banana bread

so i've determined that since we live at a higher altitude, experience a particular climate, or simply for unknown reasons specific to northern brittany, the fruit ripens much faster here than what i'm used to. this resulted in the two of four bananas i bought last week becoming a lovely shade of brown by last friday. sooo... i decided i'd make banana bread.


my banana bread... almost as good as mom's.

when one first thinks to prepare a favorite recipe from home, they are unaware of many factors that come into place, and many things can become "lost in translation." this has been my experience when living abroad, knowing that not only do you often have to translate recipes from french to english (this being a literal translation), but the same goes for tranlating american recipes so that they are somehow "french." i've had this happen on both ends, when i've tried to take a french recipe that i learned while living in paris, and recreate it back in the u.s. for my family. i've found out the hard way that recipes (and their components) don't always translate. this may not make sense to you, so i'll explain.

after you decide on a recipe that is obviously american, you first must find the particular ingredients (or in many cases, a close substitute), sometimes relying on a dictionary for exact translations. this is particularly important when baking, when precision is key to the chemical process, and substitutions are not always the best way to go. take baking powder and baking soda, for example. baking powder in french is levure chimique, not to be confused with levure de boulanger (baker's yeast), especially since the word levure translates to yeast. also, baking soda is known as its scientific name bicarbonate de sodium, and is available in pharmacies.


my levure chimique/sweet 'n low look-alike.

also, when shopping, it is not always apparent where you will find particular ingredients, or what they look like. i've seen peanut butter in a can and boxed milk on a shelf. thankfully, i remembered from a cooking class i took a couple years ago in paris, that baking soda can be found in sachets that resemble oversized sweet 'n low.

after you've finally found all of your needed ingredients, kitchen equipment comes into play. many of you may not know that the french don't care for measuring tools in the kitchen. a teaspoon becomes a cuillère à café, and a tablespoon becomes a cuillère à soupe. even if you are able to find some sort of legitimate measurement, you often have to do some sort of u.s. to metric conversion. a dry cup will become grammes, and liquid cups will become litres. degrees have to be converted from ferenheit to celcius, then to gas oven "marks." even on the preparation instructions on the outside of packages you'll see "medium" instead of a specific degree.



well, i made it through the finding ingredients, translating the recipe, and squeezed my way around the degrees in celcius... and after all that, i tasted success.