Pawpaw Magic

Pawpaw image by Liane M by Getty Images via Canva

I live in northern Appalachia, and one of my favorite parts of the fall is when the pawpaw trees start blooming. These chubby little fruits taste like a lil’ bit of heaven, sort of like a cross between a mango and a banana. Their gooey, custardy texture isn’t for everyone, but holy cow do I love them. Unfortunately, because they spoil fairly quickly, you’ll never find a pawpaw in a grocery store – and the window of opportunity for collecting them is fairly short, for just a few weeks in September and early October, so they’re just not that viable commercially. If you’re lucky, you might encounter pawpaws at your local farmers market if you live in a pawpaw-prone area, but you’re just as likely to find them just hanging out on a tree in your neighborhood, near a creek, or tucked away at the edge of a nearby woodland.

The pawpaw (Asimina triloba) is the largest edible fruit native to North America – it grows in twenty-six states in the eastern US – and looks like a small green potato. I won’t go into a whole ton of detail on the ways you can eat them – I like mine raw and fresh, but you can use pawpaw in puddings, pies, muffins, and more – but I’ll post some recipe links below. Anyhoo, I thought since pawpaw season is nigh upon us, it would be a good time to talk about their magical potential. I mean, I try to find magical purposes for everything, so here we are.

Interestingly, there doesn’t appear to be a lot of folkloric or historical writing about the use of the pawpaw in magic – I’m not super surprised by this, because like many other foods native to Appalachia, there seems to be a bit of a stigma around this fruit. Look at some of the derogatory alternative names for it – hillbilly mango and poor man’s banana. In other words, it was seen (and probably still might be) as something you eat when you can’t afford to eat anything else. Additionally, there was certainly a racial component to the way European colonizers viewed pawpaw when they got to North America. Indigenous peoples ate the fruit and incorporated it into medicinal practices, and it was also a valuable supplement to the limited food supplies of enslaved Africans. Culinary historian Michael W. Twitty writes that pawpaw gave enslaved peoples both a diversity in their diet and nourishment as they headed north to escape their enslavers. Food has, for ages, been the great social inequalizer – we (societal we, not me and you personally) don’t like to talk about things that might get us associated with those we consider beneath us… but I digress.

Many of the magical associations we assign to things are related to the item’s mundane characteristics. Dana O’Driscoll of The Druid’s Garden points out that the pawpaw can be associated with transience, death and the underworld, and moving on from a toxic situation. For me, finding a ripe pawpaw out in the woods is an absolute delight, much like discovering unexpected treasure that I wasn’t looking for. I often stumble across them by accident, and after that first initial moment of Wait, am I looking at what I think I’m looking at? there’s a bounty of joy to be harvested. From a magical perspective, I see the pawpaw as a reminder of unplanned abundance that is to be celebrated, with a sense of feeling gratitude for the everyday simple things. Because it’s such an unusual thing to encounter for most people, I like to introduce friends to the tasty, gooey goodness of pawpaws whenever I can – so it also seems representative of sharing bounty with those around us. Finally, the Indigenous peoples who lived in my region – I’m in an area that was Shawnee ancestral land – were known to use the pawpaw to mark September’s moon phases, so I associate it with fall lunar magic. Joel Barnes, the language and archives director for the Shawnee Tribe, says, “The word for pawpaw is ha’siminikiisfwa. That means pawpaw month. It’s the month of September [and] literally means pawpaw moon. That moon would indicate that was the time the pawpaws were ripe and it was time to go pick them and probably also indicated, ‘Hey, we’re getting close to winter.’”

So, if you get a chance to find a pawpaw patch, harvest a few to eat, leave the rest for others to enjoy, and celebrate the magic of this weird and wonderful Appalachian fruit.

Pawpaw Recipes & Other Interesting Stuff: