ONION JOHNNIES & MOCKING BANANAS

I take in a lot of food-related content. This week I was just watching a BBC documentary from 1957 about French peasants working as travelling salesmen across the Channel in the UK. Their wares? Onions.

Men would leave their families in Roscoff, a commune in the Finistère département of Brittany, on the north end of the most westerly corner of Franc, and travel across to Portsmouth in ships carrying hundreds of tonnes of copper and rose Oignon de Roscoff. There they would spread out across the land, spending the next five months doing what they could to rid themselves of their tasty burden. As the narrator offered, “For 500 years Roscoff shook its fists at the English, now it sends them onions. Such is progress.”

Known as “Onion Johnnies”, most would work in groups of three or four, with one owning the crop and hiring the others on salary. Each group would take a different village or district, hole up in the lodging above a pub or in the spare room of a friend they had made over thirty years of doing this work, and sell onions. To do so they didn’t set up a tent or cart or try and get them into markets or restaurants. With them strung together by the dozen on long, hand-braided cords of raffia and slung over their shoulders and hanging from their arms, or alternatively dangling them off a bicycle, they would stroll and peddle door-to-door, pitching and pleading with a town’s housewives.

Apparently the practice started in the early 19th century and carried on through the 20th century. I love it. And it blows my mind that there was a time, and so recently, when you could grow some vegetables and make a living spending half the year hawking them like this, à pied ou à vélo.

Thought this tradition lasted for generations and is, sadly, all but gone, Roscoff has a museum to the Onion Johnnies, La Maison des Johnnies et de l'Oignon de Roscoff, and there's an annual onion festival held in the seaside municipality in August.

Along with French onions, I was also watching and reading about the UK's love of bananas. Prior to the Second World War, apparently the UK was consuming huge volumes of bananas. Of course, they would have been arriving from their tropical colonies and outposts all over the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia. Apparently bananas were particularly popular with coal miners who loved them for their convenient wrapping that allowed them to be eaten without having to touch the edible flesh with sooty hands. I just love the image of rugged labourers blackened in coal dust eating bananas. In the coal-blackness all you can see is the blinking whites of a pair of eyes, some teeth, and a creamy Gros Michel.

Of course, there were restrictions, both voluntary and involuntary, on all sorts of things in the UK throughout and even long after the war. Perhaps most significant was food rationing. (I remember reading about bees being so critical to local fruit and vegetable production, and thus the war effort, that, while sugar was one of the first things to be restricted for the human population, hives received their own special dispensation…) Like sugar, butter, and bacon, right away the supply of the much-loved banana was cut off. The flow was not severed by the enemy but because the British Minister of Food, Lord Woolton, made the call to cease imports of the fruit as he saw them as a needless extravagance but also due to the distances and tremendous shipping volumes involved. Bananas just could not be justified.

To give you a sense of what a big deal this was, at the height of the war, in 1943, bandleader Harry Roy and his Tiger Ragamuffins dropped a local hit titled, When Can I Have a Banana Again?

I get along without sugar, I'd never drink any tea,

Eggs and bacon, even ham, these things don't worry me.

I won't eat the neck of a chicken, to me it don't mean a thing,

There's one thing I always crave, and that's why you hear me sing:

Oh, when can I have a banana again?

Oh, tell me, tell me mother, tell me do. Woo-hoo!

When can I have a banana again, as I used to do?

You see, I like them for breakfast, and I like them for lunch,

I don't mind them single or all in a bunch!

Oh, when can I have a banana again?

Oh, tell me, tell me mother, do.

I've had carrots and beans and onions, and all sorts of things to eat,

But they don't fill the bill, they don't taste so sweet,

I'd give my best suit, my old suit and my shoes,

For just one nice yellow banana, I'm blue!

Because the fruit was so loved folks came up with alternatives. My favourite is Mock Banana Sandwiches. Can you even imagine how you might produce a faux banana or anything of the sort in wartime England? It requires boiling and mashing parsnips until smooth and then mixing in a small amount of margarine, milk, cream, or yogurt (if any of those were available), and adding sugar (if available) with as" much artificial banana extract as desired.

This sweet and pulpy mash would be spread between the thinnest possible slices of grey bread. The slices were grey because this would have been the mandated, and very unpopular, wartime “national loaf”. Though, technically, bread was not rationed you could not get other bread or flour. The bread was made using the “national flour”, a fortified wholemeal blend concocted of a coarse flour (made with far more bran and germ than folks were used to in order to preserve wheat supplies and encourage people to consume more locally grown potatoes) and with added minerals and vitamins. I also imagine it was adulterated in other ways to stretch the supply for an island nation that was used to getting the majority of its food from elsewhere. The flour made a dense loaf with poor taste according to those forced to eat it. Most accounts appear to suggest any loaf made with the national four was either mushy or went stale incredibly fast. The nicest review I found is in a diary entry from the time and explained:

Went to town the afternoon with Monica. Our bread now is composed of potatoes & flour and has to be 24 hours old before delivery. It is inclined to be heavy and sour.

Another anecdote found published in The Guardian noted a National Loaf competition in 1942, taking place at the Caxton Hall in Westminster on November 18, and that judges would not taste the loaves but only squeeze, cut, smell, and examine the bread by eye. Hilarious.

Tolerated because it was the only bread available, folks liked to joke that the loaf was “Hitler’s secret weapon” and given to the population only to demoralize them. Interestingly too, the restrictions on local flour production lasted longer than most other things, 14 years, until 1956. Though I have yet to make this delicacy for myself I’m told it tasted like parsnips with artificial banana extract added to it. Sounds about right.

Unlike the situation with the flour, Brits didn't have to wait too long for their favourite fruit to return. And the first arrival of bananas was a very big deal when, on December 30, 1945, a shipment of 10 million arrived in Bristol from Kingston, Jamaica, aboard the SS Tilapa. The boat was greeted by a large crowd headed by the mayor and a gaggle of children.