Canthook

Thirty or forty years ago, we started finding banana chips for sale, first in specialty stores, and then in supermarkets.

They were, and are, pretty tasty, although they're rather rich. It's my understanding that they were, and are, slices of banana, french fried in oil, presumably palm oil or some other tropical oil. I've seen them bulk, or bagged with no labeling at all, and I've seen them bagged and labeled "banana chips", but I don't recall ever seeing a list of ingredients, or a "Nutrition Facts" label.

I recently found these in a local oriental grocery. Blondie stared at them when I gave them to her. "I don't know what to do with them," she complained. I suggested that she try eating one of them. "How?" I suggested that she could try opening her mouth, inserting one, and chomping off a bit, then chewing. She was really unhappy that I might suggest such a dangerous course of action.

She cautiously tried unrolling one. She was afraid it might snap. "Or do you mean sticking it my mouth, still rolled up?" I told her that it probably wouldn't make the product toxic if she unrolled it, and she was unlikely to find a living gila monster at the center of the roll, ready to bite her. Oh, she was mighty unhappy.

And she got even unhappier when she tried to tear off a piece about one square inch. "It's not easy to tear this apart," she complained. I suggested that she try her teeth. But she eventually tore off a piece, stuck one end in her mouth, and then tried to bite off the end.

You can imagine how it went. Blondie is very apprehensive about new foods. On the the hand, after about three or four bites, she decided she liked these banana rolls. "So how are you supposed to serve these? Do you flatten them out, and put something on them? Do you fill them with a filling and roll them back up? Do you steam them? Do you slice them?"

Fruit roll-ups, honey, I told her. Ingredients are dried banana, and a little sodium sulfite. You could chop them up and use them in fruitcake, or in chicken salad, or in trail mix, or in cakes, or you can just each them by themselves, just as you have eaten that one. Or is it two?

It was three.

A single serving is one roll. They run about 1.5 ounces each, according to the Nutrition Facts panel, although there were only 7 in my 12-ounce package. About 175 calories, it says, 1 gram of protein, a little under one gram of fat, and about 25 grams of carbohydrates. Lots of dietary fiber.

They are considerably tougher and more chewy than the fruit roll-ups you find in the supermarket, but not a whole lot different than real fruit leather. The stuff in the store contains a lot of corn syrup, making them sort of a cross between Twizzlers red licorice and fruit leather.

These come from SONACO, which is a company I'd never heard of. Small wonder. There's not much in the oriental grocery that comes from companies I'd ever heard from. The company is located in the Vihn Loc Industrial Park, HCMC, Viet Nam. Hmmm. That would be Ho Chi Mihn City, wouldn't it? Isn't that the new name for Saigon? Oh, well. It's about time we stopped fighting that war, I guess.

They sell bananas in the oriental grocery in a variety of forms. Fresh, of course, and these dried fruit leathers, but they also sell them canned, which is something I've never seen in the regular supermarket. The pictures on this label, and the pictures on canned bananas depict the same variety of bananas that are sold fresh in the oriental grocery - they're very short.

I saw a cartoon yesterday, with a guy peeling a banana. The banana was complaining, not only am I going to be eaten, but I get tortured first.

Cliff Arquette - that's Roseanne's granddaddy, if you're too young to know - read once in his "Letters From Mama" that Daddy didn't like bananas, because once you peeled them, and threw away the bone, there was nothing left to eat. Cliff Arquette dressed up as "Charlie Weaver" and read those letters, first on Jack Paar's television show (which eventually turned into today's Leno) and then on Dean Martin's variety show. Arquette dressed up as Mrs. Butterworth to do ads, and dressed as "Charlie Weaver", was the lower left square on "Hollywood Squares" until his death in 1974. His gentle jovial manner is much missed.

The bananas sold today in supermarkets are the Cavendish variety. Years ago, we mostly ate a tastier variety of banana known as the Gros Michel or "Big Mike" variety. In the early 1960s, a disease wiped out most of the Gros Michael bananas, and the Cavendish ended up getting planted to replace Big Mike. The Cavendish is resistant to the "Panama 4" virus.

Eat up. There's a new virus that's attacking the Cavendish world wide. Within 5 years, you won't be able to buy Cavendish bananas, either. The banana was first widely available in the US about 1900, but by the 1920s, we were eating 2 pounds per person per month, a figure that's still being maintained. Before 1900, the apple was king of all fruit in the US, but not now. There are something like 1200 different banana varieties, so we won't be left out in cold, but other varieties have different tastes, many of them wonderful, but few of them tasting like Big Mike.

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banana chips - bananas - Cavendish - dried banana roll - gros michel - HCMC