Laurel’s Banana Bread: 52 Ancestors 2025 Prompt “Family Recipe”

Crumbling Recipe Card is a Sweet Reminder

Laurel Emily Jandy: 1926-2016 (Mother)

 

One of our favorite family recipes is a banana bread recipe Bruce’s mom Laurel gave me. Not only is it a great and easy recipe, but the recipe card is written in Laurel’s hand. Just seeing that handwriting brings back fond memories.

The recipe card has seen hard use in the thirty-five years I’ve had it. There are grease stains, scorch marks, and  fingerprints that have left brown marks. Also, paper moths or silverfish have been nibbling on the note card. It is almost unreadable in its current form. Luckily, I transcribed it long ago. I keep the old, beaten-up card for sentimental reasons. The transcription can be found further below.

The recipe is titled “Hawaiian Banana Bread”. There is nothing particularly Hawaiian about the recipe—no pineapple or coconut, for example. It has the traditional banana bread ingredients of flour, sugar, baking soda, bananas, eggs and shortening, but the instructions are a little different than a typical banana bread recipe.  First, the liquid ingredients—eggs, butter or margarine, and ripe or over-ripe bananas—are to be turned into an emulsion in a blender. This makes the batter very smooth. And second, the batter is a little thinner and is poured into an 8x8 inch cake pan for baking instead of a bread pan. The end result is a super-moist, cake-like banana bread.

I seem to remember that Laurel called it Hawaiian Banana Bread because she got the recipe from someone in Hawaii while she and John were visiting there around 1990. But I may not be recalling that correctly.

Transcription of Laurel's recipe card

I occasionally add chopped nuts, or mini chocolate chips to the batter. This recipe is our favorite way to use up over-ripe bananas. It’s a sweet treat—both in flavor and as a reminder of a sweet lady.