When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for the single man of the tropics to take unto himself a helpmeet for him, and to provide for other events likely to come after, he selects some fertile spot, usually on the border of waters over which his canoe may easily carry the bulky harvests he will have; and there he cuts down tree and vine, bush and bamboo, and lets them lie as they fall in tangled mass. Every day the ardent sun helps the constant wind to shrivel leaf and twig until, one day, the windward edge of that snarl is touched by the torch, and in a moment a blazing hades is where a cool and shady grove will soon rustle in the breeze.
When the last flame has flickered out and coals lie dead beneath their gray shroud, women paddle to that place with canoes laden with banana sprouts. With machetes they dig little pits amid charred stumps and trunks and branches, and in each hole they set a sprout. Then they go away to wait, and rest; and the sun shines warmly down into that clearing, breezes sift a gray veil of ashes over the wilted suckers that look like black and ragged stakes; and at last come showers which wash them clean.
Those stakes are made up of sheathes of leaves tightly rolled one around another, the inner ones narrow, cream-colored and tender; those nearer the outer ones wider and yet wider, until the outer one is reached. The outer one covers nearly or quite three-fourths of the stem. When the warm rains fall, the tender leaves unroll and spread to their widest, and the sun dries and the wind whips them until soon they are split into narrow ribbons; and a few weeks after that planting a sea of giant leaves waves and whispers in the breeze—a roof of bright and tender green covering the moist, black ground.
Not before the plant has grown to a height of ten to twenty, and in some places to thirty feet, does the flower-stem begin pushing its way up from the base through the middle of the stalk. In a short time it sends out at the top one or more leaves, smaller than their older fellows, as a signal that flower and fruit will quickly follow. Soon every supporting column of those graceful arches ends in a cone of red that deepens into purple and swells until its outer petals are crowded off by the fatness of the fruit they hide, that these may have air and light. Under those petals the baby bananas are packed close, like fingers tightly gripping the parent stem. These closed ranks, each separate hand or whorl reaching half way around the stalk, grow so quickly that in six or eight weeks the bunch weighs fifty pounds or more.
To most people of northern climes bananas are merely—bananas. For such folk know as little of the many varieties of bananas as they know of the many and varied uses of that fruit. Perchance that is why they fry the common yellow guineo which comes by millions of bunches each year to the United States, and then wonder that folk who have dwelt in the tropics, and who extol fried bananas, show nevertheless that they cannot like the mushy, cloying mess set before them here. He who grows bananas, and she who cooks them for him, select for frying that thick-bodied, hard-fleshed and rather tart fruit which they call plátano, and which is by blundering English-speaking tongues misnamed plantain. And even among the plátanos there is room for choosing, for there are of them several varieties. Best of these is that little one which bears, on the Mosquito Shore whence good bananas come, the Spanish name “miel,” or honey, coupled with the Waika word “silpe,” or little. The name “maiden” plátano also is given to the “little honey,” most fittingly, for it has just enough of piquant tartness to give unfailing relish, yet is tender, plump and mighty comforting withal, upon occasion.
If he is so lucky as to live near a port where steamships stop, the planter may sell his plátanos for a cent or even two cents for each finger or fruit; and as the plants may be set only eight or ten feet apart, and each will mature a bunch of thirty to fifty fingers every nine months, it is clear that he who has an acre of plátanos may have a tidy income of food or of cash. Usually the planter prefers to eat this food, for which reason people in the North have few opportunities for learning the superior virtues of the fruit. The planter is quite right, for the plátano is the one banana fit to be cooked; and is by no means bad to eat raw.
Sometimes a planter may leave a bunch of bananas to ripen on the standing stalk, but that will rarely be, for the fruit so ripened is strong in flavor, dry and too soft to bear transportation; its skin splits, and ants, bees and other insects gather about the exposed flesh. Therefore the women lug home green bunches and hang them in the house to ripen, where everybody who has the right—and that is every visitor, every member of the family and every passing acquaintance—may pluck and eat as the fruit turns yellow and becomes tender. Meanwhile many of the fruits will have been taken from the bunch, peeled and broken into bits, to be boiled with beef or pork, or flesh of the deer, peccary or other game.
Another sub-variety of plátanos bears, in Mosquitia, the name of “butuco,” perhaps from the name of the River Patuca—or maybe the river has taken its name from the banana. The butuco is perhaps rather more tart than the miel silpe, and when fried reminds one of fried greening apples, and when stewed has somewhat of the flavor of stewed peaches. In either way it is most agreeable to the taste. There are other plátanos, also, most of them giants among bananas, many being fifteen or more inches long and some two or three inches in diameter. These are firm in flesh, resist decay much longer than do the common guineos, and will, therefore, much better bear transportation. They should become known to the millions of northern lands, for they would afford a vast supply of food much more convenient and palatable than, and equal in value to, potatoes.
Prof. Wynter Blythe, of London, is an analyst who tells us that the relative values of bananas and sago, corn meal and wheat flour are as follows: