PAPAYAS FROM A TREE

One of the pleasures of being here is that every now and then we notice that one of our many Papaya trees has a football-size fruit dangling beneath its umbrella-shaped canopy, turning yellow. If we let the fruit hang there too long, birds will eat it, especially the orioles. Therefore, usually we cut it off a couple of days before it reaches its peak of perfection, set it someplace where we can watch it, and then when its really ripe, what a pleasure to slice into it and just eat. Of course that's a papaya fruit above.

In my opinion, a papaya isn't perfectly ripe until its husk begins looking almost disagreeable -- the yellow surface browning here and there, even with some spots of white fungus breaking out. Well, you cut off that part and eat the perfect stuff inside. I say "in my opinion" because I'm always astonished at how many people think that a banana with brown spots is beyond eating. "In my opinion," bananas are at their best as brown spots begin appearing, and purely yellow bananas are unripe and bitter tasting! But the advertising industry has put it into people's heads that bananas need to be yellow, so what can you do? Possibly the same form of lunacy extends into papaya eating, but I don't know.

Papayas please with much more than their mere taste, texture and appearance. Something in them sets the stomach at ease, and makes your guts smile on a hot, sunny afternoon like we're having now.

That shouldn't surprise us, for traditional cooks have known for millennia to wrap their pigs in papaya leaves before baking them, and even our own culture has realized that papayas contain "the natural meat tenderizer" called papain. Papain helps our stomachs digest things.

Here Papaya trees grow all over the place, both the horticultural kind with big, football-shaped fruits, and others whose fruits are spherical and grow no larger than lemons before yellowing; those we just let the orioles have. Well, the orioles take them whether we want them to or not.

Because I like papayas so much I suggested to Ana María that we plant larage numbers of them. Her reply was that planted papayas nearly never come up. The ones we have just grew on their own accord. The thing to do is to eat your papaya, scatter the seeds, and let nature take its course.

My Maya-speaking friend Don Elías tells me that if you put a papaya's seeds in water, the seeds that will produce trees bearing small, round fruits will float to the top, while the seeds producing trees bearing big fruits will sink. That doesn't make any sense at all, but usually Don Elías knows what he's talking about, so I'm remembering the advice.

What a pleasure walking down our lane at dusk, eating papaya and conscientiously spitting my seeds just everywhere!

FROM THE JULY 27, 2007 NEWSLETTER:

THE PAPAYA BERRY

A lot of people are surprised that papayas are hollow inside, and that many soft, blackish seeds are attached to the cavity's walls by short, slender, stringlike umbilici. The attachment is so weak that a quick brush with a finger dislodges them. The seeds themselves are so soft that they can be chewed, but they have such a strong peppery taste, like wild cress, that few people bother with them.

Terminology relevant to papaya fruits can be a bit disorienting. For example, botanically, papayas are berries. Technically, a berry is a pulpy fruit developing from a single pistil, containing one or more seeds but no true stone.

Therefore, the term "berry" is much more inclusive than we usually think. Tomatoes are berries, as are oranges, grapes and cucumbers. The concept of "berry" is so general that subcategories have beene defined. Cucumbers, like watermelons -- developed from inferior ovaries so that the resulting fruit is surrounded by a fleshy layer such as the watermelon's rind -- are berries of the "pepo" subcategory. Oranges are specialized berries known as hesperidia. A hesperidium possesses a thickened, leathery rind and juicy pulp divided into segments, the segments corresponding to carpels, or sections, in the original flower's ovary.

If flower terms like "carpel" and "inferior ovary" throw you for a loop you may want to review my flower page at http://www.backyardnature.net/fl_stand.htm.

An overview of fruit types is provided at http://www.backyardnature.net/fruits.htm.