Blame The Banana Industry For This Bizarre Vintage Meatloaf Recipe

While it's still common for food companies to print recipes on product labels, countless American brands used to release promotional cookbooks starring their trademark items. Even bananas got their own recipe collections meant to drive up sales. Starting as early as the 1930s, a rather novel dish began appearing in various booklets: banana meatloaf.

The idea of tropical fruit improving a classic meatloaf recipe sounds like it would only be born out of a desperate need to sell bananas. Many of the first recipes are indeed backed by the banana industry, including the United Fruit Company, which eventually became Chiquita Brands International. Its 1947 "Chiquita Banana's Recipe Book" sports dishes like cheesy ham and banana rolls and broiled bananas with curry sauce, and in 1941, its subsidiary the Fruit Dispatch Company published "Bananas ... How To Serve Them." This book's meatloaf recipe combines ground beef with onion, seasonings, breadcrumbs, and mashed bananas. It also suggests baking peeled bananas briefly with the meatloaf to serve alongside.

One brave cook on YouTube tried this recipe and described the meatloaf as salty and not very flavorful. They also felt that the texture was too wet. A user on Reddit who also made the dish said the bananas' sweetness came through, but it's still not super tasty. This meatloaf sounds like one of those retro dishes we're glad aren't popular anymore. However, if your curiosity has been piqued, you can have a gander at different versions of the recipe.

The United Fruit Company's 1941 banana meatloaf recipe is actually not its first. In 1940, it published "A Study of the Banana," a booklet that both shared recipes and provided general info about the fruit, including nutritional benefits. Its meatloaf recipe is similar to the 1941 version, but instructs to baste the loaf (and the peeled bananas on the side) with juices from the meat. It also suggests an optional topping of bacon.

An even earlier banana meatloaf recipe was published in 1935 in the Winnipeg Free Press newspaper. It tells readers to combine ground beef, pork, and veal with celery, cracker crumbs, seasonings, and eggs, then bake the mixture with a filling of banana chunks and apple sauce plus a topping of bacon strips. Mixing in apples is actually a great easy way to elevate meatloaf, but the jury's out on how much value the bananas add.

While banana meatloaf has a clear connection to marketing campaigns, it wasn't just a flash in the loaf pan. The dish was still in circulation as late as 1960, with two variants appearing in the cookbook "365 Ways to Cook Hamburger." One recipe is rather simple — just meat, mashed banana, peppers, onions, paprika, and breadcrumbs — while the other sports both bacon and sliced bananas on top. Bananas may not be one of those unexpected ingredients that need to be in your meatloaf, but they sure made for an interesting moment in food history.