People sometimes wonder out loud why artificial banana flavoring doesn't taste like the bananas you eat fresh. It's because banana flavoring was developed in the mid-19th century, even before Americans knew what real bananas tasted like. That doesn't mean that the flavoring was wrong; in fact it was very close to the taste of real bananas. But those bananas were the Gros Michel variety. That's the banana that Americans went crazy over when they began to be imported on a large scale. Gros Michel was the type of banana you found in stores up until the mid-1950s. Then it was replaced by the Cavendish variety, which is what we have in every grocery store now. And it tastes different.
Brandon Summers-Miller wanted to taste a Gros Michel banana to see how different that variety is from the ubiquitous Cavendish strain. It was difficult to find any, but he managed to have some shipped to him. Then he tested Cavendish and Gros Michel bananas in old recipes that were designed with the Gros Michel banana in mind, namely bananas Foster and banana pudding. Note for the banana pudding, he made sure to use vanilla pudding instead of artificially-flavored banana pudding for the comparison. The taste tests revealed what we have lost. Read about that comparison, and the history of banana varieties at Epicurious. And if you want to know what a Michel Gros banana tastes like, try a piece of artificially-flavored banana candy. Or go to a farmer's market in Southeast Asia. -via Metafilter
(Image credit: Juan Emilio Prades Bel)