"For years now, the internet has known about the ham and banana hollandaise, which can be traced back to a 1973 recipe from McCall's Great American Recipe Card Collection. There's also a recipe for bananas with pickled herring. These recipes emerged from the evolution of banana marketing, as the fruit had been pushed on American consumers for decades and had become big business for a time. Remember, the banana as an everyday food is relatively new."
"When it came to the questionable recipes of the 1970s that involved ham or cheese sauce, companies were basically out of ideas. Earlier recipes had explained what bananas were to people who had never experienced them before, so these later recipes needed to up the ante a little to keep interest. Corporations and advertising firms were behind most of these mid-century cookbooks."
Vintage American cookbooks included savory banana dishes that mixed bananas with ham, fish, and cheese, such as ham and banana hollandaise and bananas with pickled herring. These recipes arose from aggressive banana marketing and corporate efforts to make the fruit ubiquitous, after consumers gained widespread access to bananas only in the last century. By the 1970s companies and advertising firms pushed unusual banana entrees as interest waned and conventional recipes exhausted creative options. Some home cooks experimented with these dishes to feel modern. The culinary landscape later shifted as cookbooks lost cultural control while technology and global supply expanded ingredient access.
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