February 24, 2012
Peeling Open the 1947 Chiquita Banana Cookbook
Chiquita Banana's Recipe Book, 1947/Photo courtesy of Christina Ceisel
In 1947, the United Fruit Company released the Chiquita Banana’s Recipe Book. The book was a strategic attempt to market the still “exotic” banana and make it palatable for the entire American family. How did they do it? Well, the banana would appeal to everyone (“Doctors recommend fully ripe mashed bananas for infant feeding”; “Old folks find bananas a pleasant, satisfying treat because they are a bland food, easy to chew, easy to digest, and low in fat content”). The book’s recipes include ham banana rolls with cheese sauce, salmon salad tropical, broiled bananas with curry sauce, and an obligatory Jell-O mold with bananas.
In a recent paper, “The Banana in the Tutti-Frutti Hat,” Christina Ceisel, a PhD candidate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, writes, “While these recipes have fallen to the wayside, the United Fruit Company succeeded in making the banana as commonplace as peanut butter and jelly.”
The cookbook also showcases Miss Chiquita (originally drawn in 1944 by Dik Browne, who’s probably better remembered as the creator of the comic series “Hagar the Horrible”). Her character invokes Latin American women such as Carmen Miranda, and this, Ceisel argues, symbolically links the banana to a prevalent stereotype of Latin America and the Caribbean as “tropicalized“—marked by bright colors, rhythmic music, and brown or olive skin. Miss Chiquita’s ruffled skirt and fruit basket hat have become icons of Caribbean ethnicity.
Of course, Chiquita’s spokeswoman also acts as a kind of distraction—weaving a trope of the tropics as lazy and primitive, Ceisel argues. Miss Chiquita is a piece of the symbolic groundwork for the enduring involvement of the United States government and multinational corporations in Latin America. Ceisel again:
The image of Miss Chiquita as a tropicalized Latina does the cultural work of providing Americans with an affordable, exotic fruit year-round, while masking the labor of the very real Latin Americans who provide these foodstuffs. Thus, while Miss Chiquita’s 1947 recipes sought to include the banana in the everyday vernacular of the American household, today they also function as a none too subtle reminder of the history of cultural representation and US hegemony and intervention in Latin America.
It’s a reminder that cookbooks are not merely books filled with recipes for foods—even uncommon recipes for everyday fruits—they’re also conduits for potent political ideas.
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I know some people think Chiquita is not a favorable symbol of Latin American women, but this article reminded me of how I played Chiquita Banana during a school play in middle school. As they sang the song, I danced with a bowl of fruit on my head and a beautiful, ruffled skirt. It was a proud moment for me. At 34 years old now, and an avid foodie and cook, this talent show moment is very important to me. Thanks for reminding me of this wonderful memory.
I have a good collection of these books that I salvaged from my husband’s grandmother’s garage. She was a farm girl and only completed the 8th grade. These books published by the food companies were basically her home economics books, and I find their recipes to be an homage to Americana, and their ideas about homekeeping and kitchen work rather hilarious! I loved the Chicquita Banana lady….
Virginia Jenkins covered this territory in a book she wrote for YOU, the Smithsonian Press, in 2000 — Bananas: An American History. Jenkins also wrote the entry on bananas for the Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America. The politics of banana growing have also been covered extensively in Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World, by Dan Koeppel (NYC: Hudson St. Press, 2008). Koeppel talks about the real death rate from political revolutions, not just images. Ceisel makes it sound as if Chiquita started publishing cookbooks and pamphlets in 1947 to try to get Americans to eat bananas at times other than breakfast, when the cooking pamphlets go back at least 40 years.
Thanks to everyone for sharing their memories and thoughts about Miss Chiquita and the United Fruit Company during this era. It is so interesting to hear about how widespread an icon Miss Chiquita truly is! I also want to thank Linda for her book recommendations–my presentation was, in fact, focused on the image and its cultural work. I would be interested to talk to you about any ideas you have in placing this in a larger historical context, it seems to be a topic that has generated quite a bit of excitement.
Sometimes a cookbook is just a cookbook, and not a representative of so-called U.S. hegemony. Methinks Ceisel overextends herself in order to align herself with the political views of her doctoral committee.