Pawpaws: Everything You Need to Know About the Native American Fruit

As soon as late summer edges toward fall in New York, I begin to lick my pawpaw-loving lips. As this native North American fruit gains mainstream recognition it has become easier to source both the fresh fruit as well as the pawpaw saplings. Despite the rising tide of awareness, many people are still unfamiliar with them and have yet to taste a fresh pawpaw. And if you have lusted after the perfumed fruit but have not met one,  there are few things you may not know.

Here are 15 of them.

Photography by Marie Viljoen.

1. “Pawpaw” actually refers to two completely different and unrelated fruit.

The pawpaw under discussion is the native North American fruit belonging to the genus Asimina. The cold-hardy common pawpaw is A. triloba, but there are over a dozen other species, with regional distributions that cleave to the eastern and Mid-Western parts of the United States, from southern Canada down to Florida.

In regions and countries with Commonwealth and British colonial histories (think Australia, England, India, South Africa, the West Indies, and more) the common name “pawpaw” refers to what anyone from the Americas calls papaya. Soft-skinned and subtropical, small or football-sized, that pawpaw, Carica papaya, has yellow to deep rose flesh and is filled in the center with little black, peppery seeds. It is available in many grocery stores, year-round.

2. For the Shawnee, September is the month of the pawpaw moon, ha’siminikiisfwa.

The botanical genus name Asimina is derived from the Shawnee word for pawpaw: ha’simini. For the Shawnee, September is the month of the pawpaw moon, ha’siminikiisfwa, according to Joel Barnes, Archives Director for the Shawnee Tribe (via a West Virginia Public Radio interview in a 2020).

Until the 19th century, before they were forcibly removed by the US government, the Shawnee’s ancestral lands were in pawpaw-rich Appalachia, including current southeast Ohio.

3. The fruit has inspired an annual three-day festival.

The three-day Pawpaw Festival in southeast Ohio in September is a celebration of everything pawpaw. There are pawpaw tastings, and dozens of pawpaw dishes to choose from. Chris Chmiel is one of the founders of the festival and the co-owner (with Michelle Gorman, his wife) of Integration Acres, which has sold fresh pawpaws, frozen pawpaw purée, and other native wild things to the public since 1996. (The first pawpaws I tasted were shipped from Ohio’s woodland’s to my Brooklyn front door in 2016.)

4. The crew of the trans-continental Lewis and Clarke expedition were sustained by “poppaws.”