Bananas: delicious, but hard to type

I can think of a number of ways to enjoy the goodness of a slippery-skinned, potassium-filled banana: one could simply peel it and eat, slice it and put it on cereal or in fruit salad or perhaps dry the slices into chips, make a pie, a loaf or a banana split, fry it as a fritter or mash it with chocolate and wrap it in foil and place it in a campfire. I'm sure there's more.

One way that I've never thought of is to have them pickled. And yet, poking through my preserves cookbook for interesting things to do with the surfeit of tomatoes my garden has provided, there is the pickled banana recipe, right next to that for pickled grapes (hmmm). I can't even say, "Oh, didn't they eat odd things way back when? It would have gone well with that potted vole", because the cookbook dates from the decidedly not-ancient year 1990.

Perhaps I'm behind the culinary times. Perhaps you're all merrily pickling sliced bananas in white vinegar and spreading them on crusty bread for breakfast. For me, though: ergh!

( But if you do happen to have 13 bananas you don't want just now... )