Banana Ice Cream
Cailin Frankland
©
Copyright 2024 by Cailin Frankland
|
Photo courtesy of the author. |
“What
types are there?” Grandad directed the question to nobody in
particular, squinting at the labels taped to the ice cream display
counter. I must have been eleven or twelve at the time—old
enough to know that elderly people sometimes needed help with things,
but still young enough to be profoundly embarrassed to have to do the
helping.
I
sighed and started listing out the flavours: “Okay Grandad,
well there’s strawberry, vanilla, mint chocolate chip, rocky
road, banana…”
“They
have banana? I’ll have that then.”
My
younger sister and I exchanged a look, and she scrunched her little
face up in disgust. Of all the flavours, banana seemed like an odd
choice—almost out of character for a man with less than
adventurous tastes. But who were we to judge? The man wanted his ice
cream, and he would not be denied. My parents paid for our treats,
and soon enough we were strolling down the boardwalk, cones in hand.
“How
is it, Grandad?” I asked after a few minutes.
He
paused for a second before he answered: “It tastes too much
like banana.”
We
couldn’t help ourselves—we burst out laughing. “What
are you talking about? It’s banana ice cream—of course it
tastes like banana, Dad.” My dad replied.
“The
sign said they made it with real fruit and everything!” I added
unhelpfully.
Grandad
struggled to explain himself. “It tastes like banana, not
proper banana flavour. I like proper banana flavour.”
My
dad chuckled, “What, you’re upset it’s not the
artificial stuff? I can eat it if you don’t want it.”
“No,
I’ll have it. It’s not bad,” Grandad insisted,
marching ahead obstinately. Soon enough, the whole cone was gone.
I
didn’t think much of this incident at the time—I can’t
remember exactly what year it was, or which beach we were visiting. I
just pocketed it away as a funny story about an eccentric man—the
only person I’ve ever known to prefer manufactured banana
flavour over actual fruit. Just another silly Grandad story.
Or
so I thought, until recently.
There’s
nothing I love more than an Internet rabbit hole. It usually starts
with a mundane google search, but my curiosity often draws me to seek
more and more information about niche subjects loosely connected to
my initial inquiry until I find myself looking up the dimensions of
the Titanic (883 feet long and 92 feet wide) or scrolling through
artistic renderings of obscure Greek goddesses (I am partial to Até,
the goddess of mischief). It was on one of these digital
deep-dives—which ostensibly began as a pandemic-induced hunt
for a simple banana bread recipe—that I discovered that
Grandad’s taste for banana might not be so silly after all.
England
has been importing bananas since the 17th
century—by the advent of World War II, they were arguably the
most popular fruit in the country. So when the British Minister of
Food ordered a complete ban on new shipments of the fruit in 1940 to
support the war effort, it came as a tremendous blow to the British
people—many even resorted to cooking with mock bananas made
from parsnips to satisfy their cravings. Bananas didn’t return
to the British Isles until December of 1946, over a year after the
Allies’ victory.
Grandad
was born in 1943, right in the middle of the banana embargo—he
was probably three or four years old before he ever tried one. It may
have seemed trivial to me as a pre-teen by the beach, but now my
grandfather’s enthusiasm for the fruit made perfect sense: to
many children of his generation, bananas were quite literally their
first taste of peace. No wonder he’d been coveting them ever
since.
But
something still wasn’t adding up. If Grandad loved bananas so
much, wouldn’t he appreciate the authenticity of an ice cream
made from the actual fruit over a manufactured alternative? Wouldn’t
he, of all people, eschew artificial attempts at banana flavour that
quite frankly taste nothing like The Real Thing?
Well,
it turns out The Real Thing is also a generational construct.
The
bananas we typically find in supermarkets today in North America,
Western Europe, and many other parts of the world are Cavendish
bananas—first developed in 1835 and known for their mild
flavour, they now represent 99 percent of all exported bananas
globally. But this wasn’t always the case. Back when my
grandfather was a child, it was the sweeter and firmer Gros Michel
banana that reigned supreme in international markets—the
Cavendish only came into favour in the 1950s, when an outbreak of
Panama disease destroyed the world’s Gros Michel supply and
consequently reshaped our idea of what “proper banana flavour”
even is. Interestingly, most artificial banana flavour manufacturers
still base their concoctions on the Gros Michel’s flavour
profile to this day. No wonder Grandad preferred it—to him,
artificial syrups tasted more like the bananas he had cherished in
the late 1940s than any actual fruit we could buy him today.
Grandad
never spoke of his childhood much—almost everything I know
about him I learned from other relatives, gleaned from my
grandmother’s vague references to decades gone by or exchanged
like gossip among my cousins. We often asked him questions—tried
to get him to tell us stories of when he was young, how he met
Granny—but he had a habit of changing the subject, redirecting
the conversation back to the present and the attention to someone
else. I knew him as a man of few words, and a creature of habit: he
liked his steaks and his Sky News and his budget holidays; he ordered
chicken madras from his favourite Indian take-away and gammon from
his local pub. He never had an iPhone and called my grandmother
“love”. And he loved banana ice cream.
Grandad
passed away from liver cancer in March of 2023, just six months shy
of his 80th
birthday. He was at the pub when it happened, naturally. I wrote a
poem and read it aloud at his funeral about a month later—I
spoke of the holidays we took together and the car he used to drive,
of Christmas mornings and garden parties and all the other little
memories he left behind. My dad wrote his love of banana ice cream
into the eulogy.
It’s
so easy to forget that our elders were children once, and that the
stories of their lives and ours overlap ever so briefly. But when I
come downstairs each morning and peel a banana for breakfast, I get
to remember Grandad, and imagine a chapter of his story that I never
got to see—in my mind, he is running along some English
boardwalk on growing legs and feet, chasing down his very first scoop
of banana ice cream.
Cailín
Frankland (she/they) is a British-American writer and public health
professional based in Baltimore, Maryland. She currently works for
One River Grants, a small grant-writing business representing safety
net healthcare providers and nonprofit organisations, and holds a
Master of Science in Neuropsychiatric Epidemiology from Harvard
University and a Bachelor of Science in Neuroscience from Brown
University. She lives with her spouse, two old lady cats, and a
70-pound pitbull affectionately known as Baby.
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