by Andrew Moore
But what Sanderson doesn’t know—or doesn’t let on—is that pawpaws are enjoying a revival, and are being grown by young and first-time farmers elsewhere, even in North Carolina. Even in his skepticism, he admits folks are tracking him down for his pawpaws. “You’ll have folks in the city that pick me up on that Internet, and they’ll come by and maybe get a pound. They want to get two or three and try them in their yards.” Despite what he will admit, for more than a decade Sanderson has helped spread pawpaws throughout the state—the offspring of his fruit thrive throughout the Carolinas.
I want to give Sanderson an idea of pawpaw’s popularity in Ohio, particularly through Chmiel and the Ohio Pawpaw Festival, as well as the success Jim Davis has had with shipping direct to high-end chefs in New York City. He’s stunned when I tell him the festival’s attendance regularly exceeds eight thousand people over three days. I tell him about the wild patches filled with fruiting trees. I tell him the fruit’s frozen pulp sells for as much as twelve dollars a pound. Sanderson lets out a shout, and says, “Boys, let me get my pickup!”
Sanderson excuses himself to deliver his final twenty-five pounds of pawpaw fruit to Milton Parker. Though he won’t be there to see it, his fruit will cause a stir; there won’t be enough to go around, the seeds will be saved and planted.
At their 150-acre farm in Columbus County, Gary and Terrie Tyree grow organic vegetables, organic pawpaws, and organic tobacco. Though Gary grew up on this same farm, he chose a different profession, enjoying a career as a welder at a nuclear substation. Gary’s wife, Terrie, grew up across the street (their son lives in her childhood home). Their families have farmed on these two-hundred-plus acres since the late 1800s.
Terrie welcomes us in from the rain into their home, which is shaded by a giant pecan tree, while hydrangea, pomegranate, and sago palms border the house. In the kitchen, Terrie pulls a few plump pawpaws from the refrigerator and Jon and I each eat one—cut in half, with a spoon. Mine is creamy, mild, and sweet. I came to North Carolina to learn about the state’s emerging pawpaw culture and to find traces of its history, but if I must be honest, also for the promise of several orchards’ worth of fruit. It’s good.
The first pawpaws Gary grew came bare-root. They were planted and mulched; drip irrigation was installed. But it was a hot year, and every single tree, several thousand dollars’ worth, died. Still, thanks to the persistence of Milton Parker, who connected Gary with a source for Peterson Pawpaws, that wasn’t the end. Gary ordered a few dozen more, fertilized them, and they’ve since taken off. The Tyrees are now in their third year of heavy production.
As an organic grower, Gary was interested in the pawpaw’s lack of pests, and indeed they haven’t had any serious insect problems. And although he uses organic fertilizers, including feather meal, the orchard is located on a former cow and horse pasture atop at least seventy-five years’ composted manure. The land here is rich.
They’re growing organic fruit and vegetables—everything from okra to tomatoes, ice potatoes, Asian persimmons, and blackberries—but Gary says heirloom crops, never mind something like pawpaws, aren’t in high demand locally. Even the organic tobacco is not produced for domestic consumers, but rather European markets. Still, that is beginning to change, even if slowly. The Cherokee Purple tomato for one, he says, is gaining in popularity. “The people don’t hardly turn around for the difference in this part of the country,” Gary says. “But those are starting to catch on pretty big.” Unless he’s prepared to create an elaborate shipping and storage infrastructure similar to Deep Run Orchard’s, however, he will need to find a reliable, local outlet for those pawpaws.
As we tour his orchard, Gary tells me about Eastern Carolina Organics (ECO), a farmer-owned LLC that markets and distributes wholesale organic produce to retailers, restaurants, and buying clubs. It’s the type of local business that farmers like the Tyrees and Sanderson—anyone with a niche crop—could definitely use in building a consumer base for obscure items, from lacinato kale and muscadine jelly to butterhead lettuce and fresh pawpaws. If the folks in Columbus County aren’t willing to pay four dollars a pound for pawpaws, ECO will find consumers in metropolitan areas from Charlotte and Winston-Salem to Chapel Hill and Greensboro. But the Tyrees haven’t yet brought their pawpaws to ECO; there’s a demand throughout the state that so far the producers aren’t meeting.
This year, Tyree’s crop is sold by his friend Milton Parker at the Columbus County Farmers Market. He will sell them at the Columbus County market, and even if they go for a little less than at they might at, say, the Durham Farmers Market, Parker’s salesmanship will make sure they find a home.
Gary believes pawpaws will eventually make their way into stores like Whole Foods, and into the mainstream—likely through frozen purees, or as an ingredient in ice creams and juices. But for all the importance of marketing, there’s no way around the hard work, and extreme patience, farming demands. “We got to get growing them if you’re going to do that,” he says. “People’s going to want them, and if there ain’t no supply of them they’ll ask, ‘Why are you turning me on to something this good and can’t support the habit?’”
II
THE PIEDMONT
Pawpaw season takes Wynn Dinnsen back to his youth, to summers spent handpicking tobacco. It was backbreaking work, and the scent of the crop burned your nostrils while your hands, too, were steeped in the odor. Tobacco was then taken for curing to barns—dark, musty spaces whose sole purpose was getting the crop ready for buyers. Today at Wynn’s home orchard, there is no single-purpose room for the storage of pawpaws, so the smell of ripe fruit is everywhere. Wynn doesn’t notice the pawpaw perfume coating his home during the day; it strikes him in the morning, when he wakes but is still in bed, a reminder that downstairs are ever-ripening pawpaws, fruits that need to be analyzed, pulped, and stored. And then there’s the orchard, where he’ll need to pick nearly a ton of fruit before it drops and the ants get them, if raccoons, opossums, and squirrels haven’t already feasted in the night.
On his kitchen counter, plastic cups are filled with shiny black pawpaw seeds. Each cup is labeled with a number—222, 227, 158, and so on—corresponding with a tree in his orchard. They’re seeds from exceptional fruit, nuggets of genetic information he’d like to save, pass on, continue to propagate, and sell. Thumbing through his large spiral notebook Dinnsen records notes on the wide and varied characteristics of outstanding fruit. “I’m just glad it’s got so much diversity,” he says, echoing the sentiments of Milton Parker. “That’s what’s fun about it, is having the different flavors.”
Each of his fruits is also labeled with a small white sticker corresponding to its tree. Dinnsen tries to label each pawpaw while it’s still firmly attached to the peduncle, but it’s difficult to keep up. Despite all the time he puts into his pawpaw experiment, he still manages a full-time nursery business as well. As for nearly every other pawpaw grower today, his crop remains a cottage industry at best, a labor- and time-intensive gamble.
Dinnsen started an organic farm in the 1970s but says the market wasn’t yet established, so he switched careers. In the 2000s, he started a landscaping business, but then North Carolina’s real estate bubble burst and business dried up. “I got into organic farming too early, and residential landscaping too late,” he says. It takes about eight years for a pawpaw tree to begin bearing fruit. With his orchard maturing and producing more than two thousand pounds a year, he might have finally gotten his timing right, especially if the demand for pawpaws continues to grow.
Wynn did not come to pawpaws through Milton Parker. An acquaintance, a solar panel installer, told Wynn about the fruit and let him try one. But that’s as far as he would go. The man would not divulge where the wild patch he had gathered from was located; like Italian truffles, these were guarded treasures. Wynn found a source for seed, and then waited eight years—the time it took to raise his seedlings to the production of th
eir first fruit—to taste pawpaws again. For nearly a decade he raised trees for the promise of fruit, a fleeting flavor he’d experienced only once.
Now he’s awash in fruit. For the past two years almost all of Wynn’s pawpaws have gone to a single buyer: Durham’s Fullsteam Brewery. Jon and I have plans to visit the brewery later this evening. Wynn thinks its beer is terrific, and would go with us into Durham if he didn’t have so much work today. The pawpaw festival is tomorrow, and he has to prepare.
Durham is not the tobacco city it once was. Many of the brick structures once serving as tobacco warehouses have been converted into a hub of the local food scene—restaurants, breweries, bakeries, all celebrating the local terroir. And a prominent member of that scene is Fullsteam Brewery. A “plow-to-pint” brewery, Fullsteam offers “distinctly Southern beer” that, according to its website, “celebrates the culinary and agricultural traditions of the South.” There are brews made with summer basil and sweet potatoes; I’ve even heard talk of kudzu beer. The company also has a forager series in which it turns folks’ abundance of figs, persimmons, and even chestnuts into quality beer. I’m enthusiastic about those beers and eager to try them, but I’ve come to Durham for one reason: pawpaw beer. And as luck would have it, they’ve pulled a keg out from the reserves and I’ve arrived just as it’s being tapped.
The draft list is written on a chalkboard menu. Underneath the Summer Basil Farmhouse Ale and One Hope Rye, there it is. A Belgian style, 9 percent alcohol by volume Paw Paw beer. “Bright, tropical—wine-like,” the description reads. It’s a four-ounce pour, the beer sweet yet balanced. It doesn’t taste like overripe, too-sweet, too-caramel fruit. It’s great. We hang at the bar and listen as Fullsteam’s customers ask the various bartenders where they got their pawpaws, and how they can get some for themselves. The fruit is having its moment.
III
THE NORTH CAROLINA PAW PAW FESTIVAL
The pawpaw fest opens with a buffet line of pawpaw snacks: dips, salsas, sliced fresh fruit, and ice cream. There are a few presentations and several question-and-answer sessions. The fruit is new, and folks want to learn as much as they can. Milton Parker quickly sells out of fruit and trees, as does Wynn Dinnsen. Because of the large turnout, there’s not enough fruit to go around, not even to sample. I improvise, and recall that there’s a bag of fruit in my car Wynn gave me the day before. I borrow a knife and set up a tasting station to offer free samples. In a few minutes, I look around and notice that the line is wrapped around the pavilion. I slice fruit for more than an hour—offering samples to nearly everyone in attendance. My tape recorder is placed on the table, and I ask folks to give me their impressions:
• “Oh, it’s kind of soft. Oh, it’s good. It tastes like—it is kind of like pudding.”
• “It’s good. Better than I thought it would be.”
• “Better than persimmons. Oh yeah [laughing].”
• “I just thought it was a diddley we sang in school, you know? Pickin up pawpaws, puttin’ ’em in your pocket! I didn’t know they were for real [laughing].”
• A woman: “This is delicious! Nutritionally, it’s high in potassium, right?” Man: “Yeah, all the essential amino acids. And more niacin than a banana. Not potassium, but more niacin.”
• “Kinda like a ripe banana, ain’t it?”
• “Oh, it’s sweet!”
• “Smells good.”
• “I’ve heard that song all my life. [laughs] First time [eating the fruit]. I went to school up in the mountains. Caldwell County. And my grandma used to sing it to me.”
• “I have a neighbor who has a tree. But it was an old-timey tree you got in the wild somewhere, and we did not eat it until the entire surface looked like that.”
• “Where I work down at the southern end of the next county, we’ve got a lot of wild ones growing along the creek, and we’ve gone down there in August and grab up a big shirt full of them.”
IV
RIDGE AND VALLEY
We leave North Carolina and head for the mountains. After a quick dinner in Roanoke, Virginia, and a requisite drive along the Blue Ridge Parkway, we find our evening’s campsite. Not far from where we stay tonight is the homeland of the Monacan Tribe of Virginia. It’s where Professor Jay Vest grew up. Vest is professor of American Indian studies at the University of North Carolina, Pembroke, near Lesley Sanderson’s home in Robeson County. Founded in 1887 as the Croatan Normal School, it was for the exclusive enrollment of American Indians in Robeson County. Though pawpaws are largely unknown among the Lumbee, Vest remembers eating them as a child in Virginia. When I spoke with him, he recalled childhood walks, with his father and siblings, into the woods each fall to harvest nuts, persimmons, and pawpaws. Like Morris said, if they grew on your property, you knew about them.
In the morning, we stop for breakfast in Lewisburg, West Virginia. The café is nestled amid a bicycle shop, an Irish pub, and, at the edge of town, Carnegie Hall. Running lengthwise through the café is a large communal dining table. We sit near a mother and her daughter. We’ve still got a few of Wynn and Derek’s pawpaws (I managed to reserve a few for the road), and we’re eager to share. The mother is delighted by the surprise. She grew up with them in the southwest corner of the state, but doesn’t know where to look for them around Lewisburg. She’s been describing them to an acquaintance and can finally let him try one. I hand one to each of them. Today happens to be her daughter’s birthday, and she’s eating her first pawpaw. “Tastes like an avocado!” she says.
I’ve ordered a peanut butter and banana sandwich. Yesterday we sampled several cultivars at Derek Morris’s house. One particular variety, he said, was so banana-like, firm and chewy, it might be good on a sandwich. I slice open a large pawpaw and spread half of it alongside the banana and peanut butter. Tastes pretty good.
Driving north on US 219, we stop at several roadside markets. At one, an old man with a beard down to his chest is, with his son, selling tomatoes, peppers, and other homegrown produce. I ask about pawpaws. “Pawpaws!” says the son, gray-haired himself. “We used to have a couple pawpaw trees, till Daddy mowed them over! Haven’t had pawpaws in years and would like some myself.”
Farther on, near Elkins, a man wearing a baseball cap, jeans, and a white T-shirt stands holding a sign. He’s staring into each passing car. His sign reads, RAMPS FOR SALE. But it’s late summer, not ramp season. The man has been digging in the forest, rooting for ramp bulbs. “A lot of people don’t like what I’m doing,” he says. “They yell at me and tell me it’s wrong.” But he pays his state foraging fees, he says; he is legitimate. I’m unsure of the ecological repercussions but I’ve pulled over and already listened to his story, so I purchase a massive plastic bag of ramps for just five bucks.
Later, back in Pittsburgh, I plant those bulbs on the hillside above my community farm, and the following spring they sprout. That same spring, as the ramps are in full foliage, I also plant three pawpaw trees at the farm, the beginning of my own modest experiment. We could plant more, but few at the farm have ever heard of pawpaws, much less tasted one. What if no one likes it? I don’t think I can convince them to give up space allotted for garlic, blueberries, and tomatoes for the dozen pawpaws I envision. Not yet. As in Robeson County, most residents of Pittsburgh, and much of southwestern Pennsylvania, aren’t familiar with the fruit. But I’m confident my co-farmers will fall for it. I’m sure that in six years, they’ll be asking why we didn’t plant dozens of them. Or perhaps next year I should just take a page from Milton Parker’s playbook, and insist that we do.
— CHAPTER SIXTEEN —
DOWN SOUTH
“Do not buy tobacco of pawpaw color (motley color); it is called ‘fool-catcher.’”
—KENTUCKY SUPERSTITIONS (1920)1
It’s late August and I have arrived at the Kentucky State Fair. After navigating my way through a sea of parked cars, I approach t
he convention center. I’ve come here because somewhere inside, beyond the fried dough, pickled okra, and buttermilk piecrusts, is a pawpaw exhibit. It’s a competition that dates back as far as any officials can remember. “I’m not even sure who could tell you how long it’s been going on,” I was told. The first incarnation of the fair was held in 1816, and at some point in the past two hundred years pawpaws became part of it—they are tradition. More than half a million guests will attend the festival over a period of ten days, and while most come to support grandmothers in apple pie competitions, or to see headlining musical acts, a few of us do it for the pawpaws.
On my way to the agricultural wing, I wander past quilt displays, children’s drawings, Kentucky-made furniture and sculptures, jars-upon-jars of put-up fruits and vegetables, tables filled with sorghum syrup and sorghum pops—a seemingly unending array of cultural products. In the livestock wing, massive cows parade like camels in an ancient bazaar; there are pigeons with unusual feathers jutting from their feet, showy like Elizabethan ruffs; rabbits the size of dogs; chickens, roosters, guinea hens, a cacophony of shrieking poultry.
Finally, I approach the wing with vegetables, melons, fruits, and nuts. A massive pumpkin the size of a doghouse rests in a wagon. Tobacco is hung upside down, growing in five-gallon buckets, arranged in piles. On display are nearly a hundred types of beans; heirloom tomatoes with names like Chocolate Stripes, Moonglow, and Green Copa; plates of black walnut, hickory, pecan; pears, apples, American persimmons, and, on a small section of table all to themselves, pawpaws. Pawpaws shouldn’t be ripe yet in the Ohio River Valley. But here, now, I can smell that familiar fragrance, the sweet tropical aroma that from a single fruit can fill a room. These are ripe.
