Banana Bread

Banana bread is an American quick bread: a dense, moist loaf leavened with baking soda rather than yeast, built on mashed overripe bananas, sugar, egg, butter or oil and flour, baked in a rectangular tin and eaten in slices at breakfast or with coffee. It belongs to the family of soda-leavened loaves that appeared once chemical leaveners became cheap in the nineteenth century, and the banana version became a household standard in the 1930s, when the fruit was plentiful, the Depression made throwing away black bananas unthinkable, and baking-powder companies printed the recipe in their booklets. It is a bread in name only; by sugar and fat content it is a cake, and it is the thing most people bake first. Walnuts or pecans and chocolate chips are the standard additions, and café versions add a crumb topping, a cream-cheese swirl or a sliced banana laid along the top.