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."