No single person is definitively credited with “inventing” banana pudding, but food historians trace its earliest printed recipes to the late 19th century in the northern United States, with the now-classic vanilla wafer version popularized in the 1920s.

Quick Scoop

Banana pudding evolved gradually rather than appearing from one inventor, which makes it more of a shared culinary creation than a patented idea. Early newspaper and magazine recipes laid the groundwork, and later home cooks plus a cookie company helped shape the version most people recognize today.

Earliest Known Recipes

  • One of the first recorded banana pudding recipes appeared in an 1888 issue of Good Housekeeping , a Massachusetts-based publication, using custard, sliced bananas, and sponge cake.
  • Another early reference goes back to an 1878 “frozen banana pudding” request in The New York Times , showing the idea was circulating even before detailed recipes were widely printed.

How The “Classic” Was Born

  • In the early versions, banana pudding looked more like a trifle, layered with sponge cake or ladyfingers, bananas, and poured custard, sometimes finished with whipped cream or meringue.
  • Around 1920–1921, a home cook named Laura Kerley in Bloomington, Illinois, published a recipe that swapped sponge cake for vanilla wafers, a key step toward the modern American banana pudding.

Role Of Nilla Wafers

  • Nabisco was already making vanilla wafers by the early 1900s but later leaned into banana pudding by printing recipes on its wafer boxes, cementing the pairing in American home cooking.
  • By the 1940s, banana pudding built around Nabisco’s Nilla Wafers had become the familiar dessert many in the U.S. still think of today, especially in Southern cooking.

Why People Ask “Who Invented Banana Pudding?”

  • Today, banana pudding is strongly associated with Southern potlucks and soul food, even though its printed origins were in Northern publications and then spread south as bananas became more accessible.
  • Because of this Southern identity and its nostalgic feel, people often imagine a single origin moment, but the dessert is really a layered creation of many cooks, editors, and brands over several decades.

TL;DR:
No one person clearly “invented” banana pudding, but early recipes appeared in the 1880s, and Laura Kerley’s 1920s vanilla-wafer version plus Nabisco’s box recipes shaped the iconic style people know today.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.