Banana bread is a sweet, cakelike bread which contains mashed bananas. A quick bread, banana bread typically uses baking soda as its leavening agent and is baked from batter, rather than dough.

Banana bread first became a standard feature of American cookbooks with the popularization of baking soda and baking powder in the 1930s (and appears in Pillsbury's 1933 Balanced Recipes cookbook). The home baking revival of the 1960s and the simplicity of its recipe led to an explosion in banana bread's popularity, with cookbooks of that era commonly listing multiple variations which added other fruits and nuts to the basic bread.

References

• Olver, Lynne (2004). The Food Timeline: Cakes. Retrieved Nov. 14, 2004.
• Shindler, Merrill. (1996). 100 Recipes from Ten Delicious Decades. Angel Press:Santa Monica.