Week 39: Common Pawpaw (Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, Daniel H. Janzen and Paul S. Martin, A.C. Whitford)

Fig. 1. “Asimina triloba” (1924). R. G. Steadman. USDA Pomological Watercolors. National Agricultural Library Special Collections.

Waning Crescent Moon - 6 Days to New; 34 Days to Fall Cross-Quarter

Thanks to Diana Heald for suggesting this week’s topic!

Headnote#

Do you know a pawpaw fanatic? Venture more than a few minutes into conversation with someone interested in foraging or regional foodways, and you are likely to broach the subject. This custardy delectation, the largest native tree fruit in the U.S., has a curious backstory and is much beloved in such circles but otherwise hardly known. The reason is that the fruit is largely non-commercializable, because it spoils within days of picking. To find it, you’ll have more luck leaving behind the supermarket shelves and looking instead in the woods behind the store—at least for now (growers in Ohio, the heart of pawpaw territory, are experimenting with new techniques and strategies). Whether or not you love the fruit, which in my limited experience tastes like a cross between a banana and a mango, or a lightly cinnamoned pear, you are in for a surprise—a new constellation of flavors and sensations inviting you to find “a new language,” as Brillat-Savarin writes below, for your sapid experience.

Pawpaw (Asimina triloba) is a small deciduous tree or large shrub that can appear in the understory layer of forests across the eastern half of the U.S. Though its native range stops short of New England, planted trees have escaped here, and I've heard rumors of some good stands in (and tasted a few fruit from) Boston's outer suburbs. The tree grows big leaves, up to a foot long, and can reproduce via root suckers that emerge from underground as clones of the parent tree. It also produces hermaphroditic flowers, containing both stamens and carpels, that smell slightly rotten or yeasty—the tree’s ploy to attract the flies and beetles that it needs to bring pollen from other plants.

Pawpaw is a member of the soursop or “custard apple” family (Annonaceae), and the only one native to temperate latitudes. Its fruit is what some scientists consider a “neotropical anachronism”: it may have been food for the gomphotheres, a long-extinct relative of the elephants that once wandered the North American landmass. In the current day, pawpaws are closely associated with a striking butterfly, the zebra swallowtail (Protographium marcellus, formerly Eurytides marcellus), whose caterpillars feed exclusively on pawpaw foliage. Their relationship parallels that of monarch and milkweed, except that the zebra swallowtail is not involved in pollinating the pawpaw. Instead, it is in an obligate relationship, as the butterfly gains nourishment and a defense mechanism (through the pawpaw’s toxic acetogenins—concentrated in the leaves, bark, and seeds) in exchange for nothing but looking so beautiful. This dependency means that the butterflies are rarely found more than a few hundred yards (up to a mile) from their host patch of pawpaws; if you see one, you are probably also in the company of a special tree.

Fig. 2. John Abbot. “Papilio Ajax. Annona Palustris.” From The Natural History of the Rarer Lepidopterous Insects of Georgia. Printed by T. Bensley, for J. Edwards [etc.]. 1797. Tab 4.

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Readings#

1. The number of tastes perceived in objects is infinite, since every soluble body has a special flavour, in some respect differing from all others.
   
   Flavours receive additional modifications of infinite variety, ranging from the most attractive to the most intolerable, from the strawberry to the colocynth; and all attempts to classify them may be termed failures. Nor is this to be wondered at; for, granted that there are undetermined series of simple flavours which can be modified by combining them in any number and quantity, we should require a new language to express all these results, mountains of folio volumes to define them, and newly devised numerical characters to classify and number them.
   
   Since, up to the present time, no taste or flavour has, as a sensation, been rigorously defined, men are compelled to keep to a small number of general terms, such as "sweet," "sugary," "sour," "bitter," and so on; and, on further analysis, these can be classified under the two heads of "agreeable to the taste," or "disagreeable." They suffice, however, to make one's self understood, and indicate with tolerable exactness the gustatory properties of any sapid substances about which one is talking. Those who come after us will know more about such qualities, and it seems already certain that chemistry will discover to them the causes of flavours or their ultimate elements.

Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin. Gastronomy as a Fine Art; or, The Science of Good Living. Trans. R. E. Anderson. Trans. of Physiologie du Goût [Physiology of Taste]. 1826. London: Chatto and Windus, 1877. 15-16.#

2. Our discussion has focused on neotropical plants and animals, but it can be generalized to the sweet-fleshed large fruits of the Kentucky coffee bean Gymnocladus dioica and honey locust Gleditsia triacanthos(Leguminosae), osage orange Maclura (Moraceae), pawpaw Asimina(Annonaceae), and persimmon Diospyros (Ebenaceae). When there was a megafauna available to disperse their seeds, such genera may have been denser and had much wider ranges. The extreme spininess of various New World extra-tropical shrubs that are found in moist as well as arid regions has not been well explained. The vesicatory ripe fruits and weak-walled nuts of Gingko biloba might even have been evolved in association with a tough-mouthed herbivorous dinosaur that did not chew its food well.

Daniel H. Janzen and Paul S. Martin. “Neotropical Anachronisms: The Fruits the Gomphotheres Ate.” Science 215.4528 (January 1982: 19-27). 27.#

3. The pawpaw (Asimina trilby, L.) seems to have been universally used by all the tribes who lived where it flourished. Its use was apparently limited only by its distribution, for it was encountered sixteen times in the prehistoric material examined from Kentucky, Arkansas, and Ohio, as well as in historic objects made by the Menomini and Wisconsin Potawatomi. In the University of Wisconsin Museum is a bunch of prepared fiber (16422) from the caves of Kentucky. This fiber was commonly used by the cave and rock-shelter peoples of Arkansas for cords, mats, rope, and in all coarsely woven materials. A woven mat from Bushwick Cave is a fair example (MAIHF 11-6243). The Ohio cave and rock-shelter dwellers used the pawpaw for coarse bags and fabrics, for example, in a split bark bag (OSHAM 332-22). In the Milwaukee Public Museum are two bags in which this fiber was identified, one, from the Menomini (4570) in which only the weft is of pawpaw, and another (23287) from the Wisconsin Potawatomi, entirely composed of it .

A. C. Whitford. “ANONACEAE, D. C. (Custard-Apple Family).” Textile Fibers Used In Eastern Aboriginal North America. Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History. Vol. 38. Part 1. New York: American Museum of Natural History, 1941. 9.#

Supplementum#

• José I. Hormaza. “The Pawpaw, a Forgotten North American Fruit Tree.” Arnoldia 72.1 (July 2014): 13-23.

• Julia Fine. “Plant of the Month: The Pawpaw.” JSTOR Daily (September 22, 2021).

• Zannah Porter. “What About Paw Paw?” Arnold Arboretum (July 26, 2023).

• Jeanette M. Smith. “Still Life With Pawpaws.” JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association 300.15 (October 2008): 1734.

• Bronwen Powell, et al. “About Pawpaw.” Indigenous Connections through Pawpaw. Penn State University (n.d.).

Fig. 3. Edward Edmondson, Jr. Still Life with Pawpaws (c. 1870-1875). Dayton Art Museum. [Read more]

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✦ From the Earthly Book of Hours ✦#

• Data dump! I’m brushing off my curiosity about metadata and digging up my digital humanities interests from graduate school to reconsider the raw materials behind this project. This requires an ascent from playful vibe-coding into the ethereal regions of Dublin Core, JSON-LD, RDF triples, and Linked Open Data. I may not be successful. But since I’m already working on the fringes between nature and culture, humanities and science, scholarship and slop, I might as well push a little further.

• Font switch! I did some reading and research and, with the help of Claude Code, implemented a more intentional selection of historically interesting and open-source fonts across the site, all now hosted by me rather than imported from Google. Details are included on the new colophon added to the project’s About page (pictured below).