With the popularization of baking soda and baking powder, “banana bread” became a popular recipe in American cookbooks in the 1930s. It first appeared in the 1933 cookbook Pillsbury’s Balanced Recipes.
There is a National Banana Bread Day, celebrated on February 23rd of every year. Bananas were exported in the USA in the 1870s, and it took quite some time to appear in the cookbooks as ingredients for dessert recipes. Food historians believe banana bread came about during the great depression when housewives did not want to throw away over-ripe bananas, which at that time were a valued product, others believe that modern banana bread was developed in commercial kitchens to promote flour.