My interest for edible bananas came about soon after I got interested in the growing of ornamental bananas. Learning about edible bananas is a little problematic here because many of the cultivars in existence are not known by their proper cultivar names. Gardeners here know them by their very localised colloquial names which are sometimes invalid.
I need to start somewhere. I searched through one of my favourite references, PROSEA and found that there is a section that was written on Musa L. (edible cultivars) in Volume 2 (Edible Fruits and Nuts). There is a concise list provided that mentions some of the important commercial cultivars that are grown in South-East Asia. Given together are their accepted cultivar names as well as their Malay names known in Indonesia and Malaysia whenever available.
Given the Malay names of these cultivar just made my learning journey a whole lot easier because most of the bananas I have here, people refer to them via their local Malay names! Edible banana cultivars are notoriously difficult to tell apart and most can only be done so only when they are flowering and fruiting. Many cultivars tend to look similar to one another when they are just a bunch of leaves.
‘Pisang Tanduk’ was the first edible banana cultivar in my community garden that I got to know more about because out of the few cultivars I have in my garden, I got to know about its Malay name first and PROSEA happens to carry a short listing on it. ‘Pisang Tanduk’ was a banana cultivar that was given to us by the mosque in our neighbourhood.
The description of ‘Pisang Tanduk’ as given in PROSEA is as follows:
Musa (AAB group, Plantain subgroup) ‘Horn’. Synonyms: ‘Pisang Tanduk’ (Indonesia), ‘Pisang Tanduk’ (Malaysia), ‘Tindok’ (the Philippines), ‘Kluai Nga Chang’ (Thailand). The cultivar with the largest fruits. Commercially it is important in Indonesia (Java). The banana requires some cooking to become palatable. Skin yellow; flesh light creamy-orange, firm, fine in texture, remains starchy; good keeping quality; bunches with 2 hands. This cultivar has no persistent male bud.
Armed with the cultivar description given in PROSEA, it becomes apparent why the fruits of ‘Pisang Tanduk’ are not eaten like other dessert bananas in the raw form. I have been told that the fruits of this cultivar is better eaten cooked and it is now obvious to me why this is so – ‘Pisang Tanduk’ is a plantain and the starchy fruits of plantains are usually cooked before it is good for consumption. The description fits the characteristics of the plant I have in my community garden because the ‘Pisang Tanduk’ I have consistently borne only two hands of fruits. How low yielding I thought!
I also got to learn that the English cultivar name of ‘Pisang Tanduk’ is known as ‘Horn’ and it belongs to the AAB group of triploid hybrid bananas. ‘AAB’ means that the cultivar is a triploid hybrid with 2 genome sets contributed by Musa acuminata and one by Musa balbisiana.
In a work published in 1955, Simmonds and Shepherd suggested that banana cultivars should be named using their genome nomenclature consisting of their generic names, followed between brackets by a letter combination indicating their ploidy and the genome sets contributed by the 2 wild species, followed by the name of the cultivar group and/or the cultivar.
