Be Bold with Bananas by Crescent Books (1972)
One of my passion for the last couple of years is to look for a cute vintage cookbooks with nice drawings and some good, but forgotten recipes. So, when I stumbled on the old cookbook called Be Bold with Bananas, I thought to myself that it might have some nice, healthy or interesting recipe – but, boy was I wrong… This is the weirdest cookbook I ever saw, and if you eat bananas on a daily basis, you should definitely avoid even looking inside of it, or you will have to force yourself to go through these recipes with the craziest combination of ingredients and maybe feel nausea from time to time – and that’s just from reading it, I can’t imagine what it would happen if you would actually try to make some of these “specialties”, you know – just for fun.
For instance, you could try the Banana Mould recipe, where green peas and bananas are mixed together and then covered with gelatin. And I understand that in some part of the world the banana is a staple ingredient used in many combinations, but I dare the bravest cooks to try recipes named Banana Meatloaf and Banana Fish Salad – man!
And, as if this was not enough, this crazy vintage cookbook has a lot of photos, and the food photography in this vintage cookbook is just wrong.
The funniest recipe from this cookbook is the Banana Candle Dessert, where author uses banana stacked in the pineapple ring, dripped with mayonnaise (?!) with additional cherry on the top. The author wrote, that this composition should resemble the burning candle, but instead, it should be marked as “Not a dessert for under 18“, since it clearly allude the phallus in a state of arousal ;)
The only occasion where this dessert could pass as appropriate, is at some crazy bachelor party, but I would definitely change mayonnaise with something that can be eaten with banana, like vanilla pudding, etc.
Enjoy if you dare…
the author had a really wild imagination!!!! ;)
wild imagination and a looot of bananas ;)