Pisang

Musa spp. Bananas. Those who have lived in a banana-growing area will know that Europeans and North Americans have scarcely any notion of the variety of size, colour, texture and flavour to be found among bananas, or of the number of different ways there are to cook and eat them. The problem is, of course, that only a few varieties travel well; it is uneconomic to ship fruit that bruises too easily or ripens uncontrollably fast. There are said to be more than 40 different kinds of banana in Indonesia, though many of the best cultivars are members of the same species, M. sapientum. For encyclopaedic information on bananas, see N. W. Simmonds’ Bananas (Longman, 1959). Six of our favourite bananas are described below.