Pawpaw

by Andrew Moore

  When Charles Johnson, an LSU fruit crops specialist, joins us, I ask if creating a buffer would help to protect pawpaws in a commercial orchard. “I think you would have to have something for a little bit of a windbreak,” he says, “and they would do better if they’ve got a little bit of shade in the afternoon. Like if I plant pecan trees, I might plant them every other row in there, just to give you some shade and wind protection.”

  Tags are still affixed to the trees, labeling each variety—MD-14, Ark-21, 7-10-34, Taytoo, Wabash, Rappahannock, and others. Despite the battering of the trees, there are positive lessons to be learned. Other than mowing, the trees receive very little attention, and they’re still producing excellent fruit. Jerry and I eat the ones we find—they’re big and great. Again, other than the ones that have been jostled and made crooked by high winds, they’re perfectly healthy. LSU has never sprayed for pests, never had any reason to do so.

  Before the RVT it was unclear to researchers how pawpaws would perform in an orchard this far south. But Johnson says that chilling hours—the minimum number of cold hours a fruit tree needs to blossom—have not been a factor. Previous reports had indicated pawpaws need eight hundred to a thousand chilling hours. “Some years, in mild winters, we may get 250 here—but it has not affected the fruiting,” he says.

  Unfortunately for the pawpaw (and for Jerry), the fruit is no longer an official mission of the university. The USDA has approximately twenty trees planted at a research plot in Poplarville, Mississippi, which shares a similar climate and challenges to those found here in Baton Rouge. The researchers are not, however, doing any cultivar research; they’re simply watching to see if they grow, and how long it takes until fruit production. Johnson says there has been interest in Louisiana, growers looking to plant a few in their yards, and a few more ambitious growers like Jerry. But in the years since the orchard was planted in Baton Rouge no commercial growers have followed suit. “It’s an interesting crop,” he says, “I think we could grow it. I’d like to see some growers just trying it, and they can be more innovative than I have been here. They can put them in different places in their orchards and on their farms, and find these niche places for them to grow.” The pawpaw market in Louisiana is wide open.

  Pawpaws do seem to be a forgotten fruit in Louisiana. “I ask the so-called woodsmen, the people that are always in the woods,” Johnson says, “and they say, ‘I’ve never seen it, I wouldn’t know a pawpaw if I saw it.’ And they don’t recognize the tree.” Jerry agrees. People he knows in their eighties and nineties, who have “lived their life in the woods fox hunting, coon hunting, and raising cows,” have never heard of them. “And they’re in the woods by the thousands, along that Tickfaw River, but they’d never heard of them,” he says. Many of Jerry’s neighbors also say they wouldn’t know one if they saw it—even though he’s seen them growing on their property!

  Jerry has one theory: that August is just too hot. Even the most avid hunters tend to avoid the woods this time of year, when the mosquitoes seem to bite more often and with more vigor, when the sun is high and baking. But in Louisiana, that’s when the pawpaws are ripe. So from east Texas to the Florida panhandle the fruit goes largely unnoticed. Indeed, pawpaws are absent from much of the lower South’s food writing. Paul Prudhomme didn’t include them in any of his Cajun tomes; neither, at the turn of the century, did The Picayune’s Creole Cook Book, which included everything from “compote of pigeon and frogs a la Creole” to blue plum jelly and banana sherbet.40 Mississippi native Craig Claiborne, food editor and restaurant critic for the New York Times, forwent pawpaw in his Southern Cooking (though he did include a recipe for persimmon ice cream), and in The Taste of Country Cooking, Edna Lewis’s seminal work on rural southern foodways, there’s no mention of pawpaws, though wonderful recipes for wild foods are well represented, including dandelion blossom wine, persimmon pudding, hickory nut cookies, and watercress salad. But according to Jerry’s theory, all of these omissions might make sense. Dandelions and watercress can be harvested in spring; persimmons and hickory nuts later into the fall. And August is not only hot, but also a busy time on the farm. When crops needed harvesting, there is simply no time for pawpaw hunting.

  Another theory suggests that the lack of pawpaw culture here might also have to do with language. Once Europeans and Africans settled in Louisiana, a lingua franca—known as Mobilian Jargon—developed between speakers of Old World languages and the many Native American languages. And so the Louisiana Indians, who had previously known pawpaw by a variety of names, came to refer to pawpaw as açmine. Linguist Emanuel Drechsel observed that this word was often mistaken for jasmine, and the tree açminier for jasminier (the word açmine was taken into Mobilian Jargon either from the Illinois rassimina or the Virginia Algonquian or Powhatan assimin).41

  Açminier first entered Louisiana French either through the Mobilian Jargon, or through the Acadians (Cajuns), who were exiled from Canada. As early as 1744, French explorers in Canada wrote of “l’Acimine” and continued to encounter the fruit in the North and throughout the Mississippi Valley. In Louisiana French, pawpaw was also frequently referred to as jasminier, or jasmine, as opposed to jasmin, which, confusingly, is Louisiana French for jasmine. English speakers may have trouble with the pawpaw/papaw/papaya confusion, but Francophones have it no easier. All of this is to say that in much of Louisiana, pawpaw may—literally—have not been part of the vocabulary.

  And yet another thought is that in southern Louisiana, at least, there’s never been a need for the poor man’s banana. This far south, you could grow the real thing.

  But of course, folks do know pawpaw, even if they’re fewer in number. At the Vermilionville living history village, in Lafayette, I meet Steve Chandler, who is taking a break from playing fiddle. I hold out a ripe pawpaw and ask what he knows about them. Without any hesitation he takes the pawpaw from my hand, tears it in half, and squeezes out a mouthful of pulp. “I know they taste good,” he says. He wipes the pulp from his fingers and we shake hands. Although pawpaw trees might be thought of as rare in the Louisiana prairie of today, they were once known. They’re included in Vermilionville’s handout on wild foods and medicinal plants: Assiminier, its name in Louisiana French, was once used as a laxative.

  In a curious scene from an 1874 Louisiana adventure novel by Thomas Mayne Reid titled Bruin; Or, The Grand Bear Hunt, a large group is preparing for a barbecue in the swamps. “[A] party of negroes had been busy in the woods, searching out the tall slender saplings of the pawpaw (asimina triloba), and now returned, bringing their spoil with them. The saplings were laid across the top of the pit, thus extemporizing over it a huge gridiron. The ox, which was to form the staple of the day’s feast, had been killed and dressed; and having been split in halves after the fashion of the barbecue was laid upon the bars to roast . . . it is well known that the sap which exudes from the pawpaw, when thus exposed to fire, adds a new relish to whatever is cooked upon it.”42 This is the only reference I have ever seen extolling the virtues of pawpaw wood in culinary applications, barbecue or otherwise. Which is curious, because although the excerpt is from a work of fiction, there must be some truth in it. Reid was so specific about the species that he included its scientific name—either because he was sure of its culinary virtues and wanted to be clear in his instructions, or perhaps to avoid any confusion with Carica papaya. Until it can be proven otherwise, the prevalence of pawpaw-smoked barbecue is yet another unknown in the fruit’s history.

  Jerry and I load my car with pawpaws until it is packed to the gills. As Dale Brooks once told Southern Living magazine, “Some people say they get a giddy feeling from the odor . . . I can’t attest to that, but I do know that when I have them lying around the house, I’m extremely happy.”43 With that much fruit, the fragrance overpowers my little hatchback, and stays with me for the next thousand miles.

  I drive first to a coffee shop that also happens to be a bakery specializing
in cake balls. I wonder, since pawpaw flavor is preserved best when uncooked, if perhaps their cake balls would work. The basic recipe calls for combining fully cooked cake batter with a wet batter (such as pawpaw puree) that is then rolled and drizzled with icing. It seems perfect. I hope the friendly baristas and cooks will be willing to experiment with this new fruit. They try it but are not blown away, perhaps even holding back a little disgust at the texture. Still, they indulge me and my strange bag of fruit, with one employee saying it tastes like a mango. I keep waiting for them to get it, to fall in love with the fruit, but I eventually realize that no cake balls will be made today. Instead, I leave three pieces of fruit with a note for the manager, but I’m not optimistic that they won’t end up in the trash.

  Pawpaw detractors are nothing new. In 1902, the Topeka Daily Capital reported: “The pawpaw crop is light this year. This would be important if pawpaws were good to eat.”44 In his 1905 treatise on pawpaws, James A. Little addressed the anti-pawpaw contingent. “There are a few persons who do not relish the pawpaw and they give as a reason that they do not eat things a hog won’t eat,” he wrote. “They consider that a stunner. I tell them I don’t eat everything a hog eats.”45

  But Jerry Dedon, of course, is not one of those people. Because of a late frost that killed many blossoms, the pawpaw trees in his orchard didn’t produce much fruit. After I have returned to Pittsburgh, he sends me an email. “A friend and I went on the river today to check out his paw-paw trees and we came back with about a dozen nice ones he shook loose.” Jerry won’t be without pawpaws this year.

  In the woods of northern Louisiana, flatlands stretch to the horizon. Dense columns of pine form unbroken ranks, straight and tall. I stare into these woods and recall that just east of here, in the mid-1800s, Henry Bibb escaped from enslavement, if only briefly. Bibb was born into slavery in 1815, in Shelby County, Kentucky, approximately thirty miles from the Ohio River. The distance to that river was all that separated Bibb from freedom. He would overcome it more than once, and eventually became a leading abolitionist of his day. After his first escape, Bibb returned to rescue his wife, Malinda, and their child. The attempt failed, and the family was sold to a ruthless plantation owner in Claiborne, Louisiana. When it was discovered that Bibb—a deeply religious man—had attended a prayer meeting without permission and would be flogged and sold apart from Malinda, the family fled to the wilderness, slogging through the Red River swamps, “among the buzzing insects and wild beasts of the forest.” While on the run, Bibb wrote that “Our food was parched corn, with wild fruits such as pawpaws, percimmons, grapes, &c. We did at one time chance to find a sweet potato patch . . . but most of the time while we were out we were lost.”46 They were eventually apprehended; Bibb was lashed, and sold away from Malinda. Though the family would never be reunited, Bibb did finally escape to freedom.

  The terrain I see today seems sparsely populated, but I know its history of habitation is ancient. The Piney Woods, more than a poetic description of the landscape, is an official eco-region that includes east Texas, southern Arkansas, western Louisiana, and a bit of southeastern Oklahoma. The woods also represent the southwestern limit of Asimina triloba. According to A Field Guide to Texas Trees, pawpaw trees occur in several eco-regions in the Lone Star State: “the deep, rich soils of the bottomlands of the Pineywoods, Gulf Prairies and Marshes, and Post Oak Savannah.” The book’s authors state that in years past, “there were large drifts and thickets of Pawpaw, but now it is found as single, isolated understory trees, or in small groves.”47 Located in Harrison County, Texas, is Paw Paw Bayou—named, certainly, for the trees that once grew in abundance there.

  In northeast Texas there is a geologic formation that dates back to the Early Cretaceous, known as the Paw Paw Formation. The pawpaw shales, or clays, were named for nearby Pawpaw Creek. In 1992, the skeletal remains of a large, prehistoric creature were discovered in this area, a creature now known as the Pawpawsaurus. An herbivore, the Pawpawsaurus likely ate fruits. Perhaps even a proto-Asimina was part of the armored giant’s diet.48

  But today, as you travel west into Texas, pawpaws are indeed fewer in number. The Sabine River, which divides Texas and Louisiana, marks the transition from pawpaw country to persimmon country. According to Caddo legend, an old Indian chief who lived on the banks of the Sabine told his two sons it was time they found their own land. “The chief told one to face east, the other west, and then walk in the directions they faced from sunup of one day until sundown of the next. Where each found himself at that time was the place for his tribe. The one walking east found the fruit of the pawpaw tree, and his people were called Natchitoches, ‘pawpaw eaters.’ The one walking west found persimmon trees, and members of his family were called Nacogdoches, ‘persimmon eaters.’”49 The city of Natchitoches, Louisiana, established by Louis Juchereau de St. Denis in 1714, was named for the tribe. I was unable to visit it on this trip, however, and cannot say whether any of its residents are still pawpaw eaters.

  I am driving north on US 167. It’s twilight, and the setting sun casts a warm glow on the grasses and shrubs below the pine forest. I’m far from Cajun country, but there’s a food truck in the tiny town of Bernice, Louisiana: the Rockin’ Cajun Tamale. Bright bulbs advertise gator meat and crawfish pies. I make a U-turn and head for the window.

  “Be right with you, cher,” the proprietress calls out. I order a combination of boudin balls and crawfish pies. “Everything made from scratch, cher,” she says. Mindy is from southern Louisiana and has been cooking Cajun food since she was a girl. She’s talkative and friendly, and so I bring up pawpaws. She’s unfamiliar with them, and calls her husband, Mike, to come and look.

  “Yeah, I know pawpaw,” he says, a little taken aback. “But I thought I was coming out here to see a pawpaw,” he says, by which he means he thought there would be a grandfather standing here, not a piece of fruit. “I used to get them here, right up the road, several years ago,” he continues. “You won’t find them just anywhere.” Mike then asks if I’m familiar with possum grapes, and takes me around back of the property to show me his own wild bounty. “They’re little bitty, and they’re loaded,” he says. “Look up there, look how many. I’m fixin’ to pick them and see if I can make me a wine.” I ask if I should eat the seed inside. “Just chew it and spit it out, kind of like a huckleberry. We got huckleberries this time of year too. Huckleberries are real, real good for your liver. So the Indians say.” The possum grapes are indeed tiny, and mostly consist of seed, but the little bit of flesh packs a large punch, like wild SweeTarts. Mike gives me a bunch to take on the road, and they’re a nice follow-up to Mindy’s rich, delicious crawfish pies. Meanwhile Mindy has been thinking on the pawpaw. “I think we call it for something else,” she says. “We have nickname for the little bits of everything, so I just can’t put finger for this.” Assiminier, perhaps?

  Later, I finally cross into Arkansas, and in El Dorado I stop for frozen yogurt at a gas station. It’s around midnight, and I’m the only person in the store. I take the yogurt to a small bistro table out front and mix a medium-sized pawpaw into the cup. The fruit is a little overripe, with strong caramel notes. And while it’s not Dale Brooks’s preferred Dairy Queen vanilla, at this moment the combination is just right.

  The Ozarks are the oldest mountains in the US. When their peaks were at their highest, before they eroded to the hills they are today, pawpaws were present. When ground sloths and giant beavers and even mastodons wound their ways through the Ozark bottomlands, pawpaws were on the menu. And as they did elsewhere, the Native Americans who eventually settled in these hills ate pawpaws, and used the tree’s fibers in textiles. In Missouri, carbonized pawpaw seeds date back to at least 1650 BC.50 The fruit was eaten in bottomland camps, or taken back to caves and rock shelters where groups ate or cooked using large amounts of pawpaws. In one such dwelling, the dry cave conditions encouraged mummification. In one of the most elaborate burials yet discover
ed, a person was buried with a bundle of pawpaw bark and a woven bag “containing a brush and a bone awl.”51

  Settlers of European descent also ate pawpaws, of course, and although much time has passed since those frontier days, some culinary traditions haven’t changed much since the 1800s. Fred Pfister, former publisher of The Ozarks Mountaineer, once wrote: “Ozarkers, culinary-wise, could be divided into two types. The first is the basic meat and potatoes type, with a mind closed to outside influences. The other type follows the philosophy if it grows and God made it, it can be eaten. This type’s table would be graced with scrambled eggs and squirrels’ brains, barbecued ’coon, woodchuck ragout, venison, pawpaw and persimmon bread, fruit pies and cobblers, and jams and jellies from the cornucopia of local plants such as blackberry, pokeberry, mulberry, raspberry, gooseberry, wild grape, plum, and elderberry. In short, anything that could be picked and prepared.”52 Further research shows that, historically, pawpaws were ubiquitous and widely eaten. The Paw Paw Militia earned its nickname in nearby Missouri, simultaneously snacking on the fruit and hiding in its thickets. So did the Paw-paw French, French colonists who settled around the Ozark community of Old Mines in the late 1700s. According to one descendant, the “funloving insult” referred to poor folks “who had to live on paw-paw in the summer and possums in the winter.”53 The name stuck, as did their language, and for centuries a unique dialect known as Paw-paw French was spoken in that corner of the Ozarks. Its speakers are now rare, but the language is still spoken.

  Winding through the back hills, I find a family farm offering sorghum syrup, mayhaw jelly, and fresh eggs arranged on tables and carts in their front yard; and at a grocery store, muscadine grape juice. Elsewhere, at a gas station, a handwritten flyer advertises fresh milk for sale and includes a number to call for more information. Among these lingering food traditions, I’m hoping to find pawpaws.