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."

Shaken

Yesterday I told all of my many pawpaw followers that one of the pawpaws on the Wells had gotten soft enough that I was going to stop squeezing it to test its ripeness, and from here on out I would just shake the tree. I shook the tree this morning and it didn't fall. I shook the tree when I got home from work and it didn't fall. And then before we went out for a walk this evening, I shook the tree and thud it fell.

The re-enactment below took place just three minutes after the actual event of the pawpaw falling.

Shaking...

Shaken.

There it is, like a big green Easter Egg.

For perspective on the size

Up against the dying light of the sky and the peak behind our house.

So, now the pawpaw sits on our kitchen table. Still ripening a bit, since it's soft but as NJ says, it doesn't really feel soft enough yet, and there's no point in eating it before it's the best it can be.

The Problem with Counting Pawpaw Trees, in Utah or Anywhere

In August I got the idea that it would be possible to count all of the pawpaw trees in Utah. That idea set us on a course to visit the feeble BYU pawpaw orchard, a humbling experience because BYU owns so many more pawpaw trees than I do. But not completely humbling, because BYU's trees have been growing for about as long as mine have. And while the tallest of BYU's trees is about up to my knee, all my trees are about a foot taller than I am.

It wasn't more than a few days after we visited the BYU orchard that I notice the efforts that were being undertaken by the rootstock of the Wells cultivar. The rootstock, which is technically a different pawpaw tree than the Wells branches that it nourishes, decided to send up its own branches. And so, out of the mulch have grown two little "trees" (one of them bigger than most of the trees in the BYU orchard), native to the rootstock and genetically distinct from the Wells branches. 

And so, how to "count" the number of pawpaw trees in my own yard? On one hand, I might say that because they new sprouts come from the roots of the wells, they are still the same tree, genetically identical. That would work, except they're not genetically identical with the Wells branches. So, it would seem that there are two trees. To drive this home: Pawpaws are almost always self-incompatible (which means they can't cause themselves to bear fruit but they need a genetically distinct fellow pawpaw to do the job); and if I were to let the rootstock's new sprouts grow up and flower, their flowers would be able to fertilize the flowers of the Wells, and produce fruit. 

This leads to a second option for how to count pawpaw trees. This second option would be to count each grafted tree as two trees, given that its rootstock and its branches are genetically distinct. This would mean that I have seven pawpaw trees in my yard:

1. the rootstock that nourishes the Shenandoah branches

2. the Shenandoah branches

3. the rootstock that nourishes the Wells branches

4. the Well branches

5. the rootstock that nourishes the KSU-Atwood branches

6. the KSU-Atwood branches

7. the unimproved tree, whose rootstock didn't do a good enough job of nournishing the Sunflower cultivar branches (which died), and then the rootstock put up its own branches

This approach would work okay, but if I'm using as a litmus test the question of being genetically identical, then consider a scenario in which I were to have two Shenandoah cultivars and two KSU-Atwood cultivars growing in my yard. The two Shenandoahs would be the same tree (because they are genetically identical) and the two KSU-Atwoods would be the same tree (because they are also genetically identical). So that would be a total of four genetically distinct rootstocks and two genetically distinct branches, for a total of six trees (which isn't the eight trees I would have if I took the easier approach of counting each grafted tree (rootstock-branch combo) as two trees.

In some ways, then, the most accurate way to count all of the trees in Utah would be to count the number of rootstocks, and then to count the number of cultivars, and then add that number together. That would mean that if twenty-six people in Utah owned the Shenandoah cultivar, I would count twenty-six rootstocks but just one Shenadoah cultivar for a total of twenty-seven pawpaw trees. 

But none of this seems very intuitive, and all of it seems much more complicated than counting trees should be. And the definition of "tree" becomes more complicated that most people would be willing to tolerate. So what to do? 

For right now, just look at some pictures, below.

The larger of the two sprouts from the Wells cultivar's rootstock.

Another picture of the same sprout.

The smaller sprout

The biggest pawpaw on the Wells branches

The second biggest pawpaw on the Wells

The two smaller pawpaws on the Wells

Just in closing, I'll mention that the largest pawpaw on the Wells is starting to feel soft, so I imagine it won't be many more days before we have a very humble, but first annual, Utah Pawpaw Festival.