Ever since I was a child and learned the song “Way Down Yonder in the Pawpaw Patch,” I’ve been curious about pawpaws.
Pawpaw fruit is notoriously delicate and ephemeral, so unless you live close to where pawpaws grow, you don’t get to have any. As a lifelong New Englander, I’d resigned myself to never tasting a pawpaw unless I happened to visit the South at the right time of year. Then I found out that there was a farm in Rhode Island that not only grew them, but also sold them. For years, I was eager to get my paws on some, and in the early fall of 2024, I finally did.
Rocky Point Farm in Warwick, Rhode Island is an urban farm, the access point hidden away on a residential street. They sell pawpaws only a few days of the week in mid-September and through October. You have to show up early to get in line, because they sell out within twenty minutes, even though they limit the amount that people are allowed to buy.
Luckily there were some people, but not a lot, already in line when we arrived. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have known where to go. Standing with these random people in this weird location and then paying in cash for a little stash of fresh and frozen pawpaws, it was almost like joining a secret society (“or a cult,” my husband added when I said as much). As the other people drove away with their pawpaws, my husband also joked about us clearly not fitting in well, because everyone else had an electric car.
Those pawpaws cost a pretty penny, I tell you, but they filled the car with the most heavenly smell. Since we were near the ocean, we decided to stop at a seafood restaurant and enjoy a nice dinner together. We didn’t look closely at the fruit until we got home, at which time we were surprised to see that some of the pawpaws were downright black in spots. Whether they’d been that way at the time of purchase or whether they’d turned black during the couple of intervening hours, we’re not sure, but it was clear that they were already degrading and would only get worse. They needed to be eaten or frozen that very night. So we ate a few, and we froze the rest.
People say that the flavor of a pawpaw is like a mix of banana, pineapple, and mango. Our experience was mixed. A couple of the pawpaws were the sweet and custardy treat we’d been told to expect. Yum! Others were mealy. Some had far more seed than flesh. Some were bitter or had a vaguely vomitous aftertaste. Overall, we weren’t sure we liked them very much.
We watched a few YouTube videos about pawpaws afterward, and what we learned is that each pawpaw tree is genetically unique. Some will produce good-tasting fruit and/or fruit with plenty of flesh. Some will produce yucky fruit and/or fruit that’s mostly seeds. So, they’re like apples that way. If you want to be guaranteed good fruit, you need a graft from a tree that produces good fruit. So, perhaps the farm’s pawpaw patch was naturally seeded, and that’s why the fruit quality was so varied.
Someday, after horticulturists have had their way with the pawpaw plant, we may be able to get pawpaws that last longer than a day and that have small seeds and that are consistently tasty. Until that happens, I don’t think I’m going to buy any more pawpaws, but I’m sure glad that my husband and I went on our little pawpaw adventure. It was a fun and informative day.