photo courtesy UA Press
This wonderful new release is the product of Arizonan Carolyn Niethammer’s forty years of personal research and living an informed eating and cooking life. The author of the “Tumbleweed Gourmet,” “The Prickly Pear Cookbook” and “The New Southwest Cookbook” has the native wild harvest of the Southwest’s environs squarely in her sights.
It is in part cookbook, a practical guide to harvesting native desert fruits and plants legally and without too many stickers in the hands, and part gentle exhortation to the reading public to explore and enjoy indigenous foods: “Including some of these delicious and easily available plants in our diets even once and a while can keep us connected to our beautiful and generous Southwest homeland.”
With a hefty sprinkling of enough ethnobotanical and folklore references to both Native American and Sonoran Mexican traditions to pique the interest of the scientifically minded, the volume is a welcome addition to the rapidly expanding literature addressing locally raised foods, traditional foods, healthier foods, and native foods. When available, the nutritional benefits of these wonderful “free” edibles are provided.
Twenty-three wild foods are lovingly described, harvesting techniques explained, along with tested recipes replete with cooking tips. For example, greens like pigweed, lambs-quarter, watercress and purslane (verdolagas to our Spanish speaking friends) can be located and harvested wildly, and utilized in any way that store-bought greens can.
The Mesquite pod, a grand dame of wild southwest foods, can be collected easily and milled into flour by Desert Harvesters (see related Desert Harvesters story here). There’s a staggering amount of meals that could be made from locally grown pods, yet mesquites’ bounty ends up in landfills and down our street drains every year. If you have a dog, you know they are edible, as surely as your dog crunches on the pods’ sweet flavor. Twenty-six recipes for mesquite meal, syrup and broth are provided.
Niethammer points out the irony of the global system of expensively distributing food while ignoring sources closer to home. For example, Christopher Columbus carried the prickly pear cactus (literally hundreds of species exist, nearly all edible), back to the Old World. Prickly pear has been incorporated into the fabric of eating and growing in such far-flung places as Italy, Spain, Israel and Madagascar. Italian raised prickly pear fruit are imported to New York gourmet Italian markets as “Barbary figs” at premium prices to the purchaser (and to the planet), as Italian émigrés in New York cannot live without their taste of home, while the fruit generally goes unused in its Southwestern locale.
The author opines that the fruit of Engelmann’s prickly pear, a common landscaping plant, are the best. She recommends carefully harvesting the fruits using tongs or heavy leather gloves and a bucket. Preparation requires a pair of heavy rubber gloves, a stiff vegetable brush and the willingness to accept a few stickers. “Do not let the stickers become a big irritation, physically or psychologically,” she writes. Concoctions like the prickly pear citrus marinade and sauce sound tasty, as does prickly pear sangria. Prickly pear pads, called nopal, are a delicate vegetable low in calories. Nopalitos and chicken in culichi sauce will definitely be on this writer’s list of “to try” recipes.
Oak acorns, piñon pine seeds, cholla buds and fruits, barrel cactus fruit and the archetypical saguaro cactus fruit, all receive their due. The largess of the desert and uplands in various seasons is frankly breathtaking.
On November 12, Carolyn Niethammer gives a cooking demo and talk at Tohono Chul Park, 7366 N. Paseo del Norte, from 9 a.m.-11 a.m; $25 for members, $35 for general public. On November 18 is a free discussion at Antigone Books, 411 N. 4th Ave., starting at 7 p.m. More information on the book is at www.UAPress.arizona.edu.
