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Fruit
3 Fruits, 3 Origins, 3 Popular Imports
The history of the banana, the orange and the pineapple.
The Banana
Bananas are known as a fruit, but technically they are a very large berry.
Bananas are native to Southeast Asia, mainly in India. Gradually, bananas began to spread around the tropics where they flourished under cultivation. They were brought west by Arab conquerors in 327 BC and moved from Asia Minor to Africa in the sixteenth century. The Portuguese finally carried bananas to the New World and the Caribbean when they conquered territory there.
Before the 1870s, most of the land that bananas were grown on in the Caribbean had been previously used to grow sugar as part of the slave trade. The cultivation of bananas spread throughout the Caribbean and became an important foodstuff for feeding slaves that remained on sugar cane plantations.
Banana plantation in Jamaica, early 20th century
The banana required very little labour to grow, and it produced fruit all-year round and was loaded with calories, thus making it a cheap, high-energy food for those who cultivated and harvested sugar cane. Banana trees also provided necessary shade to other crops that were imported into Britain, such as coffee and cacao. However, at this time, explorers were unable to bring bananas home with them as they could not survive the slow journey across the ocean.
Read here about the improvements made to maritime technology so that fresh fruit could be successfully transported to Britain!
The mass production of bananas started in 1834, but their consumption wouldn’t become popularised until the late nineteenth century when they became much cheaper.
In 1835, William Cavendish, the Sixth Duke of Devonshire received banana plants as a gift from the Earl of Shrewsbury. Joseph Paxton, the Duke’s gardener, successfully cultivated these bananas in Chatsworth's glass-forcing houses, and birthed the soft, sweet yellow-skinned banana we know of today.
Paxton named this ‘the Cavendish banana’ (as seen opposite) and he served it as part of the dessert to special guests who dined at Chatsworth during the Victorian era – what a treat!
The Cavendish banana was not cultivated on a commercial scale at Chatsworth, but plants were sent to various British controlled areas during the 1850s to be cultivated on a larger scale – where because of shipping problems, they were enjoyed locally.
It was not until 1884 that the first bananas were shipped from the Canary Islands to Britain. These bananas were likely picked up by steamships on the final leg of their journey when they stopped at the islands to refuel. Like this, bananas made the journey back to England and soon became popular in steamship ports in Liverpool and neighbouring cities! Bananas soon became a viable commercial crop that could be shipped to Britain successfully for people to enjoy - just like these three are below!
Photograph of Victorians eating bananas c.1890
Did you know:
The first recorded sale of bananas in England was actually in 1633! Although it likely resembled more a pile of black mush than the shiny yellow banana we can buy today!
The Orange
Orange trees first bloomed in Southeast China around 2,500 BC.
Today, oranges have become so ubiquitous it’s easy to forget how exotic their origins are but they have a great history. Early oranges were very different to the oranges we know and love today, they were small, sour and nearly inedible! It was only with genetic engineering in ancient China where the plant was produced by mixing an early mandarin plant with a pomelo - that oranges were made to be sweet and edible.
Soon after this, the engineered fruit gradually spread across the world.
The Romans imported oranges but after the fall of Rome, the bright fruit was forgotten in Western Europe… The first record of the orange in Europe appeared around the 1300s when it was referred to as an orenge – a term borrowed from the Arabic, naranj. The Arabs introduced oranges to Spain in the eighth century when they conquered them, then introduced them to Italy.
In the sixteenth century, Christopher Columbus took oranges to the Americas.
Meanwhile, Spaniards shipped the oranges out from Europe to South America, Mexico and the US West Coast.
In Victorian Britain, because of issues with transportation and the general scarcity of oranges outside of Asia, oranges were known as ‘winter delicacies’ and were brought out by those who could afford them as a dessert.
The Pineapple
Pineapples originate from South America. The Latin name for the fruit is ‘ananas comosus’, which originally comes from Guarani, meaning ‘fragrant and excellent fruit.’
Pineapples were first introduced to Europe by the explorer, Christopher Columbus in 1493. From the moment they were introduced to Britain in the fifteenth century, it became immediately clear they could not be cultivated in the British climate.
Yet that didn't stop people trying and failing to grow the fruit for nearly two hundred years in Britain.
However, both the difficulties of shipping pineapples across the Atlantic and being unable to grow them on home soil, only created a greater sense of curiosity towards the exotic fruit and heightened its position as a luxury item that only royalty such as King Charles II or nobility could afford.
At the height of their popularity, a single pineapple would sell for as much as £7,000 in today’s money!
Two centuries after first attempting to cultivate a pineapple on home soil, Pieter de la Court, a Dutch businessman, developed greenhouse horticulture, or ‘hot houses’ around the seventeenth century. Pineapple plants were then distributed to English gardens in 1719.
However, even building a greenhouse or ‘pinery’ became a symbol of wealth as the cost building the greenhouse, buying the equipment and the labour required to grow pineapples in a temperate climate was exceptionally expensive!
Producing a pineapple on British estates even became the subject of rivalry between wealthy aristocrats such as John Murry, 4th Earl of Dunmore who were determined to grow their own – well, they told their staff to. The Dunmore estate soon constructed a pinery decorated by a huge stone dome 14 metres tall in the shape of the fruit.
The Dunmore Pineapple
By the nineteenth century, pineapples became slightly cheaper as they began to be grown commercially, yet, they were still astronomically expensive.
So, to get around these costs, the rising middle-classes who sought to emulate the dinner parties of the elite would often 'rent a pineapple' to display for an evening, then send it back for the next customer to hire, instead of buying one.
As pineapples were such a distinctive sign of wealth, being able to produce such an exotic fruit for a dinner party demonstrated excellent hospitality and would be sure to be the talking point of the party. Once the price of pineapples began to fall – although they were still expensive – dinner guests were also served them.
You may have gained the impression so far that the appearance of a pineapple was limited to the kitchen or dining room, but did you know that the fruit also made a more permanent mark on Georgian and Victorian society, especially in London, in terms of architecture?
That’s right, the pineapple shape was incorporated into sculpture and civil architecture across the capital. As seen above, St Paul’s Cathedral features a giant gold pineapple that sits above the archway.
Pineapples also started to find a way onto Georgian and Victorian gates and railings around the elites houses in London as welcome signs. Great Russell Street for example is surrounded by gold-painted pineapples - have a look below!
Eventually, in the last few years of the nineteenth century, the pineapple and its celebrity faze fizzled. This was when improvements to shipping were made and pineapples became readily accessible in Britain, meaning this once luxurious, rare item that few could dream of seeing became more common. This is especially true when canned pineapple became widely available and became the most common way of eating it in the early twentieth century.