A Desert Feast: Celebrating Tucson's Culinary Heritage

Southwest Center Series

by Carolyn Niethammer

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.”

Genres: Cookbooks, Food

232 pages, Paperback

Published September 22, 2020

Reviews

[Brigitte Cromey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nonfiction at its best, this is a gorgeously comprehensive overview of Tucson’s history and culinary makeup. I have particular interest in how important ancestral foods are to people with Native ancestry, and this book has a wealth of resources for me to follow up with as I learn more. Not a cookbook by any means, but the type of knowledge that’s invaluable to have in physical form.

[S Roberta · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was not a cookbook. It told about the origins of the native foods around Tucson and the restaurants that use them. It also mentioned the Mission Garden growing trees and bushes that the Spanish brought, and the foods of the Tohono O'odham. Also mentioned was Native Seed Search and the Seed Library. It's very informative for Snowbirds or gardeners who have recently moved here.

[Brian Hale · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderful (quick) read about the history of food and food development in and around Tucson. Not a cookbook. Niethammer nails it with her descriptions of local growers, suppliers, and retailers in the Tucson food chain.

[TENN2ARIZ · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good study and explanation of the early desert foods and gardens of Tucson of the 1700s and 1800s.