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Loading... Pawpaw: In Search of America's Forgotten Fruit (2015)87 | 2 | 309,475 |
(3.7) | 5 | As fruits go, the pawpaw is about as unique, historically important, and yet mysteriously undervalued as it gets. Despite an impressive resume, most people have probably never heard of the pawpaw, let alone bit into one. If you haven't yet eaten a pawpaw, Moore's lively and inquisitive book will have you seeking out the nearest pawpaw patch--Dust jacket.… (more) |
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Epigraph |
Way Down Yonder in the Pawpaw Patch
Where, oh, where is little Susie? Where, oh, where is little Susie? Where, oh, where is little Susie? Way down yonder in the pawpaw patch.
Come on boys, let's go find her. Come on boys, let's go find her. Come on boys, let's go find her. Way down yonder in the pawpaw patch.
Picking up paw-paws, puttin' 'em in a basket. Picking up paw-paws, puttin' 'em in a basket. Picking up paw-paws, puttin' 'em in a basket. Way down yonder in the pawpaw patch.
—Traditional American Folk Song | |
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For Erika | |
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Throughout the years it's gone by a lot of names—frost banana, Indiana banana, fetid-bush, bandango, custard apple, prairie banana, poor man's banana—but most of the time it's just been called pawpaw. | |
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Fewer and fewer Americans turn to the woods for fruit, nuts, greens, and meat, and fewer Americans grow gardens. Archeological evidence, which includes fossilized fruits and other remains from sites as diverse as Mississippi and New Jersey, indicates that pawpaws grew in North America as early as fifty-six million years ago. To get the whole story of the pawpaw’s importance—and later unimportance—to human cultures, I started at the beginning, traveling forty miles from Pittsburgh to Meadowcroft Rockshelter. Meadowcroft is the earliest known site of human presence in North America, with the longest sequence of continuous use—at least sixteen thousand years. Among the fossils that have been discovered here are those of pawpaw seeds. Donna Davis once told a reporter, rather diplomatically, “The people who like them are passionate about them. I suppose because it takes so much to grow them, and they have that delicate flavor.” But then she added something probably closer to the truth. “It’s kind of a cult thing.” And for some reason I will never learn, someone with an old-fashioned megaphone periodically calls out a booming, monotonous chant, “Paw, paw, paw, paw, paw, paw, paw, paw...” Long after the festival this chant will ring in my head. I imagine what it was like at the DuPont Circle farmers market on the day following the Washington Post feature. Here at the festival, though, it’s even more intense; the fruit is on the shopping list of nearly everyone in sight. This is one of the very few occasions in the world when people line up to buy pawpaws. “At home, what we do is wash them, and we take them in half, and we kind of squoosh them* out…” (Chris Chmiel)
* the seeds Many at the festival, like the couple from Johnstown, are interested in pawpaws as a component of permaculture. Short for “permanent agriculture,” permaculture is a sustainable design system modeled on naturally occurring ecosystems. Permaculture principles suggest that animals and crops don’t need to be as segregated as they tend to be in conventional agriculture. If a person wants a banana or mango or avocado, a pawpaw simply won’t cut it. But even if in practice the pawpaw can’t be a stand-in for bananas, it still represents the goal of the local-food ethos, that this native fruit that produces a tropical-like custard apple in the temperate North should at least be given a chance to become a regular part of our diets, and be cultivated, wild-harvested, and eaten each September. It should at least be known. We can eat bananas, but we should eat pawpaw too. | |
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▾References References to this work on external resources. Wikipedia in EnglishNone ▾Book descriptions As fruits go, the pawpaw is about as unique, historically important, and yet mysteriously undervalued as it gets. Despite an impressive resume, most people have probably never heard of the pawpaw, let alone bit into one. If you haven't yet eaten a pawpaw, Moore's lively and inquisitive book will have you seeking out the nearest pawpaw patch--Dust jacket. ▾Library descriptions No library descriptions found. ▾LibraryThing members' description
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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. ( )