Banana and Golden Syrup Loaf

Bananas were one of the fruits carefully and competitively cultivated in early greenhouses by the gentry in the mid eighteenth century – along with pineapples, guavas, mangoes and so on. It was only when steamships could speed the highly perishable fruit to its destination that people in general began to know them. Our first shipments of bananas – from the Canaries – docked in 1882. One of the banana shipping companies was started by a Mr Fyffe, and the name is familiar to