Pawpaw: In Search of America’s Forgotten Fruit by Andrew Moore

Pawpaw: In Search of America’s Forgotten Fruit Reviews

• 
  Jaylia3

  Picture a flavor that combines banana and mango, or imagine a fruit nicknamed custard apple, and what you have in your mind is the pawpaw, a fruit of tropical origin that somehow worked its way well up into North America. First eaten by megafauna like woolly mammoths, pawpaws were later enjoyed by Native Americans and early settlers. Thomas Jefferson had a grove of pawpaw trees at Monticello and considered the possibility of turning them into a cultivated crop, enslaved Africans who collected pawpaws to supplement their diets were reminded of fruits from their homelands, and when Lewis and Clark went on their exploration of western America eating local pawpaws helped them survive when they were low on provisions. So why aren’t pawpaws around today? That’s the thing, they are around. Pawpaw trees still grow wild in 26 states. Most of us have just forgotten about them.
  
  I had almost but not quite forgotten about the pawpaw--I just never knew they were real. When I was growing up we used to belt out a folk song with the refrain “Way down yonder in the pawpaw patch!” but I didn’t realize pawpaws actually existed until not long ago when I was on a birding walk along the edge of the C&O Canal outside Washington DC. The guide pointed out some birds in a pawpaw tree on the other side of the bank, stopping me in my tracks by waking up my atavistic memory of the song and making me feel like Alice in some strange Wonderland created by ghost lyrics.
  
  This book gives the whole fascinating, satisfying scoop on pawpaws, and will be especially interesting to anyone whose interests include plants or food or history or mystery or even wildlife--pawpaw trees are the only larval host of the exotic looking zebra swallowtail butterfly. The author made it his mission to research everything known about pawpaws and he takes readers along as he attends pawpaw festivals, talks to people who remember eating pawpaws as children, harvests fruit with farmers propagating pawpaws for a growing niche market, and searches out pawpaw trees still growing wild right under our noses (one at Jefferson’s Monticello that the tour guides didn’t know existed!) He’s especially interested in finding trees that are descendants of the ones which bore prize winning fruits in the pawpaw contest of 1916, which adds a little suspense to the story.
  
  Engaging and informative, this book is also strikingly beautiful, even when you remove the very attractive dust jacket, because someone made the whimsical but fitting decision to color it like a pawpaw fruit--the outer hardcover is deep green and the inner endpapers are a very bright yellow. The book also includes a map of the American pawpaw belt and 8 pages of color photos.
  
  FOUR AND A HALF STARS
• 
  Lindsay Gasik

  I asked for this book for Christmas because it is such a great idea. I love pawpaws. I love travel stories. A travel story about a fruit-hunter? Sounded amazing.
  
  At the end, I wouldn't recommend it to anyone but my most hardcore of fruit nerd friends. It's a slog through places and interviews that last a page or two at most. There's no central theme, except pawpaws, and the stories feel jarringly slapped together, in neither chronological or thematic order. Worst of all, it feels repetitive. I was disappointed.
  
  But I did come away with some fun facts about pawpaws, my favorite being that there is a dinosaur called a pawpawsaurus.
• 
  Mark Hartzer

  I loved this book. Mr. Moore and I appear to share a common fondness for a forgotten native fruit that deserves much wider appreciation.
  
  About a decade ago, I planted a couple of seedlings at our old home in Illinois. In 2013, we got (or really, the raccoons got) our 1st fruits. In 2014, we had to move due to a corporate transfer. But I never lost the bug for these cool little trees.
  
  The paw paw is a true American original. It is native to the US and southern Canada and has been here for millions of years; surviving glaciers, 20ft ground sloths and modern Americans. Despite being the largest native American fruit, it is remarkably unknown. I agree with Moore's hypothesis that one does not know about this tree unless it was on, or right next to your property.
  
  So next autumn, find yourself a ripe paw paw. Sit down, relax. Split open a tropical, mango like fruit. Spoon out, or just gobble it. Spit out the seeds and celebrate a true American, the paw paw.
• 
  Michael

  I can understand why this book was a James Beard Foundation Book Award nominee and not an Award winner. The book suffers from the lack of a clear thesis and from a lack of structure, both within the chapters themselves and the book overall. Part three is especially representative of these issues. In it, the book becomes a travelogue with the author traipsing across pawpaw country with no clear purpose, nor structure, to these vignettes.
  I did learn a lot about pawpaws though!
• 
  Denise

  Only a total microhistory freak could manage to finish this book: a big, seemingly unedited rambling personal narrative about hunting a wild edible in season for about 2 weeks a year and eaten mostly by squirrels. But I am that reader. If you are also that reader, or know what a Hoosier banana is, you should probably pick this up. Pawpaws are the largest native fruit in the North Americas. They grow in about every state in the Midwest. I’ve never eaten them, and I’ve been trying to find a local vendor for 2 years. (I actually found a wild fruit this year but it was in a damned nature preserve so I had to leave it, because of the Code of the Hikers.)
  
  There’s some interesting wider food history observations to the obscurity of the pawpaw: one, ease of cultivation, mechanical harvest, shipment, and preservation are the largest historical qualities impacting what produce we eat today, bar none. Are apples the best fruit in the world for nutrition, taste, or balance of the two? Heck no, but they are easy to harvest, last months if treated decently, and ship heartily. But pawpaws are dreadful for this, they’re soft, only ripen on the tree, and rot within days. The thing about the pawpaw is, to me it shows what could have happened to the tomato, had it not been able to been canned. Tomatoes are fussy little love apples, and ship terribly (unless you turn them into mealy mauve parodies of themselves with fish genetics) but we love them. Eating tomatoes never would have been widely adopted if preserving them hadn’t been relatively easy. (Yes, they were eaten only cooked for years and years, eating them raw is pretty modern.) Pawpaw can’t be preserved except for pulping and freezing, and the wide availability of frozen foods (and the means to store them in your house) is only about 60 years old in America. The pawpaw is obscure because it sucks at grocery store life. Still, maybe with time (and the frozen foods lobby working on us) they’ll become more commercially viable.
  
  The second thing is that pawpaws have an oral history that is at once universal to the Midwest, but still a secret. Everywhere he went, someone knew about them, how to find them, how to eat them. And everyone knows the song. But they were otherwise forgotten pretty evenly inside the Midwest. He hypothesizes it’s down to microgeography - pawpaws are thirsty and like the edges of creeks and rivers, and if you didn’t have your own woodlot with a crick to get swole up now and again, you weren’t going to get that way down yonder pawpaw patch. If you didn’t have a patch, you’d never learn about them. If your parents even knew about them from their childhood - pawpaws need shade, and things were pretty deforested after the 40s. And I was a wandering child and my sister and spent a couple of summers eating wild black raspberries out of the creekless woods near my house and I never saw a one. ‘Cause I’d have probably tried to eat it.
  
  Also, sideways to pawpaws, I learned Johnny Appleseed was sowing apples all up and down America in the hopes that after his death we’d all have the ability to get blasted coast to coast, because no one ate apples for food back then, it was just for alcohol production… That’s not what they told me in preschool! D:
  
  Gorgeous cover design also.
• 
  Gary

  I’ve read a number of what I call “personal food narratives” and this one was a solid 2.5 stars (rounded up to 3 because 2 stars seemed too low). There were some interesting tidbits, characters, and historical findings. Overall, I felt like it was maybe too packed. A chapter, or even section, that starts in one geographic location with one focus zigzags back and forth to previous locations and thoughts. It’s slightly disorienting.
  
  And for as much as it jumps around, it is very circular in its message. People don’t know pawpaws, except people who do. Pawpaws are wild and free, but we should cultivate them in an orchard. Or should we?
  
  At the end of the book, there are a number of short passage that are thinly tied together. It seems like the content get thinner and thinner as it goes on. It’s like the author was either just throwing disparate info in together, or was getting worn out from writing his first book. He talks about some pawpaw gelato at the end as what he thought to be a letdown in a way—like there should be something more special about it, but it’s just another product alongside other products. When I think about it, it’s the same feeling I have about the book.
• 
  Cheryl Gatling

  This spring, for the first time, I ordered some mail-order pawpaw trees. While waiting for them to arrive, and worrying about whether they would survive in my area (upstate New York), I saw this book, and I snatched it up.
  
  Andrew Moore had his first taste of pawpaw fruit in the woods of Ohio, and became fascinated with all things pawpaw. Being a journalist, he did what journalists do. He researched the history of the tree and its fruit, and he traveled the country interviewing anyone who had anything to do with pawpaws. This book might indeed be subtitled, "More Than You Ever Wanted to Know About America's Forgotten Fruit." But I did want to know.
  
  Pawpaws are native to the Americas. They are a tropical-like plant, but they flourish in a temperate climate. Historically they grew as an understory tree, in the woods of bottomlands, along rivers. The trees spread by suckers, forming "pawpaw patches." The fruit is soft and fleshy, tastes something like banana, but has big seeds in it. It doesn't keep.
  
  Native Americans ate pawpaws. Poor country people ate pawpaws. In the fall they would go out in the woods and bring home a basketful. They were enough a part of people's lives that a folksong, "Way Down Yonder in the Pawpaw Patch," was written about them.
  
  Then people stopped living in the country so much, and stopped going out into the woods, and much of the woods was paved over, and pawpaws disappeared from people's consciousness. Most people today don't know what one is, have never seen one, and never eaten one.
  
  The fruit had never been cultivated. People had only ever eaten the ones that grew wild. But a few people have been trying to change that. A few people have been performing selective breeding to develop the biggest, sweetest, most reliable varieties. A few people have been tending pawpaw orchards and selling the fruit. A few towns have been hosting pawpaw festivals, to share their enthusiasm about this unique fruit.
  
  And Andrew Moore tells you about all of them. I think he has included every conversation he had with every person he met, but that's OK. This book is a love-fest, and it is full of hope. It confirmed me in my decision to plant pawpaws, and made me excited to be a part of the coming pawpaw renaissance.
• 
  Lisa Roney

  Andy Moore was a student of mine, so I'm not trying to be objective, but this wonderful book should be on the reading list of every foodie out there, and of many others who enjoy cultural history and commentary about the mystery of what people want and how they behave. Moore tracks his own experiences learning about the pawpaw and then gradually becoming more and more of a fan of a fruit that is native to large swaths of the U.S., is easy to grow and pest-resistant, and that tastes yummy fresh and in all kinds of concoctions, including breads, ice creams, and beers.
  
  The book is rich in sensuous detail about both the fruit and its related foods, but also about the landscapes and people that Moore encounters as he explores the history and geographic range of the pawpaw. He tours around the middle and eastern parts of the country, visiting orchards, festivals, and the wild patches where the pawpaw has always thrived and helped wanderers and pioneers of all sorts get a taste of something sweet when lost and near starvation or locals to just have a lark on a pleasant day. The parts about pawpaw aficionados--those who are making efforts to grow and promote pawpaws more widely--were interesting and informative, but I especially loved the third section of the book the, where Moore ties historical stories and sites to the current state of pawpaw affairs. Moore's social criticism is gentle, yet articulate and pointed: why isn't the pawpaw better known and better valued across the country? There is no hard answer, but Moore's book should do a lot to help spread the word. I can't wait to get a chance to taste one myself.
• 
  L

  I love this book. Part natural history of the pawpaw, part Americana travelogue, it covers the author’s journeys to Appalachian backyards and commercial nurseries and gives them equal weight. It’s a light read, easy to break into smaller sections if you’re short on time.
  
  Reading it made me happy. There’s a lot of fun tidbits about the fruit, and each region it grows is given it’s due. Maybe I’m so fond of the book because the author sounds like he had a great time driving around, talking to folks, and tasting local food. It comes through in the writing. The author feels a jolt of excitement as he sees a tree even at the end of his long journey, and you, the reader, can relate because the joy is felt through his writing.
  
  I’m still happy a day after finishing it. I want to find out more. I want to plant a tree. But most of all, I want a pawpaw.
  
  
• 
  Brian

  A little bit of Pawpaw knowledge, a whole lot of Pawpaw culture, 100% Pawpaw appreciation all while traveling across the Eastern United States to find the allusive perfect pawpaw. The story became repetitive and I wasn't interested in the quest to make pawpaw a commercial success. I did catch the pawpaw fever which can only be cured by going to the Pawpaw patch, picking up the pawpaw, and puttin' it in my pocket.
• 
  Marissa

  Sorry to say my library loan expired before I could finish this! I got about 70% of the way through. While it was interesting, I find my interest level in pawpaws could probably have been satisfied by a much shorter work....😆
• 
  Lisa Kelsey

  Now I've read an entire book about a fruit I have never tasted. Time to go out there and get one this fall.
• 
  Alexander Tas

  [image error]
• 
  Ciara Mulcahy

  Awesome story and really informative. I cannot wait to try paw paws. Literally have told so many friends fun facts about paw paws from this book. September cannot come soon enough, just kidding. But looking forward to foraging!
• 
  Jennifer

  I first tried pawpaws a few years ago at a local farmers' market. Although I grew up in pawpaw country, so to speak, I don't recall ever encountering them as a child. I suspect that this has a lot to do with their "harvest" season. I went to the woods with my dad every spring to hunt for morel mushrooms, and in the fall to gather hazelnuts, hickory nuts, and black walnuts. Pawpaw season would have been late summer/early fall, while it was still quite hot and humid and the underbrush and poison ivy rampant; this wasn't a season that my father would take time off work to go to the woods. In any case, I think the fruit is wonderful, although the fragrance of ripe pawpaws is almost overwhelming...my car, after returning from the farmers' market with just a few of them, smelled of pawpaws for days. Andrew Moore's adventures searching for both wild and cultivated pawpaws were fascinating and inspirational. Now I want to go to a pawpaw festival myself!
• 
  Sarah

  A love letter to native species, Appalachia, and the importance of upholding thoughtful, gentle approaches to local food horticulture. Moore has my heart with this one and inspired me to attend the Ohio Pawpaw Fest just this past weekend. I came home with one of the Peterson varieties :). I’m rating this so highly because it’s well-researched and a good mix of anecdotal meetings with pawpaw growers in addition to culinary and flavor appreciation of this odd native tropical-tasting fruit. Informative, passionate, and inspiring- I hope more folks grow to love the pawpaw and becomes more present in our diets again.
• 
  Matt

  Do you want to know what a bunch of nobodies think pawpaws taste like? If so, this is the book for you. If that doesn't sound fun then avoid this book at all costs. Yet another book that would have been better serviced as a longer magazine article or a segment in a newspaper.
• 
  Adam Schweigert

  3.5 stars. Good information overall and some really great anecdotes but the book seems to ramble and could have probably used a bit of a tighter edit.
• 
  Michelle

  I had very high hopes going into this book, but ultimately was left feeling very unfulfilled. One of the things I really liked about this book was how it highlighted the connections between food, history, culture, and heritage. But in many ways, this book felt scattered. There was really no central narrative beyond "author became aware of pawpaws and then wanted to learn everything about them." The lengths Moore went to for his research are absolutely admirable; the sheer number of people Moore spoke to, sought out for his research, and spent time with highlights how many people have an appreciation and love for pawpaws. But after a certain point, the book becomes extremely repetitive. The book is broken down into sections, and then more specific chapters within those sections. However, the writing seems to meander through topics, one moment talking about history, then wandering into growing practices and cultivation, before circling back to whatever was supposed to be the subject of the chapter.
  I think I partially set myself up for failure going into this book. As a native Ohioan who has also worked on projects in Appalachia, I wonder if I was projecting my own ideals and hopes onto what this book would be. I also wonder if this book is better enjoyed by those who have already been pawpaw fans for some time. One thing is for sure: come next September, I will absolutely be seeking out pawpaws in my area.
  Maybe I'll enjoy this book more by reading it with a glass of pawpaw beer or a scoop of pawpaw ice cream.
• 
  Abigail

  Despite having grown up in Ohio in the foothills of Appalachia, I have never eaten a pawpaw. If I have seen the trees, I had no idea what it was. This book was interesting and made me want to go pawpaw hunting. The idea that the trees could be hidden in plain sight was fascinating. The tree itself is interesting as well. From how they pollinate to the structure of the fruit and the many uses it has. I am going to have to keep an eye out for these trees this spring and summer.
  
  A fun little anecdote to go along with this reading:
  I was telling my husband, who originally hails from Indianapolis, about this book. I was explaining how pawpaw are pollinated by carrion flies and things of that nature. We were sitting in the car and I was looking up pictures of the plant and I finally was like "Maybe I've seen these and didn't know it." My husband goes "Let me see." So I showed him some pictures of the flowers. He goes, "Wait, do the flowers stink?" I was like "Yeah, they say there's a smell because of the type of things that pollinate them." He says, "Oh! I've seen those. I thought 'Why in the world would anyone plant such a nasty tree?' "
  
  Friends, my city boy husband has seen a pawpaw tree. I am insanely jealous.
• 
  Lydia G

  I think I appreciate the existence of this book (and the kind friend who gave it to me) more than the substance. It didn’t seem like Andy could decide if he was writing a narrativeless geo/ethnographic summary of every mention of Asimina triloba in written history or an account of his own journey through the southeast and midwest U.S. in search of that information. Either way, there wasn’t a cogent thesis. You have to be predisposed to an interest in pawpaw to enjoy this, and fortunately I’m sick over them. But this book could’ve been greatly improved (in my own opinion) if at least the “traveling over the U.S.” portion read more like a voyage of discovery and less like a guy you don’t know anything about (he refers to himself as Andy only once, I believe) yelling as many facts as he can remember at you in a loud bar. Even if you like the topic he’s spouting off about, it’s just not the most enjoyable experience.
• 
  Robert Mata

  Judging from the comments I've read, people's attention spans are changing, and perhaps most can't tolerate a long(ish) book about the United States's largest indigenous fruit, the pawpaw. But that's okay. Like the folks who are struck with pawpaw madness, the type of person who will enjoy this book likely loves the outdoors and is deeply interested in the fruit. Perhaps this person is a forager. I, for one, learned about pawpaw's just last year after watching them grow all season in Columbus, OH. In September, they ripened, and I was hooked. When I discovered Andrew Moore's book (by chance!) in a local library, I knew it was a must-read, and I was not disappointed. A fascinating, deeply instructive read.
• 
  Claire

  Thorough. Too thorough. An interesting read for a pawpaw nut like myself but nevertheless repetitive and felt haphazardly organized. Parts I and II were worth reading for the history of the fruit and its modern cultivation, but the descriptions of where the author did and did not find pawpaws across the nation in Part III dragged on and on and seemed to be sets of paragraphs cobbled together without much connection except that pawpaws were eaten there or not. I most enjoyed finding out about other unusual edibles, such as the maypop, Russian seaberry, spciebush, mayapple, and cushaws. Wouldn't recommend the whole book to anyone, though I'd say pawpaw fans should peruse the first two sections, though not read them in their entirety.
• 
  Tammy

  It’s amazing that a 250 page book can be solely about one fruit with basically zero tangents. The pawpaw, a fruit I have never seen, much less tasted, is the central subject, and I was fascinated. Andrew Moore writes about its history and current status throughout its native range of 26 U.S. states, but mainly in the “Pawpaw Belt” region. He touches on a lot of interesting aspects of the fruit, namely it’s potential (or lack thereof) for commercialization; it’s varied tastes, sizes, # of seeds; how its popularity and how its prevalence have ebbed and flowed over time. I especially enjoyed Moore’s adventures traveling wide distances hunting for pawpaw and uncovering a sort of folk culture at the same time.
• 
  Cynthia

  I really enjoyed this cultural history of pawpaws, a fruit I had heard of but never tasted. Moore intertwines current interest in pawpaws with his own interest in promoting the fruit, along with the pawpaw's place in American history. He interviews farmers, bystanders, visits breweries, farms, orchards, scientists and attend pawpaw festivals in search of his material.
  
  The writing is thoughtful, if sometimes a bit recursive for my taste, circling back to earlier themes, but this approach does keep the readers' interest.
• 
  David Lor

  Overall I enjoyed this book even though the closest I've gotten to eating a pawpaw is feasting on a cherimoya or two. (Though I did know about pawpaws prior to this book.) The history of the fruit, and current attempts at cultivating it and bringing it to a wider audience really shine. However, an otherwise very good book, it gets bogged down in some repetitive points as he visits more than a handful of people and seemingly relates the same story about pawpaw events, pawpaw foods, and people's vague memories of a strange fruit.
• 
  Jude Morrissey

  Moore's narrative is hard to define - something of a microhistory, something of a memoir, something of a foodie travelogue, it meanders from past to present to future as well as state to state. For those who are truly interested in pawpaws (the history, the commercial prospects, current endeavours to produce cultivars, how it's hunted in the wild, and of course the pawpaw fans scattered throughout its range and beyond), it's a good read. Recommended for those who like long rambles about pawpaw (which includes me)!
• 
  Pamela Conley

  I should open with the confession that I am trying to grow pawpaws. I have a 40 acre family farm in Michigan that currently has several heirloom apples and an heirloom seckel pear so pawpaws fit right in. I have 3 small trees thus far delivered from 2 different nurseries. The book could go into a bit more of the evolutionary history and less of the interviews of folks that live in a place and ate one once but on the whole it is quite informative. The final chapter that contains the slow food sources and details for growing pawpaws in Michigan along with the sources provided for purchasing trees was worth the purchase price. If you are a foodie, a person interested in growing less mainstream fruits, or looking for a food to add to the slow food movement this is a book you will probably enjoy.