“Pickin' up pawpaws, puttin' 'em in your pocket
Way down yonder in the pawpaw patch!”

Pawpaws are our favorite way to sweeten late summer and early fall! We harvest the creamy fallen fruits as they tumble down and eat them fresh with spoons or use tasty recipes to turn them into ice cream, a custardy spread, or mead. The yellow-orange pulp tastes something like an Appalachian banana mango custard with caramel overtones, but Pawpaw really has its own unique incredible flavor. You can’t find Pawpaws in many grocery stores because they don’t ship well; the fruits rot too quickly and in fact taste best when they’re about to turn. We use spoons or potato peelers to scrape the skin off ripe fruit, leaving us with a soft plump sometimes squishy oval! We then run the fruit through a Victorio strainer with the grape spiral and squash screen to easily separate seeds from pulp.

These tap-rooted trees are fond of rivers, spreading through suckers in patches throughout bottomlands and riparian edges. They make a fine understory to Black Walnut! Once established, our Pawpaws require very little attention other than light pruning and they start readily from the large shiny-black seeds, once spread by sloths and mammoths and then by Native orchardists.

Some believe the earliest written account of Pawpaw comes from 1541, when Hernando de Soto’s colonizing expeditions encountered Indigenous tribes in the Mississippi Valley cultivating the largest edible fruit of Native America. But verifying old writings about Pawpaw can be hard because for a long time the name pawpaw was assigned to Papaya! In fact, it still is in some places. How Asimina triloba also got the name is a little unclear. Some suggest that Spanish conquistadors thought the fruit looked so much like Papaya that they gave it a similar name, but an old medical text reports that enslaved people, forcibly imported from the West Indies, began using the word for this native tree. Seems pretty possible, since the Taino people from those islands spoke an Arawak language from which we get the word Papaya (and also Maize). The scientific name comes from the Algonquin word assimin. Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) call them hadi’ot, and their traditional use involved mashing and drying the fruit for sauces, smoothies, and corncakes. Pawpaws are 1% protein and fat, 19% carb, have 87% more potassium than bananas and a higher concentration of all other minerals than apples, bananas, and oranges. They’re also high in niacin, a vital nutrient unavailable in Maize unless they’re nixtamalized, so mixing both into cakes ensured you got your daily dose! Aside from the fragrant fruit, the tree itself provides incredible gifts. Many Indigenous tribes, including the Cherokee, have used the inner bark as rope and and fishing line, as well as fiber for mending clothes and weaving baskets.

Pawpaw is the only temperate member of the tropical Custard Apple family, one with many relatives in Africa. The shape and taste of Pawpaw might have been familiar to early enslaved Africans. Michael Twitty, a culinary historian focused on the cuisine of enslaved African Americans and the African diaspora, has found Pawpaw patches outside the quarters of enslaved people and records of the fruit sustaining runaways in dark riverside understories of the Underground Railroad. Along with Persimmon and Honey Locust, Pawpaw gave nutritional diversity to meager enslaved diets, and the sweet-smelling pulp attracted raccoons and possums that became hearty meat stews. Fortunately, very few critters like to eat the leaves or twigs, which can be used as natural insecticide and makes the tree pretty deer-proof. The one exception is the Zebra Swallowtail, which coevolved with Pawpaw in temperate North America. The small flowers smell a little like a funky ferment, enjoyed by Pawpaw’s pollinators, carrion beetles and blowflies. Some oldtimers also suggest fertilizing with rotting roadkill to attract the pollinators!

Twitty observes that early American writings described Pawpaw as fit only for “Negroes and Indians,” for those who had few options but to eat freely what the local earth grew instead of what could be bought from afar. Poor white folks also partnered with Pawpaw, earning it the nickname “Poor Man’s Banana,” a racist money-rich dismissal of abundant gifts and seasonal patience. We’re grateful to those who tended and learned from this tree, and we’re proud to plant Poor Man’s Banana!

We propagate our Pawpaws by seed from large delicious fruits in wild groves on the forks of the Shenandoah Rivers. We select seed based on fruit size, taste, and tree health.

Note: We always love praising and pondering this marvelous magical tree, but we also love honest and holistic accounts! Which means we need to note the presence of a neurotoxin in Pawpaw fruit! Talking about Pawpaw toxicity can bring up strong emotions all around. We’re no experts on the subject, but we’ll share a little of what we understand.

Members of the Annonaceae family like Pawpaw contain acetogenins, which are linked to neurotoxins that are linked to Parkinson’s Disease. Those same compounds, also found in Pawpaw twigs and leaves, supposedly have cancer-inhibiting properties at lower doses (and why twigs and leaves are used as natural pest deterrents). Still, not much prolonged institutional research has been done about Pawpaw’s long-term effects in humans or in animals who eat loads of Pawpaw.

However, eating lots of unripe Pawpaw fruit is known to make people sick, so make sure to let them sweeten on the branch! Some say not to cook Pawpaw, others provide recipes for making pies and cakes. Some say eating loads of fresh fruit in season is fine, and we’ve also noticed that we reach our fill of fresh Pawpaws pretty quickly. Some people get pretty sick eating the skins, and some don't seem to feel anything at all (sort of like Mango skins). We pretty carefully remove all the skin when we process, but we also eat fresh ones by sucking pulp off the skin and seed (which contain alkaloids that can trigger vomiting), most likely ingesting some skin. We haven't gotten sick from it, but that’s also a very low dose!

In summary, this subject’s complicated! We encourage careful research, paying attention to embodied wisdom, and making sure both are referring to Pawpaw and not Papaya!