Pawpaws in the Zombie Apocalypse

This morning I needed to find an old journal of mine from 1999 for some writing I'm working on. So I got into a box of old stuff I keep in my closet, and in the box, along with the journal, I found a wad of paper towels with tape wrapped around it. As I was holding it, NJ looked over at me and said, "What is that?" I didn't know, I told her. But as I inspected it more closely I saw my own handwriting, executed with a sharpie.

My block letters said "PAWPAW." What could it mean, I wondered? And then...

I looked still more closely and saw more block letters, faded, as if obscured by the dust of the crypt. They said, "PERSIMMONS."

What could this mean? It was my own handwriting, but I didn't remember making this ball of paper towels and labeling it. And what would I have meant in suggesting that there were actual pawpaws and persimmons inside? That would be very strange indeed...Maybe I simply meant that I had stored some pawpaw and persimmon seeds inside? That must be it, I thought. But still I wondered why I wouldn't have used the sharpie to also write the word "SEEDS" in block letters.

So I ran and got some scissors, determined to excavate, determined to cut and unravel these strata of paper towels, these mummy bandages that concealed a mystery content.

Before I proceeded I malingered, and took another picture, having a sense that whatever it was that I was poised to unleash...

...may well change everything.

To my surprise and delighted terror, from the bandages emerged a pawpaw zombie,
an undead Asimina tribola! 

I searched my memories, wondering what version of my past self would have prepared such a macabre gift for my present self. It would have been at least eight years ago that this pawpaw was prematurely picked and then refused to ripen. And then I would have kept it on the counter for months, watching it dry out and turn deep purple with blue-white highlights. And then, though I don't remember it, I would have wrapped it in paper towels and taped it up and labeled it with a sharpie and placed it with my journals?

But wait. As I took the rock-hard zombie between my thumb and forefinger, contemplating its undead status, I caught a whiff. And it smelled precisely like you would imagine it would smell, emerging as it did from its pawpaw crypt: like deepest caramel. (If you know pawpaws, you know that as they become overripe [or just ripe enough, according to your preference] they caramelize.) I didn't remember my act of interred the undead pawpaw, but when I smelled it, I did remember that I had many years ago held this very pawpaw to my nose and smelled its caramel waftings. (It's evening now, but the smell of undead pawpaw still clings to my fingers, even after several handwashings and applications of hand sanitizer over the course of the day.)

I continued unraveling the bandages and found...

...six persimmons, also (shudder) zombies! But these ones didn't smell.

You can't see it in the picture, and I didn't want to stick around to take a video, but after I had awoken them all, they started walking toward me, a zombie pawpaw (and undead persimmon) apocalypse, slouching empty-eyed and menacingly toward us all, driving us from our suburban home and into--not that, it's too predictable!--a decaying urban environment of crumbling reinforced concrete and broken glass. 

And so, huddled with my family in the burnt-out shell of a moldering building in a post-apocalyptic industrial park, I've written this blog post, my heart droning all the while like a clenching and unclenching metal machine, as we hope against hope that the zombies will find others--not us!--to caramelize.

Pawpaw Seeds on the Christmas Tree

Just quickly, I wanted to make a post showing some strings of pawpaw seed garland on our Christmas tree (you'll see one string front and center, and the other string is further back and toward the right). You'll also see two dried citrus ornaments (a lime on the left and an orange on the right). And unfortunately, you'll also see a photobombing snowman.

On the Uses and Abuses of Pawpaw Seeds

This far outside of the home range, the pawpaw's seeds (if you have any) become kind of sacred. If you know the pawpaw's habitat (growing in Eastern hollows and beside streams running along acreages of wildwood land nourished by humid air), you know you'd be more likely to find a hen's tooth than a pawpaw seed here in Utah. Consider what you know about the pawpaw's native habitat against these pictures I recently took down in Utah's San Rafael Swell, which we visited a couple weeks ago to do several hours of hiking.

Yucca with November shadows, hardly a likely ally of the pawpaw.

Looking toward the Henry Mountains way off in the distance, where buffalo roam.

S, sitting on sandstone, admiring a yucca that had distinguished itself by forming a particularly compact ball.

A closer look at the yucca of S's admiration.

Toward sundown, the shadows on the redrock cliffs, under a stark white Martian sky.

So here in Utah, the pawpaw's genetic material is pretty rare. But there used to be a time, in Virginia, when we had so many pawpaw seeds we didn't know what to do with them.

Before NJ and I ate our first pawpaws, we had read about the seeds, and we knew that pawpaw luminaries like Neil Peterson were working to reduce their presence in the cultivars. But when we ate our first pawpaws (wild), the seeds seemed so interesting that we held onto them--hard and black and shiny, a little bigger than lima beans.

We thought about planting them, but we lived in a condominium. And as we saw online, the process for preparing them to plant seemed a little involved (here's a write-up on stratifying pawpaw seeds in preparation for planting). So we let them dry out, which, if you looked at the write-up, you'll know breaks all the rules. They changed from black to brown, and they sat around our house in a bowl looking interesting.

That year was also our first American persimmon harvest, and we held onto those seeds as well. I had read online that people used to re-purpose persimmon seeds as buttons, so after the seeds dried out I used the awl on my Swiss Army Knife to bore two holes in several seeds. I sent a little bag of persimmon-seed-buttons to each of my four brothers and sisters and to my parents as well. And I replaced the factory-made buttons on one of my old shirts with persimmon seed buttons.

Here's the shirt, which still hangs in my closet.

Here's a closer view of the buttons.

I haven't followed up with my siblings and parents, but I'm pretty sure none of them sewed the persimmon seed buttons onto their clothing, though I could be wrong about that...

That was fine for persimmon seeds. But the pawpaw seeds didn't seem like they would make good buttons. (Dried persimmon seeds are really hard and dense, good button-making material, while the pawpaw seeds have a bit of a hollow feel to them, and their outer shell has some give; and that seems like bad button-making material.) I had read that some people have used the stuff inside pawpaw seeds as a treatment for lice. But we were blessed not to have any lice...

Then at Christmas time, it seemed to me that pawpaw seeds would make good tree decorations. I got some fishing line and a needle and thimble and forced the needle through the small opening at one end of the seeds, running the fishing line just beneath the outer shell to the other side. Soon I had made several strings of pawpaw seeds for our Christmas tree. And when Christmas was over, we didn't put them away. And they're still hanging around in our house here in Utah. (Oh the abuses of pawpaw seeds!)

Here are some strings hanging from a piece of furniture we have in our living room. You can see the strings close up and also hanging off the other side of the furniture. Note the way the seeds alternate directions on the strings, with one oriented to the right then the next oriented to the left, then the next oriented to the right and so on. That's not by design on my part. It's the geometry of the pawpaw seeds, interacting with the necessary through-line of the fishing line, forcing the seeds into an alternating pattern.

The painting in the background is NJ's, of Zion National Park here in Utah.

Strings of pawpaw seeds with: a painting of Zion National Park, a glass fishing float, a stack of sea urchin shells, a 1920s postcard from North Bend Oregon, an abalone shell, and (in the front right corner) two mallets for a Javanese gong.

On Pawpaw Seeds' Alternating Pattern

String'ed Pawpaw Seeds shining bright
On one of Utah's November nights:
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?  

Like I say, from here in Utah, it seems like such a waste of the pawpaw's genetic material to place them on strings of fishing line and hang them around the house. And even in Virginia, we became increasingly enlightened over the course of our four years of pawpaw foraging. One November evening, maybe during the second year we foraged, I was out by a gully near our condo, throwing seeds and gritty fruits that didn't ripen down toward the stream, hoping they would sprout during the coming spring. From across the lamp-lit parking lot, one of my students (I was teaching a course on twentieth-century US drama at the University of Virginia at the time) recognized me and came over and asked what I was doing. Even within the pawpaw's home range, the pawpaw is hardly well- known, and so my answer ("I'm throwing pawpaw seeds and gritty fruits into this ravine") was hardly an adequate answer from her teacher, as she walked back into the night with her friends. And then, the final year we lived in Virginia, in November or December we took our pawpaw seeds to a nearby park, called Ivy Creek, and we threw them into the fallen leaves along a wooded section of the trail that wasn't too far from the parking lot. We went back maybe in May or June 2008, right before we moved, and there were several (maybe dozens of?) pawpaw seedlings growing.

But here in Utah, we've become enlightened enough to try stratifying the extremely limited number of pawpaw seeds that were in our four pawpaw fruits (all from the Wells cultivar) earlier this fall.

Here's the plastic container, with four layers of moist paper towels, to keep the seeds from drying out. We keep it in the refrigerator because in addition to not drying out, pawpaw seeds need to be cold for a few months if they're to come out of dormancy in the spring.

These two seeds sit on the top layer; they're from our smallest pawpaw of the year (and the last one to ripen).

These three seeds are from the next layer down; they're from our second smallest pawpaw of  the year (the second to last to ripen). When I got to this layer while taking pictures, I could see there was some mold growing on the paper towel and a little mold on the pawpaw seeds, so I changed out the paper towels for new ones before putting the container back in the fridge.

These five seeds are from the next layer down; they're from our second largest pawpaw of the year (the second pawpaw to ripen).

These ten seeds are from the final layer, at the very bottom of the container. They're from the largest pawpaw of the year, the first to ripen. This was the solitary pawpaw in attendance at the First Annual Utah Pawpaw Festival.

Here's the container, tucked away in a separate nook within the larger chaos of our fridge...

...while fifteen feet away from those privileged stratifying seeds in the fridge, there's a sobering reminder of other ways we might have made use of our pawpaw seeds during the waning autumn.  

A Few More of the Pawpaw's First-time Tasters

On Wednesday this week, the final two (of four total) pawpaws were soft enough to pick. We let them ripen in the normal privileged place on the kitchen table, among the bronze quail and Mexican candlestick holders. And this evening they were ripe so we headed off for two more drive-by pawpaw tastings.

Here's what people said at the first drive-by tasting:

JR (who is a self-professed foodie and prides himself on not eating at the same restaurant twice) said: "It's real good isn't it? It tastes like candy. Candy is the first thing that comes to my mind. The flavor seems reminiscent of--related to--a tropical Starburst, I'd say. And the texture is almost candy-ish too. It's obviously less resistant than a Starburst but it seems like it's in the same family of resistance. It also feels mango-y, and maybe a little bit [mango-y] taste-wise. It feels really tropical....I should have said, it's like Starburst but without the sugar overdose."

Two of his kids asked to try some pawpaw as well. BR (about eight years old) said: "It tastes like a taste that I've never tasted before. It reminds me of a green fruit that tastes like something I've never tasted before." And KR (same age as BR) said: "It tastes unpleasant like a banana. It was also very bitter."

And here's what people said at the second drive-by tasting, at the H's house:

Joanna said: "A little sweet. Interesting. It's good. It almost tastes like an overripe banana. Almost like a custard. It reminds me of the filling of bismarck, like cream filling."

Jordan said: "I like the texture...that creaminess. It's milder and better than an overripe banana. Not quite kiwi but kind of. There's a doughiness to it, like a bread dough."

Three of their kids tried it. EH (age 12) said, "Tastes like pears and it's creamy." SH (about 9) said, "I think it tastes like banana mixed with strawberry. It tastes more like mango." And their youngest, LH, said, "It's good."

Here are the two pawpaws that were ripe. The one in the foreground was only about an inch and a half long. The one further to the back was twice as big. The one is the foreground is the one we shared at the two tasting events. And when we got home and got the kids to bed, NJ and I ate the one in the background. I kept the seeds, though there were only two seeds in the smaller fruit and three seeds in the bigger fruit. And honestly, the size of these two fruits doesn't say great things about the fruit-bearing capacity of any trees that would grow from their seeds. I told NJ that if they sprout, maybe I would give these particular seedlings to some friends I don't like very much, or even to some frenemies. 

The Pawpaw's First-time Tasters

With the first pawpaw that our Wells cultivar bore (a few weeks ago now), we held the First Annual Utah Pawpaw Festival.

But during the past week (maybe Wednesday?), the Wells cultivar dropped a second somewhat smaller pawpaw. What to do with this one? On Friday we decided to share it with some friends around the neighborhood, each of them first-time pawpaw tasters.

NJ and I have eaten so many pawpaws that to us a pawpaw tastes like a pawpaw. So we wanted to see what first-time pawpaw tasters would say about, well, their first time tasting a pawpaw.

Before dropping in at a few friends' houses, I took a picture of the spot on the table where the pawpaw had been ripening since falling from the tree.

We stopped by at the first house and found our friends willing to taste a pawpaw for the first time. They even let me use their brand new knife to cut it.

Before they tasted it, we had them smell it. KS said, "To me it has a pina colada smell," and RS said, "To me it smells like a star fruit, like unmistakably like a star fruit, with a hint of pineapple." And their daughter VS said, "Like a sapote and a fruit from Hawaii." (We had shared a mamey sapote with their family a few weeks ago; to me it seems like a high compliment to a pawpaw to be compared to a mamey sapote, since I can hardly imagine a better fruit than a good ripe mamey sapote.) 

What a nice looking pawpaw!

Based on my extensive notes, which I took as she spoke, this is what KS said: "It has the consistency of a mango. I like it. I'd say--I know passion fruit is its own kind of fruit, but I think of passion fruit as an umbrella of fruit...guava, papaya, passion fruit, and I would say pawpaw too. I'd say they're sister fruits. It's like a mild pina colada. Sapote is like a melony custard. Kind of like that too."

Then RS said, "See I taste a little banana-ish in there, both in the texture and in taste. Texture is very banana-ish. Definitely tropical to me. What else? So if you describe it without comparing it to other fruits--a mild sweetness but citrusy in some ways. I think you could eat a lot of them. It's mild enough to eat a lot of them but sweet enough to really like them. Closer to the skin it becomes a little more bitter, kind of like a watermelon. It's good. It's crazy that this comes from North America. It's unlike any other fruit in North America. I could taste a little coconut. Why don't people know about pawpaws?"

After we had imposed on this first family with a drive-by pawpaw tasting, we proceeded to the home of some other friends who had already heard that we were coming by. (In fact, earlier as I was walking home from work, MHE drove past me and said they were willing to taste the pawpaw anytime that evening before the football game at 8pm.)

Here's MHE and EE, with MHE pretending to eat a piece of pawpaw for the camera, and EE making a strange kind of muted yet also melodramatic face.

Before I gave any pawpaw to either of them, their 11-year-old son came into the kitchen and asked to try some. I gave him a bite and he said, "Feels like the same material as pumpkin. But it tastes like pineapple. It's good but I've had better."

Then MHE tried it and said, with raised eyebrows, "Melt in your mouth delicious. Kind of like a mellow mango. It has a really nice texture. Delightful. Not too overpowering."

Then EE tried it. I was curious about what he would say because he's got really unique perspectives in terms of taste, ever since he experience damage to the olfactory nerve during graduate school (for years he's called his condition "amnosia"). This is what he said: "The first commentary is--chewy banana. Second thought...I don't know--it's like a flavorful potato. But I will say this: way better than the sapote. I like this." Then EE's mom walked in and tried some and said, "This is probably way off, but my senses said, this tastes like some kind of medicine or mouthwash I've had in the past." And then EE piggybacked on that and continued: "It does have a hint of something they use at the dentist to shine your teeth. But not in a bad way."

Six people shared the one pawpaw. Here are its five seeds, which we'll be stratifying in the refrigerator so they'll sprout in the spring hopefully. Who knows but from these five seeds may spring five new pawpaw cultivars: the Starfruit, the Flavorful Potato, the Mellow Mango, the Passion Fruit Umbrella, and the Mouthwash.

First Annual Utah Pawpaw Festival

If a fruit can be hip, pawpaws are....[Pawpaw] festivals now occur 

not only in Ohio but also in Rhode Island, Maryland, 

Virginia, and Delaware. And the North Carolina Paw Paw Festival 

has grown to an annual attendance of well over a thousand.

--Andrew Moore, Pawpaw: In Search of America's Forgotten Fruit

Yesterday evening we held the First Annual Utah Pawpaw Festival. When we sat down for dinner, we could tell that the lone pawpaw on our kitchen table was ripe. Its smell and feel were unmistakable. And even though it had been eight years since NJ and I had smelled a ripe pawpaw, when we smelled the lone pawpaw, it seemed like we had never stopped smelling pawpaws. And so, during dinner with our daughter S, we planned the First Annual Utah Pawpaw Festival, which was to be held after dinner, in the brief fifteen-minute interval between when our son W got home from cross-country practice and when he ran off for Scouts.

It was a festive fifteen minutes. In most ways it had far less pomp and circumstance than you would see at the mother of all pawpaw festivals (the Ohio Pawpaw Festival), but in some ways it had more pomp and circumstance than you would see there. 

The festival began with a photo-shoot of the lone pawpaw. 

Still-life: Pawpaw on Indonesian Batik Tablecloth 1

Still-life: Pawpaw on Indonesian Batik Tablecloth 2

Still-life: Pawpaw on Batik with Bronze Quail

Still-life: Pawpaw on Batik with Quail and Mexican Candlestick-holder

After the photo-shoot, NJ did us (and all of history) the favor of documenting the first cutting of the first pawpaw of the First Annual Utah Pawpaw Festival. Then she documented, in painstaking detail, the subsequent cuttings of the pawpaw.

The first cut (shallow)

The first cut (deeper)

Subsequent cutting 

Once the cutting was done, the festival program moved on to the opening ceremony.

Behold the opening!

After the opening, we moved on to the tasting. (So that you can pick up on the local color of the Utah Pawpaw Festival, observe the painting of Dead Horse Point as well as our cowboy painting purchased at a Deseret Industries in Salt Lake City.)

I scooped out the first spoonful...

...and gave it to S,...

...who gave it a thumbs up and a funny face. (She hadn't liked durian in Indonesia, and she can be kind of picky about strange food, so I wondered if she would like it. I asked her what it tasted like and she couldn't say, but she said she liked it.)

Then W tried it, in between bites of his fifteen-minute dinner.

He agreed with S that it was indescribable, and that he liked it.

I tried to get NJ to take the next bite but she insisted I take it.

It tasted like a very normal pawpaw, like dozens I ate in Virginia that were collected from the wild. "Very normal" sounds like faint praise, if it's praise at all. But a very normal pawpaw is really good, so I was pleased, even if I have to admit I was a little surprised that the Wells cultivar wasn't offering me something different from many of the wild pawpaws that I knew so well from Virginia.

I scooped out a seed for the camera.

I told you that in some ways there was more pomp and circumstance than you would see at the Ohio Pawpaw Festival. This pomp and circumstance is clear in the detailed photographic documenting of 100% of the pawpaws at the Utah Pawpaw Festival. But the heightened pomp and circumstance is especially clear in the fact that...

...one-quarter of the festivals attendees dressed in pearls.

Once I finished my half of the pawpaw, I placed the seeds back into the skin and used that as a foreground while NJ discoursed on the festival's pawpaw.

She said it was a good, middle-of-the-road pawpaw.

Nothing extraordinary in terms of pawpaws.

But yes, very good, like a normal pawpaw is.

And she finished her half of the pawpaw, eating much closer to the skin than I did. Now you can see her half in the foreground, collapsed because she ate it so close to the rind. And in the background, she's finishing off the thin film that I left in my half. As she ate, she remembered living in Virginia, where we often collected so many pawpaws that even when we each ate maybe ten each day, we still couldn't eat enough to finish them before they went bad. So we would freeze several quarts of pawpaw pulp each year and, as needed, pull a quart out of the freezer to use as jam. NJ remembered eating slices of bread with a layer of pawpaw pulp an inch thick on top. And she also reminded me that we used to eat sandwiches and toast graced with peanut butter and pawpaw pulp. An excellent combination.

Here, the dark brown seeds shine.

After the festival, S went out to play (she only wanted one bite), and W went to Scouts. And NJ and I were left alone in the house to talk about what the festival had meant, back when it was happening five minutes ago. One of the things we talked about was the predictability of cultivars: once we know what flavor and texture of fruit a particular cultivar gives, we suppose there won't be much surprise. Once we know how the fruit from all four of our trees tastes, we won't be surprised by the fruit, even if we'll at least have some variety. But in collecting wild pawpaws, we used to have both variety and surprise. There were a few bad pawpaws among the wild trees we picked from, but nearly all of the wild ones we found were really good, and dozens that we ate were really phenomenal. NJ remembered finding the best pawpaw of her life in Sugar Hollow, standing next to Moormans River and eating some of it, and then saving some for me, once we met up again to share the goods from our individual foraging work.

Back to the question of the current hipness of the pawpaw that Andrew Moore talks about in the epigraph to this post. If the pawpaw has become hip, then there must also have arisen a breed of pawpaw hipsters. I imagine that now that Utah has had a pawpaw festival, those East Coast pawpaw hipsters will be saying, "We were eating pawpaws back in the day, back before they started having festivals outside of the home range."