Assimina triloba
Ahhh yes… the elusive Paw Paw tree. I first learned about the PawPaw tree in my plants and ecology class as one of the 300+ plants we met. I’ve seen patches of seedlings on a stream bank in central Virginia, searched out specimens after dark in the Chicago Botanic Garden, and read stories of George Washington enjoying it as his favorite fruit. But I didn’t get to taste a PawPaw until Kate and I discovered some ripe fruit on a patch in Theodore Roosevelt Island this past fall. IT IS DELICIOUS. For those of you unaware of the delights of a paw paw, it comes from the PawPaw tree which is a US native understory tree that grows up to about 25′ in height. The fruit is a little smaller than a mango and tastes something like a cross between banana and vanilla custard. IT IS DELICIOUS. This of course is very confusing to me as we continue to ship bananas and similar fruits many miles to keep our cereals adorned. While it’s true that many of the native PawPaw trees have been lost to development, our landscape is still fit to grow them from the Midwest to the East Coast (the PawPaw tree is native to 25 states). I have this story in my head where at some point early in our post European conquest development someone says that he or she likes bananas better than paw-paws and poof…we start jumping through hoops to procure this exotic fruit only to forever neglect the backyard pawpaw. I would love to start seeing the now elusive paw paw on our grocery shelves but have yet to come by them. While their are people working on cultivars that offer more, better tasting fruit, there doesn’t seem to be too many folks working on the agricultural potential of this darling. The PawPaw Foundation is something of a lonely, but hopefully viable voice.
5 comments
I’ve had cherimoya, the insides look similar. Are they the same family? They taste like a pear/mango flavor
Thought I would add this very interesting comment that I received from my Grandmother in an email after she read the post…
“I was interested in your information about pawpaws. When I was growing up, there were a few in southern and central IL. I think they just almost completely disappeared after farmers started using herbicides and pesticides after WWII We really had no concept of the damage to plants and animals. You can’t imagine how prevalent flies were before insecticides. We had lots of fly swatters and sticky fly papers. With livestock, it was a constant battle to keep them out of houses. So when the insectides were developed during the war years, we really welcomed their development.Your grandfather began to use chemicals in farming in the early fifties. My first concept of how dangerous they might be, came when a hose broke on the sprayer and nothing grew there for several years. Before the use of chemicals in farming, central IL had a large population of pheasants. In the winter time, you would see flocks of them. Suddenly, they began to disappear and now you see very few.”
Dorothy Moody
Debbie,
The cherimoya (Annona cherimola) is in fact in the same family as the pawpaw. Both are a part of the Annonaceae family. The cherimoya was introduced in California in 1871 and proclaimed by Mark Twain as “the most delicious fruit known to man” !
I know where there are many paw paw trees. Because of being afraid of people distroying them I am hesitant to give everyone this info. But if you contact me through email, I will be happy to show you pictures and tell you where to find them. I had no idea they were edible. I had never heard of them before. jaboyt@live.com
I too recently discovered the paw paw tree. I read about it in “Follow the River” and went hunting them. I found several groves on the mountain behind my house and anxiously waited for them to ripen so that I could taste them. They ripened in Last Oct. and were very good, if not very pretty. I think that these wonderful fruit were lost to us for several reasons. 1. They are not very attractive. (People that I show them too invariably ask if they are ripe when they are not, and rotten when they are ripe.) Apparently there was a song taught in country schools about picking up paw paws and putting them in the basket. May of the people that I speak to from the (60+) generation remember this song, but children of a lesser age do not. 2. They don’t hold or ship well. They have to rippen on the limp and only last a day or 2 if not refrigerated. 3. They are difficult to and messy to eat, do to the number of seeds and pulpy texture. Consequently this also makes them hard to cook with. 4. The trees are apparently very difficult to transplant. They have a long fragile tap root and while they need shade for the first 3 or more years to rippen they then need sun in the later stages.
I have sought out recipes for this delicious fruit and found a couple of great web sites.
http://www.pawpaw.kysu.edu/pawpaw/recipes.htm
http://members.aol.com/blaneky/recipes.htm
http://www.petersonpawpaws.com/Facts.php
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