Both the Moslems and Romans of later times believed that the plantain or cooking banana was the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden. Due to their
erotic appearance, all of the many species of bananas were likely considered love foods long before this and they certainly have been ever since. Arabian slang and a score more languages make the fruit a synonym for the male organ, as would be expected, and "I had a banana with Lady Diana" was English slang for intercourse from the beginning of the century up until about 1930.
Romance
"Where the banana grows man is sensual and cruel," Ralph Waldo Emerson tells us in Society and Solitude, but then Emerson had more than a little of the Puritan in his transcendental soul. One of mankind's earliest cultivated fruits, Indian legend has it that the banana was the favorite of sages, who sat under the leaves of the gigantic herb and ate its fruithence its scientific name, Musa sapietum, "fruit of the wise men." Of great nutritional value to millions, the fruit is even today included in Indian offerings to their fertility gods. It has figured as a symbol in much
erotic primitive poetry, as witness the following New Ireland love chant:
Eat the banana; I look at him; I give him the banana. As the banana is with me now, So will the man be with me.
There are numerous erotic recipes for Musa paradisia, "the fruit of paradise," as the Romans called the banana. A fabled Chinese dessert is one of the best. Simply fry the bananas and keep them warm. Then cook a syrup of sugar and water until it spins a thin thread, adding sesame seeds at this point. Pour the syrup over the bananas at the table, immediately dipping them in crushed ice so that the hot fruit has a hard crunchy covering.