A Desert Feast

Celebrating Tucson's Culinary Heritage

Carolyn Niethammer

• Publisher: University of Arizona Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780816538898
• eBook ISBN: 9780816542024
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Travel

Southwest Book of the Year Award Winner

Pubwest Book Design Award Winner

Drawing on thousands of years of foodways, Tucson cuisine blends the influences of Indigenous, Mexican, mission-era Mediterranean, and ranch-style cowboy food traditions. This book offers a food pilgrimage, where stories and recipes demonstrate why the desert city of Tucson became American's first UNESCO City of Gastronomy.

Both family supper tables and the city's trendiest restaurants feature native desert plants and innovative dishes incorporating ancient agricultural staples. Award-winning writer Carolyn Niethammer deliciously shows how the Sonoran Desert's first farmers grew tasty crops that continue to influence Tucson menus and how the arrival of Roman Catholic missionaries, Spanish soldiers, and Chinese farmers influenced what Tucsonans ate.

White Sonora wheat, tepary beans, and criollo cattle steaks make Tucson's cuisine unique. In A Desert Feast, you'll see pictures of kids learning to grow food at school, and you'll meet the farmers, small-scale food entrepreneurs, and chefs who are dedicated to growing and using heritage foods. It's fair to say, "Tucson tastes like nowhere else."

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword by Jonathan Mabry
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Why Tucson Is a UNESCO City of Gastronomy
• Prehistoric and Early History of Wild Foods: Eating Off the Land
• Traditional Early Agriculture: 4,000 Years in the Fields of the Santa Cruz Basin
• Europeans, Mexicans, and Chinese: Bringing New Foods and Traditions
• Gardening in the Desert: Growing Your Own Vegetables, Tucson Style
• Small-Scale Commercial Agriculture: Contracting Tucson’s Foodshed
• Tucson’s Artisan Food Producers
• Our Sonoran Culinary Heritage—It’s a Tucson Thing!
• Food Justice
• Epilogue. In the Coronavirus Crisis: How Tucson United to Feed the City
• Index