We have no bananas today, but we have something very, very similar: something that brings us a very decidedly Latin American addition to our menus. But first, a few words about the banana “family”.

The banana family is a group of plant species which are tropical in origin, most of these species native to central Africa, southern Asia, and Indonesia. Bananas that you buy in the market belong to this plant family, of course, and they are grown widely in the New World tropics now, well outside of their native range. Banana plants commonly attain tree size, but they are not at all woody. The plants, rather, are classified as gigantic herbs, and their “trunks” are actually the bases of sheathing leaves. After producing a bunch of bananas, each trunk dies and gets cut back to the ground; the rhizome below will produce another one.

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John Nelson is the retired curator of the A.C. Moore Herbarium at the University of South Carolina. As a public service, the Herbarium offers free plant identifications. For more information, visit www.herbarium.org or email johnbnelson@sc.rr.com.

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