by Andrew Moore
Praise for Pawpaw: In Search of America’s Forgotten Fruit
“With Pawpaw, Andrew Moore walks firmly in the steps of the great literary journalists John McPhee and Mark Kurlansky. Stories deftly told, research deeply done, this book is an engaging ride through the haunts of a fruit many Easterners quietly—secretly, even—gorge themselves on each autumn. A ripe pawpaw is as illicit as Persephone’s pomegranate, and Moore captures that passion well.”
—HANK SHAW, 2013 James Beard Award winner, Best Food Blog, and author of Hunt, Gather, Cook: Finding the Forgotten Feast and Duck, Duck, Goose: Recipes and Techniques for Cooking Ducks and Geese
“This book is a love song singing the praises of a unique, delicious, and once-abundant fruit that has been sadly neglected. Andrew Moore takes us on a very personal journey investigating how and why North America’s largest indigenous fruit largely disappeared and documenting efforts to revive it. Pawpaw is a pleasure to read, and if you do, you’ll probably find yourself searching for and loving these delectable fruits.”
—SANDOR ELLIX KATZ, author of The Art of Fermentation
“Pawpaw: In Search of America’s Forgotten Fruit is a fun and well-researched, informative romp through the culture and horticulture of this uncommon fruit. Uncommon, yes, but who would have imagined that there were and are quite a few other pawpaw nuts out there? If you don’t know pawpaws, you should, and you will.”
—LEE REICH, PhD, author of Uncommon Fruits for Every Garden
“Like a gumshoe detective, Andrew Moore tracks down a mystery at once horticultural and culinary: Why is the pawpaw, America’s largest indigenous fruit, so little known? The answer, like the fruit’s beguiling taste, proves multi-layered and slippery, and after reading Moore’s engaging account, I’m ready to light out for pawpaw country myself in search of this homegrown original.”
—LANGDON COOK, author of The Mushroom Hunters: On the Trail of an Underground America
“Tropical growers have many shade crops to choose from, like cacao and coffee. Here in eastern North America we have our own luscious fruit for shady places—the pawpaw. Andrew Moore’s Pawpaw tells the story of this fruit and the people working to bring it to our gardens, markets, and restaurants. It’s the story of an eastern native fruit on its way to domestication, finally earning the place in our hearts and our cuisine that it deserves.”
—ERIC TOENSMEIER, author of Paradise Lot and Perennial Vegetables
“This book took me on an enchanting and engaging ride through the history, folklore, and science of a neglected but magical food plant. Andrew Moore shows us, in delightful prose and a wealth of fascinating stories, the role that the under-appreciated pawpaw has played in North American culture. I was constantly surprised to learn of the quiet influence the pawpaw has had on the people and environment around it, and like the author, am hopeful that it can find its rightful place among the better-known fruits that we all love.”
—TOBY HEMENWAY, author of Gaia’s Garden and The Permaculture City
“America, get ready for pawpaw mania! Andrew Moore’s book tells the definitive story of the wild fruit that is part of our nation’s heritage, and in the process the author joins the ranks of food-preservationist heroes. Prepare to be overwhelmed with longing for the sweet scent and taste of the pawpaw.”
—POPPY TOOKER, host of Louisiana Eats!
“Andrew Moore has done an amazing job demystifying one of America’s most misunderstood and neglected fruits. Pawpaw deftly navigates between his own personal journey and the facts and history of the fruit, leaving readers—including chefs interested in heritage and tradition—with a true sense of how important it is to embrace this indigenous treasure.”
—TRAVIS MILTON, chef and co-owner of Shovel and Pick, Richmond, Virginia
“Here is proof that culinary odysseys don’t always need to involve globetrotting or the pursuit of rare, exotic foodstuffs. But, then again, in his pursuit of the lowly American pawpaw, Andrew Moore reminds us that America was once considered an exotic destiny on its own, and has always had more than its fair share of culinary rarities.”
—DAMON LEE FOWLER, author of Essentials of Southern Cooking and Beans, Greens & Sweet Georgia Peaches
“I was fortunate to have experienced early in life, from my Monacan Indian and Black community friends, the joy of the pawpaw, as well as maypops, chinquapins, mushrooms, and huckleberries. Andy’s book is one of the road maps to the resurrection of another rooted American food commodity. Pawpaw will generate enthusiasm for this unsung fruit and hopefully engender passion in a few.”
—TOM BURFORD, author of Apples of North America: Exceptional Varieties for Growers, Gardeners, and Cooks
Copyright © 2015 by Andrew Moore. All rights reserved.
Unless otherwise noted, all photographs copyright © 2015 by Andrew Moore.
Front cover image: Branch of Common Pawpaw from Charles Sprague Sargent, Manual of the Trees of North America (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1905), courtesy of the private collection of Roy Winkelman
No part of this book may be transmitted or reproduced in any form by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.
Project Manager: Bill Bokermann
Developmental Editor: Michael Metivier
Copy Editor: Laura Jorstad
Proofreader: Helen Walden
Indexer: Peggy Holloway
Designer: Melissa Jacobson
Printed in the United States of America.
First printing July, 2015
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Chelsea Green sees publishing as a tool for cultural change and ecological stewardship. We strive to align our book manufacturing practices with our editorial mission and to reduce the impact of our business enterprise on the environment. We print our books and catalogs on chlorine-free recycled paper, using vegetable-based inks whenever possible. This book may cost slightly more because it was printed on paper that contains recycled fiber, and we hope you’ll agree that it’s worth it. Chelsea Green is a member of the Green Press Initiative (www.greenpressinitiative.org), a nonprofit coalition of publishers, manufacturers, and authors working to protect the world’s endangered forests and conserve natural resources. Pawpaw was printed on paper supplied by Maple Press that contains 100% postconsumer recycled fiber.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Moore, Andrew, 1985- author.
Pawpaw : in search of America’s forgotten fruit / Andrew Moore.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-60358-596-5 (hardcover) -- ISBN 978-1-60358-597-2 (ebook)
1. Pawpaw--United States. 2. Pawpaw--United States--History. I.
Title.
QK495.A6M66 2015
583’.22--dc23
2015012301
Chelsea Green Publishing
85 North Main Street, Suite 120
White River Junction, VT 05001
(802) 295-6300
www.chelseagreen.com
FOR ERIKA
CONTENTS
Foreword
Prologue
PART I: PAWPAWS IN HISTORY
1. What’s a Pawpaw?
2. A Brief History of Pawpaws in America
3. Toward Domestication
4. A Tale of Two Fruits
PART II: PAWPAWS TO THE PEOPLE
5. Johnny Pawpawseed
6. Hunting the Lost Ketter Fruit
7. Peterson’s Gambit
8. In the Orchard
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9. The Ohio Pawpaw Festival
10. Tobacco, Acetogenins, and Ice Cream
11. The Ohio Pawpaw Growers Association
12. Into the Woods: A New Orchard
PART III: WAY DOWN YONDER: TRAVELS IN THE PAWPAW BELT
13. St. Louis
14. Historic Virginia
15. North Carolina
16. Down South
17. Appalachia
18. Cherokee
19. North and Midwest
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
APPENDIX 1: Pawpaw Ice Cream
APPENDIX 2: A Selection of Pawpaw Nurseries
APPENDIX 3: Cultivar Profiles and Impressions
APPENDIX 4: Photo Gallery
Notes
About the Author
WAY DOWN YONDER IN THE PAWPAW PATCH
Where, oh, where is little Susie?
Where, oh, where is little Susie?
Where, oh, where is little Susie?
Way down yonder in the pawpaw patch.
Come on boys, let’s go find her
Come on boys, let’s go find her
Come on boys, let’s go find her
Way down yonder in the pawpaw patch.
Pickin’ up pawpaws, puttin’ ’em in a basket
Pickin’ up pawpaws, puttin’ ’em in a basket
Pickin’ up pawpaws, puttin’ ’em in a basket
Way down yonder in the pawpaw patch
—TRADITIONAL AMERICAN FOLK SONG
FOREWORD
The past twenty years have witnessed an upsurge and return to wild foods not seen since the 1970s. For many, the exploration of the indigenous American landscape as a source of rediscovered food has become a passion on both vernacular and professional levels. At the very least it is a call to conserve our heritage ecosystems while utilizing them sustainably and responsibly. In my own work aiming to restore the culinary heritage of African Americans before the Civil War, the call to return to the land is a search for redemption. In many ways, all American food cultures suffer from a legacy as damaged by cultural amnesia as much as they are by ecological ignorance and irresponsibility.
Thus enters the pawpaw, Asimina triloba, which I first learned about in the Foxfire series and then traced through a dozen odd guides to edible plants. Irregularly shaped, suggestively rather than definitively flavored, the pawpaw is an anomaly in so many ways. It’s a tropical tree in a temperate landscape that thrives in the understory rather than transitional zones on the forest edge or in open fields. It’s a triple threat—it gives food, thrives in shade, and provides shade. It’s a slow food that we wish came faster, but unlike the rest of the plant kingdom, it stubbornly demands its devotees retain their patience and sense of seasonal novelty.
In my own work I saw pawpaws described in early America as fit only for “Negroes and Indians.” As I explored the landscapes left by Black communities, I saw these treasure trees growing outside of the dwellings of enslaved people and clustering close to their settlements. It was the pawpaw, cognate to species known to their ancestors in West Africa, that along with the persimmon, honey locust, and others gave them diversity in a diet built on nutritional monotony, and enabled them to nourish themselves on trails North to freedom.
In a food tradition that documents itself with seeds left in the ground, whispers of folk songs and random tidbits from scattered narratives, the pawpaw was at best for me a pleasantly exotic footnote. I didn’t know it had any life beyond the past. How could I reconstruct a part of the cuisine that nobody seemed to eat anymore? Then I met a fellow young seeker named Andy Moore, and I never looked at this fruit the same way again.
In a time when finding the next hot indigenous wild, heirloom, or heritage food is often a self-aggrandizing exercise in staking territory in the edible past, Andy Moore gives to us a pure mission in this tidy, heartfelt work. This is not a pat on the back. Pawpaw is at once a prayer for our willingness to preserve nature, history, memory and taste, and a poem—an ode to the ancestors, the conservationists, and the cooks in kitchens humble and high who want to keep this remarkable “poor man’s banana,” a centerpiece of truly American food.
Andy has undertaken a true odyssey. His interdisciplinary approach necessarily incorporates biology, folklore, anthropology, culinary technique, and the hidden histories of pioneer, African American, and Native American foodways. The greatest benefit to the reader is that it is not a tome based on other tomes. It is an actual journey, a book written in pawpaw seeds and footprints across eastern America. You can walk where Andy walked, and if you do, you will discover, as he did, the bewildering narratives that such a stunning food can engender. This is more than a celebration of an American food; it is equally in awe of the everyday people who incorporate it into their identities.
No fruit has captured the imagination of the forager community in the past twenty years like the pawpaw. I get asked about pawpaw like no other wild fruit in creation. With this at once serious and joyful account of the resurrection of an odd and storied fruit, Andy has given its seekers both a guide and a mandate. He invites us to live interdependently with Asimina triloba, making us a part of its future even as it challenges the imagination of the new American plate.
—MICHAEL W. TWITTY, culinary historian
April, 2015
PROLOGUE
SOUTHERN OHIO, SEPTEMBER 2010
On my first pawpaw hunt, I had no idea what to look for. I’d been told that the pawpaw was the largest of all edible fruits native to the United States, but had never tasted or even seen one. I hoped this day would be the day.
Yellow blooms of goldenrod lit the field leading to the edge of the woods. A path wound beneath the canopy of oak and hickory—a lush, green, late-summer forest. I dodged mud puddles, poison ivy, clouds of lazy gnats hovering at eye level. Leaves and twigs crunched under my steps. Then, after just a few minutes, I saw the distinct, symmetrical leaves of a pawpaw tree, exactly as a friend had described them; I’d made it to a sprawling grove. More than a foot long and a deep, vibrant green, the leaves are also among the largest in the eastern forest. From where I stood, the trees seemed to be the only thing in the understory. As far as I could see: nothing but pawpaw.
I smelled the fruit—a sweet, tropical aroma—before I could see it. None of the pawpaw trees were very big. Some were ten feet tall, their trunks smooth and gray, but still no thicker than five inches in diameter. My hand easily wrapped around the first tree I shook, feeling for the weight of fruit. I looked up, and through the jungle-like canopy a single pawpaw was lit by the sun. I reached for where it clung to the end of a skinny branch, and at my touch the fruit fell neatly into my hand as if it had been waiting for the slightest movement to come along and release it. A gust of wind might have done the same. I had no other fruit on hand to compare and declare the pawpaw the largest in the United States but it definitely had heft—it was no berry, no wispy puff of sugar. It looked like an expensive import on a grocery store shelf, not something you could pick for free. I looked down and noticed there were two more on the ground. At the base of an oak tree, a third. Scooping them up felt like I was getting away with something, like I’d just discovered someone’s secret stash of goods. I couldn’t have realized it then, but in just those brief few moments I became hooked on pawpaws. And I hadn’t even eaten one.
The pawpaws still in the trees were green, reminding me of unripe mangoes. On the ground, the bruised fruit was purple and gray, and quite soft. With the push of my finger their skins broke. Some were shaped like eggs, others like overstuffed peanuts. While many were as big as peaches and apples, others were smaller, teardrop-like runts, no bigger than figs. I placed my hat, which was filled with fruit, on the ground and relieved myself of my shirt-turned-basket as well. It was time to eat.
Not knowing the right method, I tore one in half, which
was easy despite the large seeds in the center. The pulp-filled, sticky interior was colored a soft orange, like cantaloupe. I wasn’t expecting such vibrancy, which seemed out of place in the Ohio woods. Squeezing some pulp into my mouth, I sensed first the texture—like custard, smooth, and delicate—then the flavor, which was truly tropical, with hints of vanilla, caramel, and mango. Then I ate another, which tasted like melon. Both were unlike anything I’d eaten before, certainly unlike anything I’d ever pulled from the northern woods. I went for yet another, whose large, black, lima-bean-sized seeds were packed in its center, wrapped in pulp. I sucked on each one for every morsel, which seemed sweeter around the seeds, before spitting them out onto the forest floor.
I enjoyed my first pawpaws, but I was shocked that I had not heard about the fruit until recently, and was only now seeing and tasting it. Had someone kept it a secret all this time? Who else knew about it? I’m a gardener, I camp, I hike, and I even pride myself on knowing the names of quite a few trees. How had I not heard of pawpaws before? I began to wonder, what was this strange fruit—which looked as if it’d be more at home in Central America—doing in these temperate woods, in a forest that would soon turn a riot of reds and yellows before growing increasingly cold and covered in snow? Surely the pawpaw wasn’t hardy enough to survive. These small trees, like ornamental hibiscus, would wilt and die soon, right?
But the answer was no. Rather than wilting and dying, these same pawpaws would continue to thrive and grow, and for several years I would return each September to pick their fruit.
Shortly after that first trip to the Ohio woods I learned that the pawpaw’s lineage does originate farther south. In fact, it’s the only member of the custard apple family, Annonaceae, that’s not confined to the tropics. But that just led me to ask how it got up here, and again, really, how had I and most other Americans—including my friends and family—never heard anything about it before?
More questions followed. But first, I ate another pawpaw. And another. Soon my feet were encircled by a ring of seeds, in the middle of a seemingly endless pawpaw forest.