18
MY
ROUSES
EVERYDAY
JULY | AUGUST 2014
T
he most popular item in our produce department is bananas,
which is only natural since there are more bananas sold in
the United States than any other fruit.
We sell over 7.2 million pounds of bananas every year.
—Joe – Rouses Produce Director
I would hazard a guess that the most popular dessert in Alabama is
banana pudding. We ate our way through every BBQ joint around
Mobile Bay while we were remodeling our stores, and we were
offered banana pudding at the end of each meal. Banana pudding
is a sweet vanilla or banana custard (or pudding) topped with sliced
bananas and vanilla wafers, and it’s too good to pass up.
Alabama’s love affair with bananas started in the early 1900s when
bananas first arrived in the United States on ships traveling fromCentral
and South America to ports in Mobile and New Orleans.
We still get most of our bananas from Central America. —Joe
The ships’ crews would eat bananas that ripened during their
voyage; the rest would be sold at port and shipped by railroad.
Before mechanical equipment bananas were unloaded by hand. The
dockworkers who unloaded them were paid by the number of stems
they carried. A stem holds around 100 bunches of bananas (it’s the
fruit of an entire tree) and each bunch holds perhaps nine “hands”;
each hand holds about fifteen “fingers” (single bananas).
That’s a @#$% ton of bananas. —Donny Rouse
The stems could weigh up to 100 pounds, and sometimes included
unwanted
passengers
like tarantulas
and snakes.
Bananas that were
still green were loaded
onto railroad carts cooled
by open air and straw and shipped
inland. Bananas that were turning ripe (“turnings”) were sold to
local stores and peddlers. Bananas that were already ripe were
dumped.
Eventually “Sam the Banana Man,” a Russian emigrant named
Samuel Zemurray figured out a faster way to deliver bananas from
Mobile to inland cities, which created demand for the ripe bananas.
Sam made a fortune and went on to revolutionize the banana
industry in Mobile, New Orleans, and Central and South America.
(The Banana Man led a very colorful life. To learn more about him,
and the United Fruit Company, read
The Fish that Ate the Whale
by Rich Cohen, available at local bookstores and online.)
We sell a lot of banana pudding, especially in Alabama andMississippi.
It’s the perfect dessert after barbecue. No one knows exactly who came
up with the first recipe for banana pudding, but in 1901,Nabisco began
marketing vanilla wafers, around the same time bananas were coming
into ports in Mobile and New Orleans. Shortly after, a printed recipe
for banana pudding appeared on their packages.
Alabama
BANANA PUDDING
by
Ali Rouse Royster
the
Gulf Coast
issue
