The Pawpaws are Uponpon Us

I haven’t been up to Pony Pasture which has a ton of Pawpaw trees but the trees are bearing fruit along Buttermilk trail so I assume they’re doing the same just a mile upriver.

The Pawpaw tree is the largest edible fruit tree native to North America. The trees produce their namesake pawpaw a greenish-blackish fruit, usually three to six inches long. As we get closer to fall some areas along the river will smell more tropical than normal as the fruits fall and decay/ferment on the ground.

If you’d like to do some cooking with your harvested pawpaws this page from the Kentucky State University has the most straightforward set of recipes.

For the record, if hit by a falling pawpaw it does indeed hurt and surprise the living hell out of you. I speak from experience.

More on the name pawpaw from Wikipedia:

The common name of this species is variously spelled pawpaw, paw paw, paw-paw, and papaw. It probably derives from the Spanish papaya, an American tropical and sub-tropical fruit (Carica papaya) sometimes also called “papaw”, perhaps because of the superficial similarity of their fruits and the fact that both have very large leaves. The name Pawpaw or Papaw, first recorded in print in English in 1598, originally meant the giant herb Carica papaya or its fruit (as it still commonly does in many English-speaking communities, including Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa). According to Douglas Harper’s Online Etymology Dictionary, it began to be used [presumably in North America] “from 1760 to designate the papaw tree” [meaning not Carica papaya but Asimina triloba].

Daniel F. Austin’s Florida Ethnobotany states that

The original “papaw” . . . is Carica papaya. By 1598, English-speaking people in the Caribbean were calling these plants “pawpaws” or “papaws” . . . [yet later, when English-speakers settled in] the temperate Americas they found another tree with a similarly aromatic, sweet fruit. It reminded them of the “papaya”, which had already become “papaw”, so that is what they called these different plants. . . By 1760 the names “papaw” and “pawpaw” were being applied to A. triloba.

Yet Asimina triloba has had numerous local common names, many of which compare it to a banana rather than to pawpaw/papaya (i.e. to Carica papaya). These include: wild banana, prairie banana, Indiana banana, Hoosier banana, West Virginia banana, Kansas banana, Kentucky banana, Michigan banana, Missouri banana, the poor man’s banana, Ozark banana, banango, and asimoya.