My mother’s recipe for banana bread, hand-written on a page of her old looseleaf cookbook, dates from the 1940s or 1950s. The recipe itself could be a lot older. It begins: “Crush bananas with a silver folk.”

I have never used a silver fork, always a stainless steel one. I have wondered a hundred times why silver is specified. Did ordinary flatware used to contain something that reacted chemically with bananas? Does it still?
—Am I doing any harm to use stainless?
—Was there once some special reason to use silver that no longer applies?

Topics: cooking, bananas, silver, stainless steel, banabna bread