wherein Liz has a tiny culinary adventure

[edenfalling]

Today Miss Cactus introduced me to the pawpaw (Asimina triloba), the largest native North American fruit. They are apparently one of the rare temperate members of the Annonaceae, or custard apple, family; most of the related species are tropical. She has a pawpaw tree growing wild in her new backyard, and therefore has more fruit than she really knows what to do with right now. (Pawpaws don't keep or transport terribly well.)

The outside of a pawpaw fruit is sort of leathery yellow-green-brown with lots of brown spots. The inside is creamy yellow with huge black seeds, easily removed. The texture is a bit like avocado crossed with banana, ranging from relatively firm to very mooshy/squishy, and the flavor is... hmm... kind of like banana-pear with a hint of lemon, maybe? Or mango-guava-banana? Hard to describe, anyway. It's very sweet and gets cloying rather quickly; one fruit would probably be most people's limit.

It turns out that I am mildly allergic to raw pawpaws, but not terribly so -- a single Benadryl tablet was enough to mitigate the reaction, and I didn't start getting excessive phlegm/throat-closing issues until I'd eaten nearly a whole palm-sized fruit.

I don't particularly need to eat another pawpaw ever again, but I hear they make pretty good ice cream (which I would readily believe) and they can be subbed into almost any recipe in place of banana. Miss Cactus said she used a bunch in a banana bread recipe this week and it turned out well, so. :)

Comments

[heliopausa]

This was great fun to read! The spread of such fruits is so interesting, in the way it reflects colonialism - Spanish and French, mostly, though I don't who brought the pawpaw to the Pacific (where it's very commonly grown). It's a great plant, with medicinal uses as well as culinary, and the fruits can be used green, as a sort of filler vegetable in curries and things.

[edenfalling]

I think the plant that the Spanish spread to the Pacific is actually the papaya, which is a tropical/subtropical plant native to Central America rather than a temperate plant native to North America. The North American fruit and tree were probably named for their similarity to the Central American fruit and tree, whose name originally comes from the Carib word 'papaw.'

The North American pawpaw is little known these days, since it is A) kind of ugly, B) does not transport well unless frozen, and C) is very hit-or-miss in its fruit production, so it's not very cost-effective as a cash crop.

[heliopausa]

Ah! Thank you for sorting that out! :)

[krait]

I've always wanted to eat one of those, but the descriptions always give me pause; banana, mango, or cantaloupe, they say. I find the first two delicious, but the latter thoroughly nasty! Therefore I find it hard to believe something could taste like all of them at once, and what if it turns out that 'cantaloupe' is the flavour that predominates?

[edenfalling]

I also dislike cantaloupe, and I did not notice that the pawpaw tasted like cantaloupe at all. I would say banana-mango, with a hint of something sharper/citrusy more in the scent than the actual taste-on-tongue.

It was actually a bit like generic Starburst tropical flavor, in a way? Not texturally, but clearly some kind of tropical fruit flavor that didn't quite map to anything I'd eaten before. (And about a Starburst candy level of sweetness, too, come to think of it...)