banana
Cultural layer
Origins of Agriculture at Kuk Swamp in the Highlands of New Guinea (Denham et al., Science, 2003)
Fusarium wilt of banana (ProMusa, promusa.org, accessed 2026-09-10)
Kuk Early Agricultural Site (UNESCO World Heritage List, inscribed 2008)
Musa acuminata Colla (Plants of the World Online, Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, accessed 2026-10-11)
The Oxford Companion to Food (Alan Davidson, 1999)
O. Henry, Cabbages and Kings (1904; Project Gutenberg eBook 2777)
Connie Patterson, Porter, William Sydney (Handbook of Texas Online, Texas State Historical Association)
Foreign Relations of the United States, 1952 to 1954, Guatemala (Office of the Historian, US Department of State, 2003)
Cavendish subgroup (ProMusa, promusa.org, accessed 2026-10-11)
Dakshin: Vegetarian Cuisine from South India (Chandra Padmanabhan, 1992)
Route
PendingThe routes are written. They are not yet mapped.
This entry's cultural layer already names where it came from and how it moved. What it does not yet carry is that movement as structure: ordered waypoints with real coordinates, and a mechanism on each leg. Until it does, the layer stays an empty slot rather than a drawn line, because a map built from prose would be a guess with a projection under it.
1 of 409 entries carries a mapped route · nutmeg is the prototype
- Waypoints
Ordered places, each with its kind
- Coordinates
Real positions, with the gazetteer they came from
- Segments
From, to, and the mechanism that moved it
- Confidence
Documented, attributed or contested
- Summary
What the route argues, in a sentence
Rite
The banana leaf is a plate with obligations. In South Indian practice a meal is served on it in a fixed order, the tip pointing left, and it is folded toward you at the end to signal the meal was good. Banana plants are tied at doorways for weddings and festivals across South and Southeast Asia because the plant fruits and regenerates from its own base, which reads as continuity. The fruit is offered in temples where flowers would wilt.
Dakshin: Vegetarian Cuisine from South India (Chandra Padmanabhan, 1992)
Names · co-equal, marked by how each one travelled
ExtractionPresent chiefly as a colonial extraction or transit node, not a foodway.
No names recorded.
Connections
19 bonds · 14 sourcedSet in bold capitals in The Flavor Bible: very highly recommended by a large number of the chefs it surveyed.
Read from the entry for chocolate / cocoa, in general in the 2008 edition.
Read from the entry for chocolate / cocoa, in general in the 2008 edition, where bananas is set in bold capitals.
Kerala banana chips, fried in coconut oil.
Kolak pisang: banana in coconut milk with palm sugar and pandan, taken to break the fast.
Set in bold in The Flavor Bible: recommended by a number of the chefs it surveyed.
Read from the entry for cinnamon in the 2008 edition.
Set in bold in The Flavor Bible: recommended by a number of the chefs it surveyed.
Read from the entry for bananas in the 2008 edition.
Set in bold in The Flavor Bible: recommended by a number of the chefs it surveyed.
Read from the entry for bananas in the 2008 edition.
Set in bold in The Flavor Bible: recommended by a number of the chefs it surveyed.
Read from the entry for bananas in the 2008 edition, where sticky toffee pudding with bananas, medjool dates, oatmeal ice cream, is set in bold.
Tapioca recheada filled with banana, often alongside coconut or queijo coalho.
Score unexamined
One is an ingredient of the other
Farofa de banana: the banana is diced into it.
Set in plain type in The Flavor Bible: suggested by one or more of the chefs it surveyed.
Read from the entry for bananas in the 2008 edition.
Set in plain type in The Flavor Bible: suggested by one or more of the chefs it surveyed.
Read from the entry for bananas in the 2008 edition.
Score unexamined
Steamed leaf parcels.
Bonds are drawn from culinary literature and origin-tradition references, tiered by source. Origin means a reference from the place. Witness means the pairing is the place's own and the reference documenting it was written from outside.
The score is cultural weight: how central a pairing is in the tradition that documents it. It is not a prediction of how two materials behave in a formulation and not a measure of chemical affinity. The scale is ordinal, because centrality is a judgement rather than a measurement: 1.0 where the pair is the dish, 0.9 a fixed named form, 0.8 a canonical dish, 0.7 recurrent across many dishes, 0.6 common, 0.5 attested, 0.4 marginal or compound-led.
Each score is set against a named dish and carries that dish in its note. Where a score has not been examined it says so, because an inherited figure and a researched one should not look alike.
The dish is named by a reader who knows the cuisine and cites a source appropriate to it. It has not yet been confirmed inside that source page by page, so a note records what supports a score rather than what has been checked in the book.
Studio Culinar-E, "banana", Pantry Archive, Studio Monk-E, 2026. https://studioculinar-e.com/archive/banana
/archive/banana
Bonds are tiered by source, origin-tradition references first.