A Moveable Fest: Second Annual Utah Pawpaw Festival (Part 1)

One of my favorite books is Ernest Hemingway's memoir of his early years in Paris, titled A Moveable Feast. The book has an epigraph, a quotation from Hemingway himself, that says: "If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast." (Imagine being so famous that your books can begin with epigraphs that you yourself have written.)

Hemingway's idea was that a person can carry Paris around, and that Paris moves as the former inhabitant moves through space, whether to Spain or to Idaho or to Indonesia, Paris is always moving with you. But he took the idea of "a moveable feast" from something that doesn't move through space but moves through time. A "moveable feast" is an annual religious celebration that happens on different dates each year. Easter, for instance, would be a moveable feast, since it happens on the first Sunday after the first full moon of the spring season. In the United States, Martin Luther King Day would be a secular moveable feast, since its date changes every year, depending on when the third Monday of January falls.

We started small last year, when we threw the First Annual Utah Pawpaw Festival, with only one pawpaw and four people in attendance. This year, we have a few dozen more pawpaws on hand than that, but the problem is that NJ has traveled to Brazil to give a keynote address, right during what ought to be the week we hold the Second Annual Utah Pawpaw Festival. So, in analogy to Hemingway's, and Christianity's, and the US Government's tradition of the "moveable feast," I'm experimenting this year with a "moveable fest," a Utah Pawpaw Festival that is a bit more dispersed in time and space, comprising a series of events over the course of this week and next, that may take place at a series of locations. Once NJ gets back, we'll have a main event at our house with guests. Meantime, though, there will be some moveable fests.

The first event in 2016's Moveable Utah Pawpaw Fest took place at my parents' house this evening. We had dinner and I brought over four pawpaws to share afterwards.

Source of the pawpaws in the moveable fest: yesterday we were out looking at the KSU-Atwood and we noticed that one of its leaves was turning yellow. I pulled lightly on the leaf to see if it would come off. The yellow leaf didn't budge, but five pawpaws plummeted to the earth!

Here are some of the participants in this evening's moveable fest. One participant didn't want to be in the picture, I guess because she had eaten only a small portion of one of the pawpaws and said she didn't want any more, and so maybe she didn't feel like she had earned a seat at the feast table.

I'm going to transcribe what the feasters/festers had to say about their pawpaw tastings:

W, who has been eating a lot of pawpaws, says, "I could eat pawpaws all day and never get tired of them."

My parents have tried pawpaws once before, maybe in 2005, when NJ and I found some pawpaw trees near their home in East Tennessee and told them when they should go harvest them. We couldn't go with them because we were in Virginia during September, so they went alone with one of my sisters and one of my brothers (at least I think one of my brothers was there). They shook the trees over near Boy Scout Camp Pellissippi and brought home a lot of pawpaws. But it turned out no one really liked the pawpaws. So, eleven years later, here's what they had to say tonight. My dad having tried the Atwood and the Shenandoah: "Both of em--I was pleasantly surprised because the only other pawpaws I tasted were wild--from Camp Pellissippi in East Tennessee....[The Atwood] had the texture of fine butter that melts in your mouth. The taste: I can't describe it. [The Shenandoah] had a flavor more like a peach. A stringy texture--I was pleasantly surprised by the stringy texture. More like the texture of a mango." A few people jeered when he said he liked the stringy texture, since stringiness isn't usually something that gives a pleasant surprise. But he seemed to be saying its stringiness reminded him of a mango, which he likes, and I imagine few would have jeered if he just had said it had the texture of a peach. My mother had this to say after trying the Atwood: "Like banana--it's sweeter than a banana and it has a better texture."

My sister tried it--just a little. She's pregnant and bananas currently make her gag. And she's had a rather tortured relationship to fruit in her life, as evidenced by the fact that she didn't eat an orange until she was about 14 years old: once on a family hike my sister was crying and I asked my mom why the tears. My mom answered that my sister at age fourteen had eaten her first orange, and she hadn't enjoyed peeling it, and she hadn't enjoyed how surprised her siblings were to learn that she had never peeled nor eaten an orange before. This is what she had to say about the Atwood: "Banana with a hint of pine sap," and then she added: "But I'm pregnant! The texture was like butter. You could scrape it off and spread it like a jam."

My brother-in-law tried it also, eating half a pawpaw: "Texture much like a very ripe banana [my sister, who gags if she thinks of bananas, said "eew!"]." He continued: "Same mouth-feels as a very ripe banana. [Another "Eew!"] But taste-wise, it almost felt like a little bit of coconut. Sweet like a coconut but also something savory."