh that's so clever super cool because normally they all go ripe at the same time and there's a glut
Whereas in this one, you have a ripe banana every day. That's great. So it's like a rainbow from green to brown. So it would be perfect for couples like Tom and Rosie. I mean, there'd be some in the middle that neither of you would touch. I mean, I'm just more grown up about it than he is. He gets to a certain point and he's like, no, I will not eat that. And I am like, you're pathetic.
So, bananas are a berry, actually, that grow on the largest flowering herb in the world. Wow. I know. We think... They are from somewhere around Southeast Asia or the Pacific, probably New Guinea, and they were domesticated. Between 8,000 and 5,000 BCE. So we've been eating them for a really, really, really long time. Yeah, that's long. Yeah, that is long. They are usually yellow and curvy, but they can also be...
Blue, red, and green. Wow. Which is pretty cool. There's one called the Blue Java Banana, which apparently tastes like ice cream. Oh, really? It's a super high on my to-try list. What do you mean it tastes like ice cream? Do you know which flavour? Banana ice cream. Apparently it's quite vanilla-y and really soft. It's very creamy. Very creamy. Very sweet. Is it actually blue? Yeah.
I mean, if you look at photos, I think when it ripens, it's not. But before it ripens, it is like a beautiful hue of blue. Because there's a big thing. One of the reasons why you wear blue plasters in professional kitchens is that there are... in inverted commas no blue foods so you will always find the blue plaster in the stock that you've just made if it's fallen in god forbid um and therefore no poor unsuspecting customer eats someone's rank plaster that's a great um but then if
there are in fact blue bananas, then we need to write to the EHO. Alert the health authorities. Let's open our first lunchbox, and that is Jack's. Today, Jack, what have you bought for us? I have brought this. The world's first ever Cavendish banana, which was grown at none other than Alton Towers. Obviously this here is just a regular supermarket Cavendish. The original has long since been eaten, but it does represent the first ever one. I should explain what the Cavendish banana is.
the cavernous banana is the variety that you are likely to find in your nearest supermarket if you live pretty much anywhere in the world certainly western europe and america and australia It's basically the most reliably grown banana variety. They're all clones of each other and it's grown mostly for its hardiness and its ability to grow fast and its ability to grow in multiple different climates. But it's not the ultimate banana. The one we used before the 1950s was called the Gros Michel.
And that was much tastier and had many of the similar properties to the Cavendish. But it was wiped out by a disease in the 1950s because we had this monoculture. So if you have no genetic diversity in your crops, then you're much more susceptible to disease.
michelle is is still available in small pockets of like hawaii i think has some farms that grow it and various places in the caribbean but the cavendish is dominant and there's a bit of a worry that the cavendish will also succumb to a disease in the future and because it's like 95 of all bananas growing are the cavendish we'd be in trouble. Anyway, the guy who grew the first Cavendish was a fantastic gardener called Joseph Paxton.
and he was born in 1801 he was hired by the duke of devonshire to work at chatsworth house in derbyshire as a 20 year old and on his first day of work he arrived at 4 30 in the morning scaled the wall to the garden set the staff to work ate breakfast with the housekeeper and met his
future wife Sarah Brown, the housekeeper's niece, completing the morning's work before half past nine. He developed the Cavendish banana in the greenhouses at Chatsworth House, though the original seedlings came from a chaplain who was working at Alton Towers. So Alton Towers at the time was the seat of the Earl of Shrewsbury and it was a big country house which had its own greenhouse and a gardener and I think Joseph Paxton went on a visit and met this chaplain and it was a kind of sort of
you know um landed gentry to landed gentry social network of houses across the time anyway now alton towers is the uk's foremost theme park Wow. Arguably. I'm surprised that the dominant banana in the world was grown here, of all places. Yeah, yeah. I didn't know that the UK had a climate that suited them. Well, it doesn't, but I think you can grow them with the help of a greenhouse. Ah, yes, of course.
What a wild story. Do you think he'd had a banana to power him through that incredibly productive morning? Well, it was the 1820s. He was probably having laudanum or something. I think he was just high on life and keen to meet his future wife and keen to impress his new boss. Did he not have keens? I think...
I don't think he had keys because it was his first day. I would be a bit weirded out if someone I just employed broke into my office and was like, I'm so ready to go. I agree. So hang on, sorry. The Grosse Michel.
is extinct but not actually extinct. Why haven't they brought it back? I think it's because... the disease is still out there is that right yes the panama disease that wiped out i'm pretty sure it's still around yeah so it wouldn't be viable to grow it on the scale that they grow cavendish because cavendish are immune
uh whereas the grammy show i think you'd have to work really hard to keep them alive and stop them rotting yeah it's probably not commercially viable no the cavendish is built for quantity not quality i think i'm gonna put eat a Gros Michel on my bucket list. Yeah, you should. Also, one of the things about the flavor of the Gros Michel, apparently, you know that kind of synthetic banana flavor in sweets? Oh, yeah.
is like confusingly fake and kind of weird apparently that was based on the grammy shell so that is what bananas used to taste like what oh my god it's on my bucket list now i love those sweets they're like my favorite of pick and mix is the the like phone bananas so that's like the oh banana flavor like yeah that og and presumably that was synthesized then before the 1950s yeah i think it was in like the turn of the century yeah um i don't i'm not a big fan
really this freaky and plasticky and i love the kind of smoother cavendish flavor i think one of my fave desserts uh growing up was cold custard and banana. You've got to get the good like taste the difference Madagascan vanilla custard. All the yellow. But that with the banana actually kind of tastes like a foam banana flavour because the vanilla really like increases it.
one of my friends is a baker and she told me once always put a pinch of clove when you're cooking with banana because clove and banana share a flavor compound which is called eugenol Eugenol is also similar to serotonin. So in some other parts of the world, people will make a banana and clove tea where they basically stud a banana with cloves, put it in water and let it simmer gently. And that's supposed to help you sleep and basically is a really good stress.
anxiety reliever. If you're ever cooking with banana, pop a pinch of clove in there, see how it makes your banana taste more intense. I have tried it and it definitely does. Wow. And that's because of you, Janol. You, Janol. Me, Janol? God. This definitely won't make it in. But there's... No, my me, Janelle Jake. But there's a classic thing about, like, if you've had a big night and you've dipped into your happy reserves, eat a banana.
really yeah it's supposed to help with your mood the next day is that manu law no it's like so in amsterdam it's quite a few clubs used to give out bananas to like party goers oh really because they were coming down and it was a good like oh yeah just one it like soaks up all of the bad stuff you put in your body will like keep you awake because it's full of great energy and calories and also yeah helps with your serotonin levels
Amazing. Eat a banana. Don't do drugs. Or do both. I don't know. Lever yourself out with a banana. Drugs are fine if you've got a banana. Exactly. And cloves, apparently. Let's move on to our next lunchbox, which is Rosie's. What have you brought to the table? Well, guys, I have brought a banana peel curry. What? Oh, my God.
Oh, this looks delicious. I think often bananas, because they have such a strong flavour, they are kind of pinholed into a very limited amount of dishes. For example, banoffee pie. Banana split, banana ice cream, banana bread. And actually, there's a world of banana cookery that we're not exploring. Certainly in Southeast Asia, they use the whole fruit. Recently in vegan cookery.
Banana blossom has become very prolific as a swap for meat. It looks very phallic. They're growing. The flower comes out the end of the banana, which is the brown bit when you peel it. A lot of the time, actually, I've seen it used as...
fish so because it kind of resembles a fillet in shape yes so for a vegan fish and chips you fry a banana blossom and make that your vegan fish very nice I brought this in my little Thali pot and this is a recipe by Nadia Hussein, who is a British Bangladeshi chef. and food writer, author of many great cookbooks. She famously won the Great British Bake Off. She is a prolific foodways campaigner and this recipe is from a book about that. This is a banana peel curry.
It's also often called like a banana chutney because I think sometimes curries and chutneys are the same thing and we give it the wrong name. Anyway, I've also brought you some poppadoms to enjoy it with. Oh, fantastic. Little mini poppadoms. And I basically just wanted... to A, use the peel and prove that, you know, you don't have to throw it away. You can cook with it. It's a great little ingredient. And Nadia, as she said, I think in the little intro to her recipe is that...
This is something that they would eat all the time. They'd always use the whole banana for stuff. And you can use banana flesh as well in curries too. But I really wanted to use the peel because I think that's more interesting. And you know what? It does not taste a banana at all. But let's try some and let's see what you guys think. What does it remind you of? Maybe I could fool my wife. I was to sneak in the bum coming around.
That's the ASMR of it. Got quite a bit of heat to it, actually. It's onion, garlic and ginger, chilli powder and garam masala, tomato puree and water. so it's vegan it's so soft i was expecting like fibrous chewiness Can't taste the banana at all. No. It's almost like bamboo shoots. I think it also has a little bit of aubergine to it. Yeah, I agree. Because it's quite juicy. I use green bananas for this because I think that also...
means that the skin is less perfumed. Yes, that's true. I think if you tried it with a riper banana, A, you might find that they disintegrate more and B, that they might be stronger and sweeter in flavour. But one to try. Banana skins... are used in other countries in other foods and as veganism gets more and more a cultural norm more and more countries have started using other parts of plants to cook with so apparently in venezuela they use
uh the banana peel to make uh carne machada which is shredded beef and in brazil they swap banana peel for beef as well and they call that carne luca Or crazy meat. Crazy meat. That sounds quite funny. Or bananas, you know, that's the synonym for crazy, isn't it? Oh, my God, it is. Oh, yeah. Didn't even think of that. Bananas meat. In baking, if you wanted to make something vegan, for example, you could swap your egg for mashed banana. Oh, really? Obviously...
The problem is that it has a really strong flavour, which egg doesn't have. So if you do use it to replace an egg, you will end up with something extremely banana-y. But apparently half a normal-sized banana is equivalent to one egg. egg in baking. But to be clear, don't make like carbonara with banana. It might be delicious. It does sound good. It's got a good ring. Carbonara. Oh my God. Now for the final lunchbox, which is mine. I have in it
The forbidden fruit from the Garden of Eden. Oh, my God. I thought that was an apple. It might have been a banana. Oh, really? So it's never specified in the Bible that it's an apple.
Exactly. The reason why... a lot of people think basically everyone thinks that the forbidden fruit in the garden of eden that eve picked from the tree and condemned us to a life on earth where women have great pain and childbirth and we we have nine to five jobs and like we can't do whatever we want all the time no pockets in any of our clothing exactly is because saint jerome who translated uh the bible from the hebrew and the greek into the latin
he referred to the fruit the forbidden fruit as malum which in this context means bad or evil but it's also a homonym for apple so a homonym is a word that sounds the same and is spelt the same but it has a different meaning so malum and malum and latin are both bad and apple there's literally a bad apple but you could actually be a bad banana So people got confused about the meanings of these two words and started painting apples all over the depictions of Eve picking the fruit.
There is a journalist who's basically written like the banana Bible. So he's done loads of research on bananas. He's quite biased. He's a bit biased. His book is called Banana, the fruit that changed. The word. Very biased. Was he friends with Paxton by any chance? Oh, God. Anyway, so he says that...
Where the story of Eden is set, which is around the Persian Gulf, it's more likely that the fruit in this story would have been something like a banana, something that's easier to grow in a hot climate. apple which would need a little i've got to say it's always been my one thing about the bible i just couldn't believe was that they had eaten an apple that way back when i mean to be fair it could have also been a date which is my favorite fruit um so i'm i'm back in date or banana
So basically it just said an evil fruit and then it got mistranslated to be an apple fruit. Okay, that makes sense. Unfalling from heaven. And falling in general. This is a terrible segue. But I wanted to know how slippery bananas actually are. Oh, yeah. Because that in my head is like the classic. Slapstick. Exactly.
um and apparently they actually are quite a lot more slippery than other fruits so in 2014 a group of japanese scientists won an ignoble prize do we know what ignoble awards are so it's like the kind of anti-nobel prizes so there's a group that gives um kind of wacky scientific papers awards so these guys won uh the ignoble in physics in 2014 for like
getting people to slip on banana skins and proving that they were more slippery i actually looked into this as well and the history comes from in new york when bananas were becoming more popular and all of america It became synonymous with throwing your litter on the street. So if you were drawing a cartoon and you had to draw like a pile of trash, you'd draw a banana skin because it was one of the most discarded things you'd find. There was no plastic.
From there, it became common to draw people slipping on rubbish generally and they would use a banana skin. But I think once they're a little bit rotten, I can see why that would be incredibly slippery. When you crush it, apparently it releases something called a polysaccharide follicular gel. So it is a kind of lubricant. So there's something special in the skins that we need.
i want to know which end you open your banana from because this is a bone of contention and i don't know if they've ever done polls i imagine they have But I'm in the minority, I think. I open it from what people suggest is the wrong end. Oh yeah, I've just looked at the skin of the one you just ate and you did open it from the wrong end. Oh, there you go. Well, it's very weighted language. I'm a topper myself.
It's not the wrong end, it's the other end. I mean the end where it is attached to the other bananas in the bunch. I find if you pinch the other end, the flower end... Then you can peel it off. You can take the brown bit off straight away. And then you can use the other end as a handle. That's what monkeys do in the wild. That's actually not true. Is it not? No.
Jack, that's just not true. It's just not true. Apparently in the wild, they're likely just to bite into them or snap them. Oh, that's true. I have heard that. They just snap it in half. Yeah, I'm a snapper in half. Are you? Mm-hmm. Psychotic. I like a hot banana. Psychotic.
I like that there's complete variation between the three of us though I really would have assumed you all just did it normally like I do it's not normal it might be the majority but it's not the norm wiki how lists eight different ways to open your banana how many other i mean there's like a top bottom middle then i think there's one with a knife and fork oh god and i think there's one where you just chop off the end
So you're not actually pinching it. You're squeezing it from your butt. Yeah, squeezing it out, I think. Wasn't there something? I remember people being like, oh, if you stick a cocktail stick into a banana and then you kind of like... gyrate it and then you do that the whole way down you can slice the banana internally before you open it externally which is rarely useful it's not no it's a waste of everyone's time and also as soon as you
pricked the skin it starts to oxidize so one thing i do like is when people go to supermarkets and write messages in bananas that will appear over time. Stuff like, I'm watching you. Well, I don't know. It's just like a prank people do. It's so good because obviously if you scratch it, it takes time for the oxidization to kick in.
So you can pick up a bunch of bananas. It looks fine. And then when you get home, there's harrowing messages all over it. Oh my God. Purely out of interest. What is everyone's favorite banana based? dessert i can't even contain myself banoffee pie hands down is the best dessert my favorite might be the
Dish from the 1920s, have you heard of the candle salad? Oh, Jack. It's so funny. Why have you done this? I think it was basically introduced as bananas were becoming more and more popular and common, but they were still seen as quite an exotic fruit.
and i think it also features in a lot of uh kids recipe books so it is quite a childish dish you basically get a flat lettuce leaf put it on a plate and then you get a peeled banana with the bottom cut off so that it's got a flat base and then you stick that on a pineapple ring on the lettuce leaf
And then you put a cherry on the end of the banana and then drizzle it with mayonnaise. Oh, my God. It looks so phallic. It's designed to look like a candle, but it just looks like... uh an engorged penis definitely google it yeah but not with kids around
That's it for this week's edition of Lunchbox Envy. If you'd like to get in touch, you can find us on Instagram at lunchboxenvypod or you can email lunchbox at qi.com. Rosie, do you have any favourite banana recipes in your... new book i actually don't jack but i do on my sub stack newsletter the dinner party where you can find a recipe for banana scones which is a really refreshing take on banana in baking because obviously the most
obvious choice for everyone is banana bread but actually a banana scone works lovely I should check that out thanks for listening see you next week and goodbye bye Lunchbox Envy was hosted by me, Manu Oyo, Jack Chambers and Rosie McKean. The producer was Alex Bell. This has been a quite interesting podcast.