Pawpaw

by Andrew Moore

  — CHAPTER TWO —

  A BRIEF HISTORY OF PAWPAWS IN AMERICA

  North America circa fifty-six million years ago was quite different from the land we know today. Palm trees thrived from the continent’s center to present-day Alaska, and crocodiles lurked in waters as far north as the Arctic Circle. There were also giant ground sloths, woolly mammoths, saber-toothed tigers, various hooved mammals, active volcanoes, ancient ferns . . . and pawpaws. Archaeological evidence, which includes fossilized fruits and other remains from sites as diverse as Mississippi and New Jersey, indicates that pawpaws grew in North America as early as fifty-six million years ago.1 Those prehistoric megafauna were the primary dispersal agents of the fruit, enabling the ancient pawpaw tree to spread into various latitudes as the climate warmed and cooled. The large, fleshy, sweet fruit, with its numerous large seeds, emerged, evolved, and developed for a specific purpose: to be noticed, desired, eaten, and eventually planted elsewhere via the digestive systems of the continent’s massive herbivores and omnivores.

  Other mammals including bears, opossums, raccoons, and foxes also ate and dispersed pawpaws, albeit with considerably less efficiency. When after centuries of biological and climatic change humans finally arrived in North America, they too began eating pawpaws in great quantities. Pawpaw seeds and other remnants have been found at archaeological sites of the earliest Native Americans, and in large, concentrated amounts, which suggests seasonal feasts of the fruit. Whether at Meadowcroft or the rugged hills of Arkansas, the earliest Americans put pawpaws to great use.

  Native Americans are thought to have expanded the pawpaw’s range in North America—in effect picking up the work of the recently extinct megafauna. Literature suggests that native peoples brought the fruit far west of the Mississippi River, into present-day Kansas, Nebraska, and eastern Oklahoma, as well as Ontario, Canada, and western New York. These Native American horticulturists, carrying seeds in satchels rather than their stomachs, were effective stand-ins for the sloths and mammoths that had disappeared.2

  As they cultivated pawpaws, Native Americans may have selected for characteristics that were most desirable—taste and size, for example. They likely did not plant orchards in straight rows, isolated from other forest species, but would have certainly tended and selected trees. A pawpaw patch of superior-tasting wild fruit discovered today may in fact be a remnant of an orchard abandoned long ago.

  To extend the pawpaw harvest, the fruit was often dried and later cooked into stews and sauces. The Iroquois, for example, who called the fruit hadi’ot,3 dried and mixed them in sauces, as well as cooking them into corn cakes.4 Since corn is low in digestible niacin, Iroquoian cuisine demonstrates a beneficial pairing: Pawpaws are incredibly high in this particular nutrient. Other breads, cakes, sauces, and relishes were also made from fresh and dried pawpaws.

  “It is surprising to see the great variety of dishes they make out of wild flesh, corn, beans, peas, potatoes, pompions, dried fruits, herbs and roots,” James Adair wrote of the southeastern tribes in 1775. His descriptions are among the most detailed of the few that exist of American Indian foodways from this era. “They can diversify their courses, as much as the English, or perhaps the French cooks: and in either of the ways they dress their food, it is grateful to a wholesome stomach.”5 Pawpaws were most often dried, treated with lye or ash, and cooked into breads or rehydrated in soups or stews. They were also likely incorporated into drinks, as other pulpy fruits were, pounded and mixed with parched corn flour, creating a smoothie-like beverage.6

  Today several reports indicate that eating pawpaw fruit leather, or dried pawpaw, leads to brief bouts of illness. Food scientists don’t yet know the cause. However, the Iroquois and other Native Americans were able to eat it dried. Perhaps the addition of lye or ash made dried pawpaw palatable, but we don’t know for certain, a reminder of the great loss of cultural knowledge that followed conquest by the Europeans.

  There remains much to learn about the importance of pawpaws to Native American foodways, but the historic citations are few. The modern map, however, offers some clues. In Louisiana, for instance, the town of Natchitoches translates to “the pawpaw eaters,” and is derived from the place-name given by the Caddo, who called pawpaw nashitosh.7 In Georgia, various places bear the name Alcovy, including Alcovy Mountain, the Alcovy River, and two separate towns. Alcovy is derived from Ulco-fau, part of the Creek place-name Ulco-fau-hatchee, meaning “pawpaw thicket river.” These examples illustrate that pawpaws were often so abundant, and useful, that places and even people were named for them.8

  Pawpaw trees also represented more than food. The Cherokee used the tree’s fibrous inner bark to make strong rope and string.9 Since pawpaw trees were common along the rivers and streams of the Cherokee’s southern Appalachian homelands, they would have been a readily available material. American fishermen in the Ohio Valley took notice and continued to string fish with pawpaw ropes even through the end of the nineteenth century.10 Anywhere pawpaws grew, from Iroquois lands to Chickasaw country, American Indians would have used pawpaw fibers. Clothes were mended and baskets woven with the tree’s inner bark; and as medicine, it is reported that pawpaw seeds were crushed into powder and applied to the scalp to treat head lice. The pawpaw’s uses—from food to fiber to medicine—spanned millennia, and were as diverse as the words used to name it.

  On May 8, 1541, Spanish conquistador Hernando de Soto and his small army reached the Mississippi River just south of present-day Memphis, Tennessee. Searching for gold and glory, the four-hundred-man expedition had made quick enemies of the Indians while marching through subtropical forests, pine savannas, and here, the Mississippi Delta, a bottomland of tangled hardwoods. Nearer to the river, where the water was lined with cottonwoods and willows, wild pawpaws grew on bluffs, between oxbows and atop high banks.

  For decades, it has been written in books and countless articles that the De Soto expedition reported Native Americans growing pawpaws in orchard-like settings, somewhere in north Alabama or Georgia. But this assertion is not easy to prove. The primary text, Narratives of the Career of Hernando de Soto in the Conquest of Florida, credited to “the gentleman from Elvas,” includes accounts of foods eaten by the army, some cooked and grown by natives, and some taken from the woods. The fruit they called ameixas appears most often in the text, eaten green, fresh, dried in large quantities, and cooked into loaves. But that fruit was the American persimmon. There were also clear descriptions of chestnuts, mulberries, walnuts, and other edibles. Yet there is one description that might fit pawpaw: “There is everywhere in the country a fruit, the produce of a plant like ligoacam, that is propagated by the Indians, having the appearance of the royal pear, with an agreeable smell and taste.”11 One historian has noted that the “ligoacam,” to which the fruit’s tree is compared, was likely a species of lignum. Lignum trees belong to a tropical genus, Guaiacum, which consists of five plants native to the tropical and subtropical Americas. Since the common pawpaw does not greatly resemble any Guaiacum species I have seen, perhaps the author meant that the pawpaw looked “tropical”; or maybe the fruit in question was an endemic Florida Asimina, which would more closely resemble Guaiacum; or perhaps it was Annona glabra, the edible pond apple native to the Everglades. We don’t really know. Editors of a 1993 edition of The De Soto Chronicles wrote: “From the description of the fruit, it is probable that this was the alligator pear or avocado (Spanish, ‘aguacate’).”12 But the gentleman from Elvas was speaking of a fruit in Florida—a land to which the avocado had not yet been introduced. Avocados are also virtually scentless, lacking then the noted “agreeable smell.”

  Pawpaw, on the other hand, could fit the “royal pear” description—green skin fading to yellow. It is also famous for, if nothing else, its fragrance. I can certainly attest to this—when I collect pawpaws each September, my entire home takes on their sweet, floral aroma, which borders on overwhelming and can last for weeks. Even
as I write this in midwinter, I can still conjure the smell, which I agree is agreeable. So perhaps it’s true that De Soto and his expedition did encounter groves of pawpaw throughout the country, propagated by the Indians.

  Regardless, the Spanish were certainly thankful for wild foods—whether pawpaws, persimmons, deer, or rabbit—whatever names they might have attached to them. “Fruit is common for all, because it grows abundantly in the woods, without any necessity of setting out trees or pruning them,” the gentleman from Elvas observed. But the expedition didn’t rely on foraging alone. De Soto’s army also helped themselves to whatever food they could take by force from various villages and towns, often setting fire to cornfields once they had gotten their fill.

  Additionally, the Spanish brought Old World crops and livestock to the “new” continent. In Florida, oranges, cattle, and pigs were all introduced, though soon abandoned (the scrub cattle were eventually wrangled by subsequent settlers, but the feral hogs persist). Other fruits, including watermelon and peaches, were introduced and would spread through the American South like wildfire—the pawpaw would now have a hemisphere’s worth of new fruits competing for people’s palates.

  Almost seventy years after De Soto first landed on the coast of Florida, the English arrived on Virginia’s Eastern Shore in 1607. But whereas De Soto’s group had come to explore, the Jamestown settlers intended to stay. Two weeks after landing, they planted European wheat,13 and they eventually grew many types of Old World grains, fruits, and vegetables.

  The settlers brought not only seeds but also agricultural traditions with them from the Old World. In addition to finding familiar foods comforting in an unfamiliar place, they likely wouldn’t have thought to try growing anything other than what they’d always known, in the manner that had always worked. But the realities of the Virginia climate soon forced them to adapt, and in just two years they planted, and came to rely on, corn, beans, and squash—and a great many wild foods as well.

  The Jamestown settlement was located within the greater Powhatan chiefdom, specifically in a territory of the Paspahegh tribe. The Powhatans ate a combination of wild and domesticated foods, and many groups cultivated tree crops, including crab apples, persimmons, hickories, black walnuts, and pawpaws. Pawpaws abounded on the Virginia coast of the Chesapeake Bay; the humid climate of Jamestown has helped it remain to this day one of the most productive locales for the fruit in the country. I’ve explored this peninsula between the York and James Rivers and found groves of pawpaws spanning miles. The Jamestown settlement was carved out of the edge of America’s vast eastern pawpaw thickets.

  Among the English settlers was a man named George Percy, who was tasked with exploring beyond Jamestown. In his journal, Percy wrote of encountering “wild beasts unknown,” as well as “strawberries, mulberries, raspberries, and fruits unknown.”14 Of course, the entire landscape would have been largely “unknown.” If Percy discovered a ripe pawpaw in the forest, he might have taken special notice of its unique flavor and texture, but then he also would have tasted persimmons and muscadines, seen the stunning flower and fruit of the wild passion vine, or maypop, plump blueberries in the pine savannas, blankets of strawberries, the glossy leaves and creamy blooms of Magnolia grandiflora, the bandit-masked raccoon, the white-faced opossum, the deep-red flash of a passing cardinal, and, as the colony pushed westward, herds of buffalo. There was a whole world of new plants and animals to experiment with foraging, growing, and hunting. Pawpaws were just one more new thing.

  It wasn’t long, however, before the pawpaw was noted, in print, by the English. Jamestown colonist William Strachey wrote in 1612 of the “assessemin”—from the Powhatan word Assimin—which he translated as “wheat plum.”15 There is no doubt then that the English encountered the fruits, and likely ate them in late August and September each year. What’s not clear is whether the colonists began to experiment with pawpaws or add them to early colonial orchards. And at least part of that obscurity is due to language; the names given to this peculiar new fruit were often muddled.

  The English explored the Caribbean and Atlantic coasts for decades before the settlement of Jamestown, where they encountered a variety of new tropical fruits, including one called papaw. But in those cases the word was referring not to the fruit of Asimina triloba, but to the papaya. Papaya (Carica papaya) is a melon-like fruit native to southern Mexico, and a now-common item in modern US supermarkets. The indigenous Arawak or Taino word for the fruit, as recorded by the Spanish in the Caribbean in the sixteenth century, was papáia, and that word eventually became our papaya. How Asimina triloba also came to be known as pawpaw is less clear. Some say that Spanish explorers called our Asimina papaya because it reminded them of the Caribbean fruit. Another theory traces the word from England. As early as 1598 the English wrote of papaws—likely an English corruption of papaya—and in 1624, Captain John Smith celebrated the “most delicate Pine-apples, Plantans, Papawes” from Bermuda.16 By 1704 the words papaw-bush, papaw-thicket, and papaw-tree were attached to fruits being sold in Europe—but again, those advertisements, and the writings of John Smith, referred to papaya.17 Then, however it happened, by the first decade of the 1700s pawpaw (or a variation on that spelling) was used in print to describe Asimina triloba. Though I’ve never seen historical texts referring to our North American Asimina as papaya, naturalist Stephen Lyn Bales blames the transition to pawpaw on “generations of lackadaisical tongues.”18 To this day, pawpaw (or papaw) is also used as the common name for Carica papaya in many English-speaking countries, including parts of West Africa, the Caribbean, and Australia. The confusion between the two very different species began at least three hundred years ago, and it’s not likely to be a settled matter in the popular mind anytime soon.

  As colonial land surveyors pushed westward, they were often accompanied by Native American guides who pointed out to those explorers what wild foods were safe for eating.

  One such traveler was Englishman John Lawson. An entry in A New Voyage to Carolina, his 1709 account of his travels in the Carolinas including descriptions of the plants, animals, and peoples of the region, appears to be the first time a variation on the word pawpaw was used to describe Asimina triloba. The “papau,” he wrote, was “as sweet, as any thing can be . . . The Papau is not a large Tree. I think, I never saw one a Foot through; but has the broadest Leaf of any Tree in the Woods, and bears an Apple about the bigness of a Hen’s Egg, yellow, soft . . . The Apple contains a large stone.” In addition to eating the fruit raw, Lawson noted, “they make rare Puddings of this Fruit.” It’s not clear to whom “they” refers, however, because Lawson references alternately the practices of the natives as well as the colonists and enslaved Africans.

  Through the hospitality of the Santee Indians, among others, Lawson ate new items such as barbecued venison and peaches, chinquapin nuts, roasted acorn, sweet corn, corn beer (“sweet like the Sugar Cane”), and a venison-opossum ragoo. In the woods, he ate wild grapes, persimmons, raspberries, huckleberries, and also pawpaws. But the cultivated crops of the Old World were already growing exceptionally well in the Carolina climate. “All peaches with us are standing,” he wrote. “We have a great many sorts of this fruit, which all thrive to admiration, peach trees coming to perfection with us as easily as the weeds.”19 There were also pears, quinces, fig, currants, cherries, and walnuts from England and France. English colonists had only been in America one hundred years at the time of Lawson’s travels yet had already established great quantities of their familiar trees, fruits, and vegetables in this hospitable new soil.

  In just two centuries, what began haphazardly with De Soto—the scattered introductions of various plants and animals—had coalesced into the beginnings of a new American agriculture. By this time pawpaws were known by the colonists of Carolina, and yet like other wild foods, they did not make the transition out of the woods and into the colonial orchard.

  French explorers of the late seventeen
th century pushed deeper into the continent’s interior before other European groups. Forts and trading posts were established as far west as present-day Montreal and Detroit, and as far south on the Mississippi River as Louisiana.

  At this time, there was no single name for Asimina triloba. To give just a few examples, the Choctaw—a Muskogean linguistic group—called pawpaw umbi;20 the Koasati, also Muskogean, said ombó.21 The Ofo of Louisiana said ephu;22 the Osage, htóžake;23 and the Atakapa called pawpaw ol’, for “sweet.”24 Although none of these words would transition into the new American lexicon, another Native American word would in fact be used to name the plant’s botanical genus.

  While the pawpaw’s common name appears to have come from the South (via papaya), its Linnaean or botanical name comes from the North, via the French explorers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Louis Joliet—a companion of René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle—was the first European to map the Mississippi, and described the fruit in his journals as “des assons, qui sont des petits fruits qui ne sont point en Europe,” or “some assons, which are little fruits which do not occur at all in Europe.”25 Around 1699, explorer Julien Binneteau wrote that the Illinois—a group of approximately thirteen tribes in the Upper Mississippi Valley—called a fruit asimines (though later historians and linguists state the word would have been properly spelled rassimina).26 Writing in 1744, Pierre-François-Xavier de Charlevoix included “les Aciminiers”27 as one of the three “most remarkable . . . fruit-trees, peculiar to this country.”28 And the Swedish-born plant explorer Pehr Kalm noted that the French of Canada called them acimine.29 Finally, in 1763 naturalist Michel Adanson named the genus Asimina, which endures.30