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Comment by mjklin | Hacker News Reader

In Virginia we have pawpaw fruit that taste like custard, but must be eaten soon after picking since they bruise very easily and don’t store or ship well.

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Pawpaws are nothing compared to their better cousins in the Annonaceae family, and in particular the Cherimoya.

Downside; they all contain annonacin, which may cause Parkinsons. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annonacin

Whoah. Thanks for the warning. There's a squirrel that keeps trying to stash custard apples in my mother-in-law's planter in Thailand. They're tasty (and delivered by squirrels!), but I didn't know about the toxicity.

Very interesting, we talk of eating three thousands of fruits at year in any case. I wonder how the new hyped varieties of pawpaw would score.

I really appreciate your contribution. Thanks.

This is totally unrelated to this post, but the one I want to comment on (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22093297), I can't. I wonder if I could get a link to the pdf for The Priceless Gift by Cornelius Hirschberg? It's a very hard to find book :)

> pawpaw fruit that taste like custard

Do you mean pawpaw, or custard apple (aka sugar apple in the US)?

https://www.starkbros.com/products/fruit-trees/pawpaw-trees

To eat cut in half and eat with a spoon. So good.

I planted a three variety pack 5ish years ago and got a lot last year. Safely a late freeze mostly got them this year

They are describing a fruit known in parts of the US as pawpaw and custard apple both. Never heard it called "sugar apple" but there are 2 different fruits known as custard apple so maybe you are thinking of a different one.

This is the one I meant: Annona squamosa (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugar-apple)

It's called custard apple in my country. We call papaya, pawpaw.

Any discussion of fruit needs to use their botanical names since they're called different things in different places.

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