Читать книгу Taste of Tucson - Jackie Alpers - Страница 9

About the Cuisine of Tucson

Tucson is a hot, dusty college town located just sixty miles north of the Mexican border and situated between Santa Fe and Southern California. It boasts both in physicality and style a truly unique cuisine.

Tucson was first in the U.S. to be designated a “City of Gastronomy” by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), an agency promoting diversity around the world. Tucson’s unparalleled cuisine is influenced by the city’s location in the Sonoran Desert and its proximity to Mexico. Over the years, Native American and Hispanic cultures have mixed with generations of settlers who moved to the Southwest looking for a new life.

Like many American cities, Tucson is a patchwork of cultures that began long before the Europeans got here. What’s different is the unique and evolving makeup of that patchwork, and how it has grown into a vibrant and thriving community.

Tucson is one of the oldest continually inhabited regions in the world. The Paleo Indians lived here at least 12,000 years ago. They were hunter-gatherers who lived on the edible flora and fauna. When it was time to hunt, they relied more on small game like rabbit and quail than large game that also roamed the region, such as the giant prehistoric ground sloths. Some of these unique native plants and, to a lesser extent, animals are still part of the local cuisine today. (Not the ground sloths—they’re extinct.)

Beginning about 4,000 years ago, the Hohokam Indians learned how to grow crops using ditches that collected rainwater and irrigation canals that diverted water from naturalwaterways.

As time passed, the regional cuisine evolved. Several key turning points had a major impacton Tucson’s culinary evolution: the development of irrigation; land wars and Manifest Destiny (this region was ruled by

Native cultures, then Mexico, then Spain, then Mexico again. In 1912, it became one of the last territories to join the United States); the railroad, which brought an influx of new settlers (and new foods) in the 1880s; and, finally, higher education and the military, which brought major sources of population and cultural expansion in the 20th century.

Many years later, in 1992, eighty years after Arizona became a state, and twenty-five years after I was born, I came to Tucson.

People used to ask me, in a voice that conveyed some level of astonishment, “Why Tucson?” They don’t ask me that anymore (or at least not in the same tone).

Now the secret is out, and Tucson has become well known for how special it is. Not just for the unique flora and fauna and the enviable number of sunny days—it is a place where nature is still held in balance with city life. Where nature is incorporated into not only our cuisine, but in much of our dailylives.

This region is still connected to the past.To Native cultures.To Mexico.To the Spanish.To early settlers from around the globe, which include Chinese immigrants, who helped build the railroad.

The cuisine and culture are constantly evolving, as they should. People’s personal histories have merged with the region and have grown and evolved just as the area has. I want to pay tribute to all the cultures this community was built on.

I didn’t start out wanting to teach people how to cook. My main area of creative interest was always integrating words and pictures. This town was the catalyst for me to explore writing and photography, and food and cooking, in a new way. I hope this book inspires you as much as Tucson has inspired me.

8