Nana’s Foolproof Banana Bread. The recipe card was written by Nana herself. Photo by Jim Keithley My grandmother, Priscilla Parisien of Saco, loved to cook for her family.
She was one of ten children, and she had four of her own, including my mother. Luckily, Nana lived upstairs from us for more than 50 years — in the good old days families lived close by. There were a lot of aunts and uncles and cousins coming and going all the time.
I learned to cook by watching her. If you’d like to contribute to Home Plates, send a recipe and a story telling us how you came to cook it, who you cook it for and why it’s found a place in your life to pgrodinsky@pressherald.com .
Also, please tell us a little bit about your life as a home cook, include a photo of the dish, and yourself, possibly together, and let us know the source of the recipe. One of my favorite recipes of Nana’s is her old-fashioned banana bread. It’s simple.
It has only a few ingredients. It’s a fail-proof recipe that anyone can make. It’s all mixed by hand in one bowl.
I still make it often. When I said foolproof, I meant except for the one time Nana baked a couple of these breads for a ski trip. My cousins and I arrived at Sugarloaf for the weekend.
We were all dying to dig into Nana’s Banana Bread. When we opened the bread, which was wrapped in aluminum foil, we discovered it was as hard as a brick. We called to tell her that something went wrong.
“I must have forgotten something dammit,” she sai.