Well-Fostered
In the 1950s, Ralph Brennan's family that brought us Bananas Foster. Before that, his ancestors also helped bring bananas to the United States.
From the tableside burner, the smell of caramelizing brown sugar and butter fills the entire dining room. The waiter tops the bubbling sauce with fresh sliced bananas. The sauce thickens, then the dish gets a shot of rum for a quick flambé. Diners at the nearby tables are all turned this way, watching the action, cellphones out. The Bananas Foster is completed as the warm, flambéed fruit finds its home in a bowl, nestled into waiting pillows of vanilla ice cream. This classic New Orleans dessert has its origins just down the road at the original Brennan’s Vieux Carré restaurant on Bourbon Street, and continues today as a treasured tradition at Brennan’s current location on Royal Street.
So the story goes, in the 1950s, Ella Brennan, who was general manager of Brennan’s at the time, came up with the caramelized concoction at the request of Ella’s brother, the restaurant’s founder/owner Owen Brennan. Richard Foster, a prominent businessman in the city, was to dine at Brennan’s that very night, and Owen wanted to honor him with a special one-of-a-kind dessert.
At the time, their father John was operating Brennan’s Processed Potato Company, which was experiencing a surplus of bananas. So, Owen asked Ella to use them in creating something sweet and new.
Rushed for time, Ella, Chef Paul Blangé, and one of the dining room captains set to work. Recalling the way her mother used to brûlée bananas for breakfast, Ella pulled out the brown sugar, butter, and bananas—then added in rum, elevating the delicacy to a tableside flaming masterpiece, finished lovingly with ice cream. Bananas Foster was born.
This delightful morsel of New Orleans culinary history is well-chronicled; shared each night by waiters flambéeing at Brennan’s, included in food tours, found on blogs and in history books. A lesser known story is how the Brennan family’s relationship to bananas goes back to before the famed dessert. The modern Brennans’ ancestors, it turns out, played an important role in bringing bananas to our country in the first place.
It’s been less than two hundred years since the first bananas were brought to the United States—where they are now the number one fruit sold today. First introduced at the 1876 World’s Fair in Philadelphia, the fruit quickly gained popularity across the country.
By 1899, Sicilian immigrants Joseph, Luca, and Felix Vaccaro, together with Salvador D’Antoni, were importing bananas from La Ceiba, Honduras, for their produce cart in the French Market. This produce cart was the predecessor of the Standard Fruit Company, officially established in 1924 by the Vaccaro brothers. Standard’s competitor, United Fruit Company, was also established in 1899. These two family businesses, often times in collaboration, became New Orleans’s primary importers of bananas during their time—utilizing Standard’s steamships and United’s railroads. Soon, New Orleans became one of the largest importers of bananas in the United States. Standard continued to grow, and by 1915, the company’s president Joseph Vaccaro was being referred to as the “Ice King” because he owned most of the ice factories in New Orleans.
Ralph Brennan, owner of The Ralph Brennan Restaurant Group, which includes Brennan’s Restaurant, has family ties to this facet of banana history from his mother’s side. His great grandfather was one of Standard Fruit Company’s founders, Joseph Vaccaro, and Ralph has fond memories of his mother, Claire Lally, telling him about her travels as a teenager to distant lands on the family’s banana steamships. Claire and her mother, Philomena Vaccaro Lally, would stay in the staterooms and visit the banana-producing countries of Latin America. “These were working ships, not cruise ships, but they did have a number of cabins, so my mother would travel with her mother and grandmother to places like Honduras, where her brother Vincent was working for the company,” said Ralph. But the real stories, the glamorous stories, he said, are from when they would stop in Havana, Cuba: a pre-Castro playground sparkling with adventure.
“My mother always talked about how wonderful Havana was. The nightlife, the fun, the excitement of being there,” he said. “She always wanted to take us there, but never could because by that time, Castro had taken over.” Lally was enthralled by Havana’s Art Deco and Art Nouveau architecture, the nonstop nightly entertainment, and a world so different from the one she had left behind. “She talked about having fun in La Ceiba, Honduras, and seeing the banana plantations and such, but it wasn’t as glamorous as Havana for her,” said Ralph. “She really enjoyed Havana as a young girl, because she married my dad when she was about twenty-five years old, so experiencing this at an early age opened her eyes wide to a world outside of New Orleans.”
As a child, Ralph remembers driving to Friendship House, a family restaurant between Gulfport, Mississippi and Biloxi, Mississippi, and seeing the old family steamships. “My mother would get excited when we’d see the ships with the big ‘V’ on the steam pipe representing the Vaccaro family name,” he says. “The ships weren’t in our family anymore at this time, but it still made her happy to see them and brought back memories of her travels.”
Eventually, as is the case with lots of family-owned companies that continue to grow and prosper, Standard Fruit Company was acquired by the Castle & Cooke Corporation—later renamed the Dole Food Company. Dole Food is still one of the largest importers of bananas to the United States. Luckily for us, Brennan’s Restaurant retains this banana history, and the coveted Bananas Foster dessert, for foodies to embrace for years to come. In fact, seventy-five percent of dessert sales at Brennan’s still come in the form of Bananas Foster—with an average of 18,000 fosters sold quarterly. The restaurant goes through 35,000 pounds of bananas per year. The Vaccaros would be proud.