banana leaves

Banana leaves

Banana leaves are the most prevalent of the many leaf wraps used in Southeast Asia, partly because they’re the most universal, finding wide application in most culinary traditions, while the other leaf wrappers – of which there are many – are generally associated with just one. Banana leaves fresh from the tree are a delight to work with, fragrant and pliable, with a scale that reminds the cook of nature’s abundance. 

The musa species from which modern bananas are derived are largely native to the archipelago, so many households had a fine source at hand, at least until the 1980s. Today, banana trees are increasingly rare, and the leaves available in the markets are imported from commercial plantations or backyard growers in Malaysia. During their vegetative growth phase, banana trees can put out leaves at the rate of one a week, and these need to be thinned to ensure an optimal harvest of fruit. 

Both the variety and the age of the leaves matter. Older, thicker leaves are harder to fold, so they’re used for grilling (most famously for wrapping skate wings), or as fragrant non-stick liners for baked kueh. They come to the table as decorative liners for platters, or as plates themselves, at “Indian banana leaf” restaurants (this seems to be a particularly Southeast Asian adaptation of a South Indian idiom). The intricate folds required for something like kueh jongkong (classically made in an ingot shape) or yi bua cups demand younger, thinner leaves. Pisang batu (literally “rock banana”trees, which bear unappetizing fruit, apparently have leaves ideal for wrapping kueh – but good luck finding a market vendor who knows what cultivar of leaves they’re selling. 

Banana leaves serve as aromatic liners for classic “hawker paper” parcels, most famously containing nasi lemak – here a banana leaf wrapper, once commonplace, is now a particular mark of care. The use of banana leaves as wrappers for fresh produce, at one point common in the Philippines, is almost unknown in Singapore today. 

The depressingly familiar rhythms of academia and capitalism have generated reams of research on how banana leaves can be used for wrapping and serving food, except with several industrial processes inserted between the tree and the user. Not many of these seem to have taken off. My favorite of these was a study which investigated the use of banana leaves in what are essentially tinfoil hats. 

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• If you enjoy my writing, I think you’ll get a kick out of Errol Schweizer’s writing about the grocery industry. He’s well-informed, well aware of all the ways the food system is entangled with issues of social justice, and you’ll never read a funnier or more revealing review of a supermarket.

• California’s micro-enterprise home kitchen legislation gets written up in the New York Times (this is a gift link). I wrote about this way back when — in my view it’s an unalloyed good.

• Doing dishes is half the pleasure of having dinner. On soap and palm oil. (Ok, maybe not half, but it’s still important.)

• And the topic of food and infrastructure seems to be on people’s minds at the moment. A proposal for public ownership of distribution, and another on the public British Restaurants of the second world war. This is a topic I’ll be returning to, so if you’ve come across interesting perspectives, please send them my way!