A soft, spiced baked pudding made from the custardy pulp of the pawpaw, the largest fruit native to North America. Pawpaw flesh — tasting of banana, mango, and custard at once — is mashed into a batter of flour, eggs, butter, sugar, and warm spice and baked until it sets to a dense, spoonable pudding much like a baked custard or persimmon pudding. It is a seasonal mountain treat, made only in the brief late-summer weeks when the wild fruit ripens and drops. Its tropical flavor is startling for a fruit foraged from Appalachian woods.
The pawpaw (Asimina triloba) is a native understory tree of the eastern hardwood forests and a member of the largely tropical custard-apple family; its fruit is documented as the largest edible fruit native to North America. Long gathered by Native peoples and later by mountain settlers, the soft, perishable fruit never became a market crop because it bruises and spoils within days of ripening, so it stayed a foraged, eat-it-now treat. Baking the pulp into a spiced pudding is a natural use, closely paralleling the older Southern persimmon pudding it resembles. It has no single inventor; it is regional home cooking shaped by what the woods gave up each September.
Dense, moist, and soft-set, somewhere between a baked custard and a quick bread pudding, scoopable with a spoon. The pawpaw comes through tropical and rich — banana and mango with a custard creaminess — deepened by brown sugar and warm spice into something almost like a spiced banana pudding. The texture is smooth and a little gummy from the fruit's natural body. Eaten warm or cold, often under a spoon of whipped cream that plays against the fruit's perfume.
This is an egg-set custard pudding: the eggs' proteins coagulate in the oven's gentle heat and bind the fruit pulp and liquid into a soft, sliceable set, while a little flour adds body and keeps it from weeping. Low, even heat is the rule — too hot and the custard curdles and turns grainy or cracks. Pawpaw is best handled raw and mashed rather than cooked hard beforehand, since prolonged high heat can dull its delicate aromatics and turn the flavor flat. The black seeds and skin are inedible and always removed; only the soft pulp goes in.
Variations
Spicing follows the persimmon-pudding tradition — cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, sometimes clove or ginger. Some bakers lean richer with extra butter, cream, or buttermilk; others keep it lean and let the fruit lead. It is sometimes baked thinner and crisper at the edges, sometimes thick and soft like a steamed pudding. Closely related uses of pawpaw pulp include ice cream, custard, and quick breads. A topping of whipped cream or a hard sauce is common.
On the Palate
Where Pawpaw Pudding sits in the American flavor cloud
Ingredients
Serves 8
How it's made
8 steps · 20 min active + 55 min waiting
- 110 min
Scoop the pulp from ripe pawpaws and press it through a sieve to remove the seeds and any skin.
Watch outPress the pulp through a sieve until every black seed and bit of skin is gone — both are inedible and only the soft pulp goes in.
- 23 min
Whisk the eggs with the sugar and brown sugar until smooth.
- 33 min
Beat in the pawpaw pulp, melted butter, and milk.
- 44 min
Stir together the flour, baking powder, and warm spices, then fold into the wet mixture until just combined.
- 51 min
Pour the batter into a buttered baking dish.
- 645 min
Bake in a moderate oven until the pudding is set in the center and lightly browned, about forty-five minutes.
Watch outBake in a moderate oven only until the center is just set — too hot and the egg custard curdles grainy or cracks.
- 78 min
Let it cool slightly so it firms up further.
- 81 min
Serve warm or chilled, topped with whipped cream.
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