At the Minnesota State Fair, the banana bread competition always attracts a crowd. Curt Pederson, the superintendent for Creative Activities, said it's as if entrants planning their strategies for cloverleaf rolls and sponge cakes say, "OK, I'm baking already. I may as well also bake and enter banana bread."
The display case, however, often reveals why banana bread shouldn't be an afterthought. There are pale loaves and scorched loaves. Some interiors look gooey, while others resemble sawdust. For all the angst reserved for yeast breads, a successful quick bread also demands its own set of skills.
Fortunately, a foolproof banana bread is within reach of anyone with a mixer and some ugly bananas.
In fact, mottled, mushy, overripe bananas probably are the reason that this bread became a staple of morning coffee breaks and after-school snacks.
It's actually the result of Yankee ingenuity made possible by two ingredients imported from foreign shores: baking soda, first brought from England in 1846, and bananas, which first appeared here in 1870, the new fruit memorably described by Philadelphia confectioner Eleanor Parkinson as having "a highly grateful flavour."
Yet it appears that decades passed before thrifty housewives were faced with overripe fruit, their exotic novelty perhaps finally wearing off. In any case, the popularization of baking soda and baking powder in the 1930s led to the first published recipe appearing in 1933 in Pillsbury's "Balanced Recipes" cookbook, thereby lending a laudable Minnesota connection to this iconic baked good.
Oddly enough, you can't make banana bread on a whim. Gorgeous canary-yellow bananas aren't soft enough to blend evenly, nor flavorful enough to make the effort worthwhile. You may need to plan ahead, buying some bananas to "age" on your counter or, conversely, exercise a bit of spontaneity when encountering a display of overripe fruit.
If you're nice to the produce people -- and who wouldn't be? -- they might be able to retrieve some older bananas from the back room. Or you can keep your own treasure trove in the freezer, placing overripe bananas still in their skins on the shelf. Once thawed and peeled, they're perfectly mushy and recipe-ready.
