You have to start with overripe bananas. Really overripe—not yellow with a couple of streaks but two thin-skinned ones that can hardly contain their own soft flesh. You should be able to smell banana from across your kitchen.
Mash your peeled bananas with a fork, as your mother did, as her mother did. The recipe comes from a collection of recipes gathered by church ladies in Overland Park, Kansas, shortly after World War II. Your grandmother, who lived in rural North Dakota, had a neighbor whose daughter contributed a recipe to the collection—not the banana bread recipe, but still. The fact that your mother would move to Kansas as a young woman is just a funny coincidence, unrelated to banana bread.
The church-lady cookbook lies open in a dramatic swoop of flour on your kitchen counter, barely held together by a red spiral binder of aging propylene, an ancestor of plastic. The pages are five by eight inches, crackling and yellowed, foxed on the corners and anointed with the smudges and drips of dishes prepared over the course of nearly seventy years.
It is one of two cookbooks your grandmother gifted to your mother in 1954 when your mother left her parents’ little wooden house in Rolette, North Dakota, to go to nursing school in the big city of Grand Forks. Each of these recipe books is like a secret message to your grandmother’s oldest daughter, stained with all the hopes she had been forced to abandon, as well as those she had stubbornly managed to nurture anyway.
Your grandmother tells you she remembers lying in bed as a child, huddled together with her two older sisters against the aching cold of a North Dakota winter and the brutality of their father in the next room, all of them listening to their mother, your great-grandmother, beg him to leave her alone, she can’t stand another birth, the next baby will kill her, please. Please.
Push your fork firmly down through the bananas, crushing out the lush, tropical fragrance, parting the pale flesh, and forcing it through the stainless-steel tines. Use a smallish mixing bowl for this, as you’ll need a larger one in a minute to sift together the dry ingredients. When the bananas are thoroughly mashed and resemble creamed ivory, cut a lemon in half and squeeze the juice from one of the halves over the bananas. This will keep them from turning brown as you prepare the rest of the ingredients.
You might have guessed that the next baby, number thirteen, does, in fact, kill your grandmother’s mother. On the night your great-grandmother will die, your fourteen-year-old grandmother curls in bed with her sisters, their breath ragged, their fists furiously clenching handfuls of thin blanket as they listen to their mother beg their father to hitch up the wagon and take her to town so she can have this baby in the hospital, something isn’t right. Please.
Set the bowl of mashed banana aside for the moment, although you may first sneak a small taste. Its flavor will include the unctuous, honeyed sweetness of the overripe bananas cut by the bright citrus of the lemon juice. Find a larger mixing bowl and sift into it two cups of flour, one teaspoon of baking soda, a quarter teaspoon of salt, and a half teaspoon of cinnamon. You don’t actually need to sift the flour—modern flour is generally free of bits of husk and weevils and is more finely milled than flour from the first half of the twentieth century—but you choose to sift it anyway because your mother and your grandmother always sifted theirs. Also, although the recipe calls for a half teaspoon of cinnamon, you add a full teaspoon, along with a generous pinch of nutmeg and either allspice or cardamom, as both your mother and grandmother loved deeply spiced banana bread.
Instead of hitching up the wagon, still a common mode of transportation in rural North Dakota in the 1920s, your grandmother’s father rouses her and her two sisters and tells them to help their mother deliver the baby that is killing her. When the girls pull their new brother from between their mother’s blood-slicked thighs, he is not only the thirteenth child, he weighs a brutal thirteen pounds, and will have thirteen letters in his name. Your grandmother will adore him, help raise him, and privately refer to him as “unlucky number thirteen,” although the rest of his life will be relatively long and free of bad fortune beyond the genuine unluckiness of causing his mother to die. His mother, who will never get out of bed again despite the frantic ministrations of her daughters, will succumb to “childbed fever.” (Or perhaps exhaustion and despair. Your grandmother told you it was sometimes hard to tell the difference.) Your great-grandfather will tell the oldest girls to be sure to get the bloodstains out of the sheets the next time they do laundry. None of them will return to school—they are now needed at home to raise the new baby and care for the other nine children.
Five years later your grandmother will marry a man who supports her vow to have just three children, no more, and in the end they will have three, but the second child, a boy born between your mother and her younger sister, will die at six months. Your grandfather, a carpenter, will build a tiny casket and bury his only son behind their little wooden house. Neither he nor your grandmother will ever speak of this baby.
Your grandmother will make sure her daughters graduate from high school and go to college. This is the secret message carried in the other cookbook.
This other book is the 1954 edition of the Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book, gifted to your mother on the day she leaves for nursing school. Whereas each recipe in the church-lady cookbook is written out by hand, presumably by the woman who contributed it, and its pages feature fanciful, often comic, sometimes racist illustrations, also presumably done by the church ladies, the second cookbook is proudly, even ostentatiously, modern. “Every recipe,” it boasts, is “triple-tested by our Tasting-Test Kitchens staff.” They are presented in a five-ring binder with glossy, professionally lit color photos with a section explaining the latest in scientific theories about nutrition and an emphasis on “techniques for fast, efficient cooking” for the busy modern woman. The church-lady cookbook is neither modern nor efficient. It presumes, for example, that you have no electric appliances in your kitchen, so it takes for granted you will mix your banana bread by hand. It instructs you to “build up the fire to a moderate heat”—in other words, heat your oven to about 350 degrees, as your mother will explain to you the first time you bake this recipe together.
Now that you’ve finished sifting your dry ingredients, bang around in your cupboards until you find a third mixing bowl, also largish, in which you’ll cream a half cup of butter. While your grandmother would, at one time, have creamed her butter with a wooden spoon, she enthusiastically embraced electric mixers once they became available. You cream your softened butter with an electric hand mixer, although you have complicated feelings of both nostalgia and relief regarding how fatiguing it would be to cream butter with a wooden spoon.
Your mother’s dormitory at the Deaconess School of Nursing in Grand Forks, North Dakota, has a kitchen on the bottom floor. This is where she first bakes the banana bread recipe at the end of her freshman year, cradling that loaf wrapped in a tea towel on her lap like a small, delicious baby on the bus ride back home for summer break. She and her mother will agree it is an exceptional recipe, and each will make it regularly for the rest of her life.
It is the banana bread your mother will frequently bake for you, your younger brothers, and your father until that day in May 1973 when your father will crush his head against the windshield of his Buick on a two-lane highway outside Salina, Kansas, on a business trip. You are nine years old. Your grandmother will fly to your home in Topeka to comfort your mother as your father lies in a coma from which he is not expected to awaken.
After the butter is light, fluffy, and pale yellow, mix in one cup of sugar. You may also take a small taste of this mixture, a little guiltily because you already know how it will taste—rich, soft, and slightly gritty from the sugar that crunches delicately against your teeth and dissolves across your tongue in a perfect balance of sweetness and fat. Now beat in one-third of the sifted dry ingredients, then add two eggs. When you can no longer see any streaks of yellow yolk, add another third of the dry ingredients. Your batter will be thicker now, slightly stiff, and more golden-hued from the eggs. Somehow the spices, which seemed inert when they rested in the flour, will start to scent your kitchen as they are awakened by the eggs and butter.
This is also the banana bread your grandmother will bake while she is staying at your childhood home after your father’s accident, caring for you and your younger brothers, and tidying up the house. She holds her daughter as tightly as she and her sisters once clenched fistfuls of blanket, your mother trying to muffle sobs so deep it sounds like she’s gagging behind her bedroom door. This banana bread will have just gone into the oven when your grandmother, having put your weeping mother to bed upstairs and believing you to be in the backyard with your brothers, will phone your grandfather in their little wooden house outside Rolette, where he is packing to join her, having cut short his visit to relatives in Montana when the news about your father came.
Next, beat in three tablespoons of sour cream—an unusual ingredient you’ve never encountered in any other banana bread recipe. It will make your loaf both tender and light. As your grandmother and mother explain to you every time you make this recipe with either of them, the acidity of the sour cream helps activate the rising property of the baking soda and adds a delicate, barely detectable tang of dairy swirling underneath the bread’s warm, cinnamon sweetness.
Instead of being in your backyard as the smells of banana and spices creep out of the kitchen, you are lying under the coffee table in your living room, snuggling on the floor with your dachshund, Penny. It is reasonable for your grandmother to assume you are outside, as you are a bit of a tomboy and love climbing the elm trees behind your house, pedaling your bike furiously around your neighborhood, and occasionally tormenting your younger brothers, as is your right and responsibility as an older sister.
You are also known to help your father do yard work—or, at least, you did before his injury. As you help him rake leaves and pull dandelions, he will tell you stories about the place you live. Massive herds of buffalo used to trek through this part of Kansas, right through your own backyard. The brave pioneers could look out of their covered wagons and see them over there, behind where your mother’s daylilies and zinnias now grow. Your father will shove back the blue fishing hat he always wears for yard work and swipe his forearm across his sweaty brow. The hat’s band is not decorated with fishing lures but with comically awkward circus animals you and your brothers twisted out of pipe cleaners, which your father carefully, and with great seriousness, secured to his hatband with safety pins.
Beat in the last third of the dry ingredients to make a stiff batter, but don’t worry; it will loosen up. Yes, of course you should lick the beaters before you put them in the sink. Do it surreptitiously, even though you are an adult in your own kitchen and may lick anything you please, because you can still hear your mother’s warning about the dangers of consuming raw eggs. She was a nurse, after all, with a college degree. Lick the beaters anyway, drop them in the sink, and then gently fold in the mashed bananas. For this you really do need a wooden spoon, as an electric mixer will too vigorously blend the batter, breaking down the small lumps of banana that add a delicate, toothsome chew and bursts of concentrated banana-ness to the baked bread.
As you stand beside the wheelbarrow, helping your father toss in small branches lopped off the honeysuckle that every year threatens to overwhelm the fence around your backyard, he will tell you that the large, cast-iron pot standing on three stumpy legs on your back patio once sat in a campfire on a cattle drive and was filled with stew for a dozen hungry cowboys. Your mother has filled it with potting soil and scarlet geraniums, which you think are very pretty, but you wish you could see the cowboys and their horses. You’re less interested in the cows.
When you spot an oddly shaped stone poking up from the dirt below the shorn honeysuckle, your father will encourage you to dig it out, brush off the soil with your thumb, and examine it closely. It might be a fossil. Or an agate. Or—and this is your most fervent wish—it might be an arrowhead like the one your father found when he was digging out the square hole that would become your sandbox beneath the elm trees. They will die, like most elm trees in the Midwest, from Dutch elm disease two years after your father’s head hits the windshield of his Buick.
He keeps the arrowhead, which you have made him show you many times, in the top drawer of his desk. It is notched and faceted, at once blue and gray, opaque and yet almost translucent at the same time. It is made from chert, he explains, a kind of flint commonly found in the Flint Hills of eastern Kansas. Someone, almost certainly an Indian, whom you now refer to as a Native American, dropped the arrowhead in your backyard a hundred, five hundred, maybe a thousand years ago. Your father doesn’t say so explicitly, but you will soon begin to suspect the lack of Indians and buffalo in your backyard may have something to do with the brave pioneers in their covered wagons.
Your kitchen should be hot now. You remembered to preheat your oven to 350 degrees before you started peeling and mashing the fragrantly overripe bananas, didn’t you? While you wait for your oven to come to temperature, smear a little softened butter evenly on the inside of your loaf pan, then toss in a small handful of flour and tilt the pan, tapping it gently until the interior is dusted white, thus preventing the banana bread from sticking when you remove it from the pan. Scrape the batter—now only moderately stiff, speckled with cinnamon and nutmeg, and slightly lumpy from the bananas—into the loaf pan. Taste the batter one more time now that the bananas are in it. It is mild and creamy, sweet but lacking the dark depths of flavor it will achieve when the spices bloom in the heat of the oven and the butter and sugar begin to caramelize. Put the loaf pan in your oven and bake for one hour. Yes, it seems like a long time, but trust me, the church ladies got this right.
As the banana bread warms and rises, helped along by the baking soda activated by the sour cream, it will expand to fill the pan, and the scents of bananas and spices will fill your childhood kitchen as your grandmother talks to your grandfather on the phone and you lie quietly under the coffee table in your living room, stroking Penny’s long russet flank and velvety hound dog ears. Your grandmother’s voice is a comforting murmur, and you are desperately in need of comfort as you struggle to make sense of new terms like coma and brain damage. You are only half listening to her one-sided conversation, something about her bedroom slippers, something about when your grandfather’s flight will arrive the next day.
Then: “He was drunk. Again. After six months sober. Six months!” For a moment, you can’t understand these words, as though they belonged to an unknown language.Before this moment, you had never heard the word drunk applied to your father. Of course you knew he drank alcohol, but only now will it occur to you how carefully your parents have hidden the extent of his drinking from you and your brothers.
“She said the deputy told her when he got the car door open, empty whiskey bottles rolled right out at his feet.”
You freeze in the middle of petting your dog, your brain as soundless as your grandmother’s pause when she listens to your grandfather respond across the telephone wire from the little wooden house in North Dakota.
“They told her he swerved across into oncoming traffic and hit a semi head-on. Thank God the truck driver is all right, or this could’ve been even more awful.”
Common wisdom says you’ll know your banana bread is done when it is golden brown and a toothpick stabbed into its center comes out clean. The church-lady cookbook gives you no clues, apparently assuming this is, indeed, common wisdom. Your banana bread is more deeply spiced than most. It will be a rich mahogany color, not golden. Take the pan from the oven and let it cool for at least fifteen minutes before you run a butter knife around the edges and tip the pan upside down. The crackled brown dome of the banana bread will be cool, but the bottom and sides will still be warm. Fragrantly spiced steam will rise from the loaf like an offering to the church ladies. To your mother. To your grandmother. Maybe to you.
You won’t recall the rest of your grandmother’s phone conversation, although you must have heard it. You will remember instinctively pressing your hand hard against the bottom of the coffee table above you. As if your hand alone could stop whatever has just fallen, or was about to fall, or will fall for the next hundred years on you and your brothers and your mother, who is sleeping upstairs with her grief-wracked hands clutching her blanket, curled against this agony as you are curled against Penny, as your grandmother once curled against her sisters. As if your nine-year-old hand could hold back your father’s windshield, the approaching Dutch elm disease, the dead buffalo and brave pioneers and murdered Indians in your backyard. With nothing more than the fierce, unyielding love of these women and the scent of overripe bananas to give you strength.
