Carica papaya L., the sole species now kept in the genus Carica; the mountain papayas of the Andes, once filed alongside it, are now placed in Vasconcellea
The papaya is not a tree. It is a giant herb with a hollow, unbranched, soft-walled stem that will not make wood, carrying its leaves in a crown at the top and its fruit in the axils beneath them, and it behaves accordingly: it flowers within six months of germinating, fruits within a year, and is usually grubbed out and replanted after three or four, by which time it has grown too tall to pick and too slender to stand a storm. Nothing else in the fruit trade grows like that, and it is the reason a papaya can naturalise around a village within a generation and the reason a new variety can spread across a continent inside a decade.
Where it was domesticated is settled. Wild Carica papaya is found only in the lowland forests of southern Mexico and Central America, wild populations there carry considerably more genetic diversity than the crop does, and an isozyme survey of wild plants from Yucatán, Belize, Guatemala, and Honduras found them more closely related to each other than to the cultivated papayas growing in the same districts, which is the signature of a crop drawn from a local wild stock rather than of escaped garden plants. The wild fruit is globose and at most seven centimetres across, so the increase in size under cultivation has been very large. The date is another matter. Fleshy fruits leave nothing for an archaeologist to recover, and there is no carbonised papaya to put a figure on; the domestication is read as having happened within Maya agriculture, Yucatec Maya calling the plant put, and the date given here is a placement rather than a finding.
The plant's sexual arrangements shape the way it is grown and, in one part of Indonesia, the way it is eaten. Papayas may be male, female, or hermaphrodite, the three forms differing in the flowers they carry; commercial orchards are planted from hermaphrodite seed because those trees set the pear-shaped fruit the trade wants without needing a pollinator, and growers who plant seedlings of unknown sex thin out the males once they flower. In North Sulawesi the males are not wasted: the flower buds of the trees that will never fruit are salted, wrung of some of their bitterness, and fried, which is as thorough a use of a plant as the atlas records anywhere.
Two plants are persistently confused with this one and neither is related to it. The North American pawpaw, Asimina triloba, which shares the British and Nigerian name for the papaya, belongs to the custard apple family; the mountain papayas, papayuela and chamburo and the cultivated babaco of the Andes, are Vasconcellea, a separate genus of the same family, cold-hardy, small-fruited, and cooked in Colombia and Ecuador as a preserve rather than eaten raw. Neither belongs in this entry.
The papaya was one of the fastest travellers of the Columbian exchange, and it travelled fast for a mechanical reason: the seeds keep, they germinate readily, and a sailor who pocketed a handful could leave a fruiting tree behind him within a year of landfall.
The written record begins on Hispaniola. Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo described the fruit in his Sumario of 1526 and recorded that Alphonse de Valverde had carried seed from the coasts beyond Panama to Darién, from where it reached Santo Domingo and the other islands. The Taíno name papáia travelled with the seed, and it is the reason that a plant which never grew within a thousand miles of the Caribbean before 1500 is called much the same thing in Manila, Colombo, and Lagos today. Spaniards carried it west across the Pacific on the Manila Galleon, the annual Acapulco to Manila run that opened in 1565 and lasted two and a half centuries, and it kept its Hispaniolan name in the islands. From there or from the Portuguese side it reached Malacca before 1583 and Goa after 1589, and van Rheede figured it on the Malabar coast in the Hortus Malabaricus a century later. Seed is recorded as reaching Europe from India in 1626, where without heat it could only ever be a glasshouse curiosity.
Africa took it from both coasts. The Portuguese are held to have brought it to East Africa in the sixteenth or seventeenth century, and it was noted growing at Zanzibar by the middle of the eighteenth; on the Atlantic side it moved with the same ships that carried maize, cassava, and the groundnut to the Guinea coast, and it naturalised around compounds from Senegal to the Congo. Jan van Riebeeck, at the Cape, ordered papaya seed from India in 1652. The Pacific was the last leg: by about 1800 the plant was known through the islands, and it reached Hawaii in the first decades of the nineteenth century, where the single most consequential introduction in its history was still to come.
What is remarkable about the diffusion is not its speed but what the receiving kitchens did with it. Most of the New World fruits became fruit. The papaya became two ingredients, because a fruit that takes months to ripen is available unripe for most of its life, and cooks from Colombo to Vientiane discovered that the green flesh is a vegetable: firm, neutral, cheap, keeping well in the heat, holding its crunch under salt and acid, and soaking up whatever it is dressed with. The pounded green papaya salads of mainland Southeast Asia are the largest single consequence of the Columbian exchange in that region's cooking, and they are younger than most people assume, since they need the chilli as much as the fruit and both had to arrive first.
India now grows about a third of the world's papayas, far ahead of anyone else, with the Dominican Republic, Indonesia, Brazil, and Mexico following in the 2024 figures. Very little of that crop is traded across borders. The fruit bruises if a thumb is pressed into it, ripens in days once it starts, and is therefore mostly grown where it is eaten, which is why the papaya is at once one of the most widely cultivated fruits on earth and one of the least visible in international trade.
The kitchen divides it cleanly. Ripe, it is breakfast fruit, blended into shakes across the Caribbean, cut with lime everywhere, and made into candied sweets throughout Spanish America. Unripe, it is a vegetable: shredded into salads across mainland Southeast Asia, pickled in the Philippines, curried in Sri Lanka, stir-fried in Gujarat, dried and put into soup in the Benue valley, and cooked with alkali in Assam. The unripe fruit is also a tool, since the latex contains papain, the protease that Wurtz and Bouchut isolated and named in Paris in 1879 and that cooks in a dozen tropical countries had been using long before to tenderise tough meat by wrapping it in papaya leaves. Papain is now a commodity in its own right, tapped from scored green fruit and sold to brewers, tanners, and the makers of meat tenderiser.
The papaya is also, uniquely amongst the world's major fruits, a crop whose survival in one place was secured in a laboratory. Papaya ringspot virus devastated the Hawaiian industry in the 1990s; a team led by Dennis Gonsalves engineered resistance by inserting the virus's own coat protein gene into the plant, and the SunUp and Rainbow varieties released to growers in 1998 restored the crop. Most Hawaiian papaya has been transgenic ever since, which has made an ordinary breakfast fruit into a fixed point in the argument about genetic modification, more often invoked than examined.
Historical Journey of Papaya
Mérida, Yucatán & the Maya Lowlands — c. 1000 BCE
The papaya was domesticated here, in the lowland forests of southern Mexico and Central America, and the evidence for it is consistent across several disciplines. Wild populations of Carica papaya are found only in this region, they carry far more genetic diversity than the cultivated crop, and an isozyme survey of wild plants from Yucatán, Belize, Guatemala, and Honduras found them more closely related to one another than to the cultivated papayas growing beside them. The wild fruit is a disappointment: globose, seedy, and at most seven centimetres across. Yucatec Maya calls the plant put, and the domestication is generally read as having happened within Maya agriculture, though the date cannot be fixed, since a fleshy fruit leaves almost nothing for an archaeologist to find. The date of this point is a placement.
The peninsula still eats it in both of its forms. Ripe, it is breakfast, cut cold with lime. Half ripe, it goes into the syrup pan as dulce de papaya, cooked for an hour and a half with cinnamon and vanilla until it turns translucent and amber, and served with cubes of Edam, a cheese that reached Yucatán by sea and stayed.
Santo Domingo & Hispaniola — c. 1526 CE
Hispaniola is where the papaya entered the written record. Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, who served the Spanish crown on the island and published his Sumario de la natural historia de las Indias in 1526, gave the first European description, and reported that one Alphonse de Valverde had carried seed from the coasts beyond Panama to Darién, from where it went on to Santo Domingo and the other islands. The Taíno name went with it: papáia, which Spanish smoothed to papaya and which is now the word in most of the languages on earth.
The island kept the plant and the habit. Dominican Spanish calls it lechosa, the milky one, after the white latex that bleeds from an unripe fruit, and the Dominican Republic is now second only to India in the quantity it grows. The everyday form is liquid: a batida de lechosa, ripe fruit blended with evaporated milk and ice, drunk at breakfast or bought from a stall in the afternoon.
Manila & the Philippine Islands — c. 1565 CE
The papaya crossed the Pacific on the Manila Galleon. From 1565 until 1815 a Spanish ship sailed once a year between Acapulco in New Spain and Manila, the longest sustained transoceanic route in history, and it took Mexican silver west and brought Asian silk and porcelain back. It also carried, quietly and with far greater consequence, the American plants the Spanish had already established in Mexico and the Caribbean, which entered Asia by the back door rather than round Africa: maize, the sweet potato, the chilli, the groundnut, cassava, the guava, the pineapple, and the papaya. Some accounts put the fruit in the islands as early as about 1550, which is before the route opened and would require one of the earlier and less documented Spanish crossings; the fuller studies of the plants introduced to the archipelago place the arrival within the galleon centuries, and the date of this point follows the opening of the run.
The Taíno name came with the seed. Filipino still says papaya, which is why the word travelled onward through maritime Asia in that form rather than in any other.
It arrived in a kitchen ready for it. The green fruit went into the pickle jar as atchara, the Philippine member of the achar and acar family that had come the other way, from India through the Malay ports, and it is set beside every fried and fatty thing in the country. It also went into the pot: tinola, chicken simmered in a broth of bruised ginger and fish sauce, takes wedges of green papaya, or chayote if the household holds the other opinion. José Rizal put a bowl of it at the centre of the third chapter of Noli Me Tángere in 1887 and used the serving of it to say what he thought of the colony.
Malacca & the Straits of Melaka — before 1583 CE
Malacca was the hinge. The plant is held to have reached the Straits before 1583, brought either by the Portuguese who took the port in 1511 or by Spaniards out of Manila, and from this one anchorage it went in every direction that ships went: west to Goa and the Indian coast, north up the Mekong, east through the Spice Islands, and along the Annamese shore to the Tonkin delta. Malay called it betik rather than borrowing the Spanish name, which suggests the fruit arrived and was absorbed rather than merely traded through.
This point records the crossing rather than a cuisine. The dishes that the Straits themselves make of green papaya belong to the same pounded and pickled families as those of the ports on either side of them, and the atlas carries them where they are strongest.
Goa & the Konkan Coast — after 1589 CE
The papaya reached Goa after 1589, later than Malacca and by way of it, and India is now the largest producer of the fruit in the world by a wide margin, growing something in the order of a third of the global crop. Hendrik van Rheede figured the plant on the Malabar coast in the Hortus Malabaricus, compiled from the 1670s, by which time it was thoroughly at home.
Goa is a transit point on this journey rather than a destination. From the Portuguese ports the plant moved north to Gujarat, south across the water to Ceylon, round the Bay of Bengal to Lower Burma, and up the delta into Assam, and it is in those four kitchens that it became something particular rather than merely a fruit tree in a yard.
Havana & Cuba — c. 1600 CE
Cuba will not say the word. Papaya carries a coarse anatomical sense in Cuban Spanish, so the fruit is fruta bomba, the bomb fruit, in every market and on every menu on the island, and the substitution is old enough and complete enough that visitors are corrected rather than understood.
The island also bred the papaya that most of the hemisphere now eats. The Maradol variety is credited to Adolfo Rodríguez Rivera, a self-taught breeder, working with his wife María Luisa Nodal Ochoa across the years between 1938 and 1956, and its name is their two names spliced: Mar from María, adol from Adolfo. It is now the overwhelming majority of the Mexican crop and the standard large papaya of North American shops. Cuba's own kitchen treatment of the green fruit is dulce de fruta bomba, batons taken slowly into a lime and cinnamon syrup until they are glassy, and served cold against a slab of cream cheese.
Phnom Penh, Lovek & Cambodia — c. 1600 CE
European ships reached the Khmer capital at Lovek in the sixteenth century and Phnom Penh after it, and the papaya came with that trade, as the chilli did. When precisely is not recorded, and the date of this point is a placement for the period rather than a year.
What Cambodia made of it is bok l'hong. Bok is the sound of the pestle striking the mortar and names the method: the shredded green fruit is bruised rather than tossed, so that the dressing is driven into it. The dressing is where the Khmer version parts from its neighbours, because it is built on prahok, the thick fermented fish paste of the Tonlé Sap, which is deeper and muddier than the fish sauce of the Thai bowl and the padaek of the Lao one. Green papaya also goes into samlor korko, the old mixed vegetable stew, as one root amongst a dozen.
Espírito Santo & South-East Brazil — c. 1600 CE
Portuguese ships carried the papaya from the Spanish Caribbean into Brazil in the sixteenth century, into a continent whose northern shores the plant had in any case already reached before any European saw it. Portuguese named it twice over: mamão, from mama, for the shape, and papaia for one particular kind of it.
The distinction is now a market one. The long heavy formosa, named for the Taiwanese breeding line behind it, is sold by the slice; the small round papaia, also called havaí, is a Solo type out of Hawaii and is eaten whole by one person. Espírito Santo and the far south of Bahia grow most of the crop, and Brazil is among the four or five countries that dominate world production. The dish, by contrast, is young: creme de papaia, ripe fruit blended with vanilla ice cream and flooded with crème de cassis, appears in the late 1980s, becomes a São Paulo restaurant fashion in the 1990s, and is now on the dessert list of every churrascaria in the country.
Caracas & the Spanish Main — c. 1650 CE
The papaya did not need to be brought to the Spanish Main. Oviedo found it growing on the coasts of Panama and what is now Colombia in the first quarter of the sixteenth century, which means the plant had already worked its way south out of its Mesoamerican homeland long before European ships arrived. What did have to be brought was the sugar and the technique.
Candying fruit in syrup was how Europe held a harvest through a winter, and in a climate where the papaya fruits continuously the method stopped being preservation and became confectionery. Dulce de lechosa, strips of green papaya scored with a fork, soaked in alkaline water, and cooked for hours in dark papelón syrup with cloves, is the fixed last course of the Venezuelan Christmas table, after the hallacas and the pan de jamón. The Andes cook it paler with star anise, the east adds cinnamon and sometimes coconut, and Caracas maintains that anything beyond papelón and cloves is meddling.
The Malabar Coast & the Tamil Country — c. 1650 CE
From the Portuguese ports the papaya went down the coast and into the southern kitchens, and it is there that India's relationship with the fruit is closest. Malayalam has two words for the unripe fruit, kappalanga through the centre and south and omakka through Malabar; Tamil has pappali kai; Telugu has boppayi. When it arrived is not recorded and the date of this point is a placement, but it has been in the yards long enough that nobody in the south regards it as a foreign plant. India now grows about a third of the world's papayas, and the southern states are a large part of that.
The green fruit is treated as an ordinary vegetable, which is the whole difference between South India and the parts of the world that wait for it to ripen. Kerala grates it into kappalanga thoran, barely cooked and crushed through coconut, cumin, and green chilli, and also cooks it into omakka curry and erissery. The Tamil country simmers it with moong dal and a ground coconut paste as pappali kai kootu, which the Palakkad Iyers make as molagootal with pepper in the paste. Andhra fries it as boppayikaya kura and grinds it into chutney. The ripe fruit, meanwhile, is breakfast, cut cold with a squeeze of lime.
The tree suits the arrangement. It fruits within a year of a dropped seed, bears continuously rather than in a season, and stands in the corner of a yard taking up almost no ground, so the green fruit is always there to be picked and the household never has to buy a vegetable on a day when it has one.
Colombo & Sri Lanka — c. 1650 CE
The Portuguese brought the papaya to Ceylon from their Indian ports in the sixteenth or seventeenth century, and Sinhala gave it two names according to what was to be done with it. Ripe, it is papol. Unripe and bound for the pot, it is gaslabu, which reads as the tree labu, the gourd that grows on a tree, and settles the question of what kind of thing Sri Lankan cooks decided the green fruit was. English on the island says pawpaw, as Britain and Australia do.
A papaya in the garden is now the ordinary state of affairs, and because one tree gives more than a household can eat ripe, the green fruit became a vegetable. It is cooked as gaslabu curry, a mild white curry of coconut milk with fenugreek, turmeric, pandan, and curry leaves, which is the calm dish on a rice and curry table surrounded by things that are not calm; grated raw into gaslabu mallung with coconut and lime; or stewed with dried fish.
Makurdi & the Benue Valley — c. 1700 CE
The papaya came to West Africa in Portuguese ships during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, along the same sea roads as the chilli, the groundnut, and the cassava, and it naturalised so readily that it now grows unplanted around compounds across the forest and the middle belt. Nigeria calls it pawpaw, in the British usage; Yoruba calls it ìbẹ̀pẹ. The date of this point is a placement for a spread that is not documented year by year.
Most of the crop is eaten ripe and raw. In the Benue valley, which Nigeria calls the food basket of the nation, the Tiv do something else with it: the unripe fruit is cut into strips, dried in the sun until it is leathery, and cooked as a vegetable in a soup of palm oil, ground egusi melon seed, and beef, eaten with pounded yam or eba. Drying gives the flesh a chew that fresh green papaya has not got, and it also makes a tree's worth of fruit keep.
Manado & the Minahasa Peninsula, North Sulawesi — c. 1700 CE
The papaya worked east through the archipelago from the Straits, and North Sulawesi came to use more of the plant than almost anywhere else does. The ripe fruit is breakfast, the green fruit is a vegetable, the young leaves are boiled as bitter greens, and the male flower buds are the basis of a dish that is one of the signatures of the Minahasa: garo bunga pepaya. The date of this point is a placement.
The buds come from the male trees, which never fruit, and they are about as bitter as a bitter gourd. They are rubbed hard with coarse salt until they weep, rinsed, and rubbed again, two or three times over, until the bitterness is reduced but not removed, since a version without it would be considered a failure. Then they are fried hard with a great quantity of bird's eye chilli, shallot, garlic, ginger, lemongrass, and shreds of cakalang fufu, skipjack tuna smoked over coconut husk until it can be pulled apart with the fingers.
Ahmedabad & Gujarat — c. 1750 CE
The plant moved north from the Portuguese ports to Gujarat, which now grows more papaya than any other Indian state and which put the green fruit to a use of its own. Sambharo is a Gujarati category: a raw vegetable coarsely shredded, thrown into hot oil with mustard seed, asafoetida, curry leaves, and turmeric, turned for two or three minutes, and taken off whilst it still crunches. Cabbage and carrot make one version; raw papaya makes the one that matters.
It has a fixed partner and a fixed day. Papaya nu sambharo is served with fafda, the chickpea-flour strips, and at Dussehra the queues outside the Ahmedabad fafda shops form early for fafda, jalebi, fried green chillies, and a fistful of the sharp warm papaya, which is the only thing on the plate stopping the other three from winning.
Papeete, Tahiti & the Society Islands — c. 1775 CE
The Society Islands became the crossroads of the Pacific within a decade of European contact. Samuel Wallis reached Tahiti in 1767, Cook followed in 1769, and between 1772 and 1775 Spanish expeditions sent from Callao by the Viceroy of Peru landed there repeatedly, left animals and plants, and maintained a short-lived mission at Tautira; the London Missionary Society arrived in 1797. Every one of those ships came from a coast where the papaya was already common, and the fruit took hold in the islands amongst the many things they put ashore. Which ship brought it is not recorded, and the date of this point is a placement.
What Tahiti did with it was to fold it into a dish far older than itself. Po'e takes its name from the proto-Polynesian poke, to mix or knead, the same root behind Hawaiian poi and poke; fruit is mashed, bound with pia, Polynesian arrowroot, wrapped in banana leaves, and baked in the ahima'a, the earth oven. Banana is the best-known version and papaya one of the standard ones, baking to a translucent apricot colour and eaten cold under coconut cream at ma'a Tahiti, the Sunday meal after church, from a single dish that everybody reaches into.
From here the plant went on north-east. The mission parties and traders who worked out of the Society Islands reached the Marquesas from 1797, and it was Marquesan seed that Francisco de Paula Marín is credited with taking to Honolulu.
Yangon & Lower Burma — c. 1800 CE
Burmese calls the papaya thinbaw thee, ship fruit, and offers two readings of the name: that a papaya cut in half has the shape of a boat, or that thinbaw is the prefix the language gives to things that arrived by sea, which this one did, through the Bay of Bengal ports and the Tenasserim coast. The second reading is the likelier, since the prefix does the same work elsewhere in Burmese, but the record does not settle it. The date of this point is a placement.
Thinbaw thee thoke is the Burmese green papaya salad, and it is not a pounded one. A thoke is mixed with the hand, which is what the word means, and the shreds stay dry, separate, and crisp. The seasoning is Burmese rather than Thai: garlic fried slowly in oil until gold, with the oil going in as well as the garlic; fried onion; ground dried shrimp for salt; lime for sour; and a spoonful of roasted gram flour, which is the ingredient that makes a Burmese salad cling.
Guwahati & the Brahmaputra Valley — c. 1800 CE
The papaya travelled up the Bay of Bengal and into the Brahmaputra valley, probably in the seventeenth or eighteenth century; the date is not recorded and this point is a placement. It arrived in a kitchen that had a technique waiting for it. An Assamese meal opens with khar and closes with something sour, and khar is both a dish and the alkaline liquid that defines it, made by burning the peel or dried stem of the bhim kol banana, steeping the ash in water, and straining the filtrate through cloth. Neighbouring peoples call the Assamese kharkhuwa, khar-eaters, and the name is carried without embarrassment.
Amita is papaya, and amitar khar is the version most often made: the raw fruit simmered with the alkali, sometimes with pulses or a fried head of rohu, and finished with raw mustard oil and green chilli. The khar softens the flesh faster than water would, deepens its colour, and leaves a clean, faintly soapy bitterness that has no equivalent elsewhere in Indian cooking. An older technique met a newer ingredient and found that it suited it better than what had gone before.
Nuku Hiva & the Marquesas Islands — c. 1800 CE
By about 1800 the papaya was growing through the islands of the Pacific, and the Marquesas had it before Hawaii did. How it arrived is not recorded. Álvaro de Mendaña made the first European landfall in the group in 1595, sailing from Callao, and from the 1790s the islands were worked steadily by whalers, sandalwood traders, and missionaries, many of them coming by way of the Society Islands, where the fruit was already growing. Any of those ships could have carried the seed, and none of them wrote it down. The date of this point is a placement for a crossing rather than a record of one.
The Marquesas matter to this journey because of what left them. Francisco de Paula Marín, the Spanish horticulturist who advised Kamehameha I and planted much of what Hawaii now grows, is credited with taking papaya seed from these islands to Honolulu in the early years of the nineteenth century, which makes this archipelago the immediate source of the Hawaiian crop and therefore of the Solo papaya's whole later history.
This point records a passage rather than a cuisine. The Marquesan larder was built long before on breadfruit, taro, coconut, and fish, and it is mā, fermented breadfruit paste, that carried the islands through the dry seasons; the papaya arrived late and took its place as a fruit amongst the others rather than displacing anything. Further south, in the Society Islands, it did find its way into a dish: po'e, the baked starch and coconut-cream pudding of the Tahitian table, is made with papaya as readily as with banana or pumpkin.
Honolulu & the Hawaiian Islands — c. 1823 CE
Papaya reached the Hawaiian islands in the early nineteenth century. The introduction is credited to Francisco de Paula Marín, the Spanish horticulturist who advised Kamehameha I, who is said to have brought seed from the Marquesas, where the ships working the Pacific had already left it; other accounts have it arriving from the Caribbean. The decisive date is later and exact. On 7 October 1911 Gerrit P. Wilder of Honolulu introduced seed from Barbados, and the small fruit it produced was named Solo in 1919, for the fact that one person finishes one at a sitting. The Kapoho selection of the 1950s, grown on the lava soils of Puna, built the export trade.
That trade nearly ended. Papaya ringspot virus reached Puna in the 1990s and cut the crop to a fraction of itself, and resistance was engineered by a team led by the plant pathologist Dennis Gonsalves, who had grown up on Hawai'i island, by inserting a gene for the virus's own coat protein into the plant. The resulting varieties, SunUp and Rainbow, went to growers in 1998, and most Hawaiian papaya has been transgenic since. The islands' own contribution to the kitchen is smaller and stranger: a salad dressing made with the fruit and its own black seeds, which taste of mustard and cress and pepper the dressing with flecks.
Vientiane & Laos — c. 1860 CE
The papaya and the chilli came up the Mekong through the Khmer country, and by the middle of the nineteenth century both were established in Lao cooking. Out of the two of them, and out of a mortar that had been pounding tam salads long before either arrived, came the dish that has since spread across the region and out of it.
Tam mak hoong means pounded papaya, and the Lao version is the fiercest of the family: padaek, the unstrained fermented fish, rather than clear fish sauce; more chilli; more sour; often no peanuts and no sugar at all. It is generally accepted that the dish originated here or in the closely related Isan country across the river, and that it moved outward rather than inward, though a claim of this kind can never be settled to everyone's satisfaction and the two banks of the Mekong belong to one culinary tradition in any case.
Hanoi & the Red River Delta — c. 1900 CE
The papaya entered Vietnam through the southern and central ports, where Portuguese, Japanese, and Chinese merchants traded at Hội An from the sixteenth century, and worked north to the Red River delta. Đu đủ is the name, and the green fruit belongs to the street rather than the household kitchen.
Nộm đu đủ bò khô is the northern form and is assembled in under a minute on a pavement near Hoàn Kiếm lake: shredded papaya salted and wrung dry, strips of bò khô cut with scissors, roasted peanuts, a fistful of rau răm, and a ladle of thin dark sweet and sour dressing. Nothing is pounded, which is the first difference from the salads further west, and the second is the rau răm, whose soapy pepperiness is the note the dish is remembered by. Green papaya also turns up pickled, in slivers, beside the grilled pork and noodles of bún chả.
Khon Kaen & the Khorat Plateau — c. 1950 CE
The Khorat plateau shares its language, its sticky rice, and its mortar with the Lao country across the Mekong, and it shares the pounded papaya salad too. What happened in the twentieth century is that the dish left the plateau. Isan workers moving to Bangkok for work after the Second World War took it with them, it became popular in the capital through the 1950s and 1960s, and from there it travelled to the rest of the world as som tam, the sour pounded salad, which is now the single most widely eaten thing ever made with a green papaya.
The Bangkok version was tuned on the way. Som tam Thai uses clear fish sauce rather than padaek, adds palm sugar, dried shrimp, and roasted peanuts, and pulls the heat back, whilst som tam pla ra on the plateau keeps the fermented fish and the ferocity. Both are pounded to order in a clay mortar with a wooden pestle, and the papaya must still crunch when it reaches the plate.
