Bananas would seem to grow on trees, but the plant itself is a grass. What injustice, I thought when first encountering the fact --what lack of recognition of the banana's majesty. But botany being the more organized and sensible science against the hodgepodge of my perception, it wins. Even if I'm not entirely sure how one can obtain a leaf, say in which to wrap a tamale, of grass. Wait, was the banana classified after the style of Walt Whitman?! I suspect a bananaliterary conspiracy.
At any rate, to come somewhat more elongatedly to the point: what dreams may come must certainly include bananas. I first saw a banana-grass in Buenos Aires, all wrapped up in wool and leather in the cold. It didn't exactly exude any sort of belonging there; wasn't its place. But it instantly made me feel far away from what I knew. The heady, slightly sour scent of its big glossy leaves that bobbed in the gentlest breeze, the cluster of fruit, recalling something of the honeycomb in its geometry; and the long fuschia-pink protrusion of its flower, a spectacular sunset-hued dancer dangling from the end of an umbilical rope.
It's unlike anything else, except of course its many cousins and odd sisters in law. Plantains, guineos, tiny date bananas smaller than a thumb and thick maduros with golden succulent skin, red and green and yellow and brown. What is the rasta rainbow if not the refraction of banananean palette? The family treegrass holds one general genetic rule as to taste: mild sweetness, with a soft wall of well...nothing behind it, a flavor on an invisible pedestal. While this rule is never broken, it attracts tiny notes to attach to each varietal, sometimes a woody flatness, or the piquancy of youth, perhaps an infinitesimal slash of spice.
In its idiosyncracies the banana family sustains as few fruits can, especially in its indigenous band around the equator. "When it came time to make dinner," I heard the story told, "and my Grandmother, with tears in her eyes, saw that not even a grain of rice was about the house, she would call to me and my little cousin, and tell us to fetch a few guineos from the plant one-left from the northwest corner of the backyard."
There's patio bananas and bananas of the highway, plants tucked into neighborhood parks and peeking out from the chaos of corrugated steel that make up the dark barrios. Any given glance at sus alrededores probably has a bananish secret, if not a full-blown plantaination.
I've heard tell, too, of the back-breaking, blood-pressure-piquing work of a bananero, that being he who labors in a bananal, which'd be the plantation. The climax is at harvest time, as climaxes ever are: fruits are picked (by which we mean to say hacked off the plant with a large machete) and carried until the arrival of the great banana sky-tram, a basket carried through rows of bananagrass on a horizontal pulley cord. At which point they're chucked in, hopefully --the operation requires a delicate finesse of dead-tired arms and fast-twitch timing.
What do the bananal's bananeros eat?
Not this. Tiramebananomisu came about as the conclusion of...nothing too particular. It's neither especially complicated, like the banana itself. You make a normal savoyardi-based tiramisu with zabiglione and all, but you layer in well-ripe beach bananas. Also a coupla layers of dried bananas soaked in dark rum for a day or so and then minced. Also said rum.
Bananapetit, and let me leave you with the thought: what other thing's bruised flesh can taste so sweet?