ISSUE 32, NATIVE FRUITS, Part 4: Mayhaw
Mayhaw
Mayhaw (Crataegus opaca): As the name suggests, the plant is a member of the Hawthorne family. There are two native genera, both fruiting in the Spring—one producing round red from a little over ½ inch in diameter; another producing round yellow fruit a little over ½ inch in diameter. The red varieties have seen the most intensive cultivation in recent decades. In recent years, because of disease vulnerabilities (particularly to Rust) a Chinese Mayhaw has been introduced with larger fruit that harvests in the fall.
The wild fruit grow in swamps and stream bottoms, habitats so damp nothing else challenges its dominance. Most of the early cultivated varieties were wild landraces collected and cultivated. The USDA currently preserves three cultivars: Heavy, Big Red, and Super Spur.
[http://www.ars-grin.gov/cgi-bin/npgs/acc/display.pl?1906608]
T. O. Warren, the great promoter of Mayhaw cultivation, collected the red skinned white fleshed Heavy in the Pearl River Swamp in Mississippi circa 1968, and praised its heavy bearing habit and late season fruiting. Big Red, another Warren discovery in the Pearl River Swamp, distinguished itself from other varieties by its size—between ¾ and one inch inch in diameter. Super Spur a red skinned version collected by J. S. Akin in a swamp near Sibley, LA. It is the variety most celebrated for taste, making delicious syrup and Jelly. (T.O. Warren, 1990, “History of Mayhaw Varieties,” Pomona 23(3): 69-71.)
Because the fruit are jam packed with seeds and the fruit has a acidulous quality that requires a sugary counternote to be pleasurable, the Mayhaw is rarely consumed raw or seeded and used dry. It is almost invariably processed into a syrup or a jelly, sometimes in pies and cobblers.
Immediately after the Civil War a Louisianan observed of its taste: “It resembles the apple in perfume and shape and the haw only in its seed, having a juicy flavor, acid and delicate, of its own.” (New Orleans Times Picayune, May 24, 1868, 5) . The Jelly was long used in the south as an accompaniment to game dishes. Indeed, a newspaper report from Louisiana dated 1875 proclaims it the preeminent such complement. “With venison, wild duck or wild turkey, it surpasses apple, plum, grape or orange jelly. We wonder that it is not cultivated and improved.” In precisely this decade it mutated from a forage crop to a cultivated crop, in large measure because it proved a very robust grafting stock for fruits, particularly in wet zones.