Pass the Pawpaws

Fistful of Fruit: September is harvest time for pawpaws credit: Photo courtesy of Kent Priestley

When he was a graduate student in plant genetics at West Virginia University, he wandered down to the banks of the Monongahela River between classes one day. Along with the expected maples and tulip poplars, pawpaws were growing. Fruit hung ripe from the trees, lay scattered on the ground.
“It was what I like to call my aha moment,” Peterson says of his first encounter with the fruit thirty-eight years ago. “This was a wild fruit, something that hadn’t received any improvement, and the flavor was amazing. I had to assume that what I was tasting was worlds better than the little fruits that were the progenitors of the modern apple.” After filling up on the fruit, Peterson immediately went to the university library with the aim of learning everything he could about pawpaws.

The pawpaw is North America’s largest edible native tree fruit. The trees pawpaws grow on are bit players in the forest, seldom big and usually found along stream banks and river bottoms, hiding in the shade of more stately trees. The pawpaw is also unabashedly odd. Its leaves are long and limp; crushed, they give off the scent of an oil refinery. Its maroon flowers smell like rotten meat.

Still, how could it be that this fruit—which a traveling companion of De Soto’s had claimed in 1541 to be “like unto peares riall,” which had single-handedly saved Lewis and Clark from starvation during their return trip from the West, which George Washington and Thomas Jefferson favored for their dessert tray—could go the way of the mustache comb?

“What struck me was this sense of neglect,” says Peterson. “Look around the world and you see crops from every continent in cultivation. Barley, millet, rice, wheat, tomatoes, potatoes—the list goes on and on. But very little has come to agriculture from North America. I couldn’t understand why.” There is the blueberry, of course, and the cranberry, but those are tart fruits with a contained, puritanical disposition; nothing even approaching the gushy, taffy-sweet, and even sexual experience of biting into a ripe pawpaw.

Determined to reform the pawpaw, Peterson over the past quarter century has sought out the stragglers of those early varieties, bred them, and selected their offspring for the best characteristics. He’s tasted thousands of pawpaws and kept detailed notes of their flavor, size, and appearance. Occasionally, he’s hybridized the pawpaw with other species from the genus. Through the years, his box at the Harpers Ferry post office has been crammed with everything from bud wood to vials of pollen to boxes full of overripe fruit.

To date, Peterson’s breeding effort has yielded six pawpaw varietals, all named for American rivers. It’s exacting work, and, he admits, hardly the best way to pad a 401(k) plan. “There’s a saying that pioneers never make the money,” says Peterson, who is sixty. “To be honest, I’d really like to find a philanthropist who would support this work.”

It was this intention that, in 1988, led Peterson to form the PawPaw Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to improving the fruit and broadening its commercial appeal. The foundation’s work has paid off. Today, Kentucky State University has its own pawpaw research program, and groups like Slow Food USA have taken up the pawpaw’s banner.

Still, there’s work to be done. Peterson is currently developing his seventh pawpaw variety, one he hopes will have a thicker skin and a firmer texture—the better, of course, to entice the squeamish American palate.