Carolyn Niethammer will present a talk about her book A Desert Feast: Celebrating Tucson's Culinary Heritage, as part of the State of Arizona Research Library’s 2023 Arizona Author Series. The talk is at 1 p.m. MST, Thursday, May 11th, and will be held virtually on Zoom. Attendees are encouraged to register to receive the link to the presentation. After the talk, there will be time for questions from the audience.

Tucson cuisine combines the influences and foodways of Indigenous, Mexican, mission-era Mediterranean, and ranch-style cowboy traditions into something wholly unique to the desert. It is no wonder, then, that Tucson became American’s first UNESCO City of Gastronomy. In A Desert Feast, Carolyn Niethammer honors this history and shows how waves of immigrants, travelers, and settlers have shaped this confluence of flavors and techniques to create food that smells and tastes unlike anything else. In this book, she interviews farmers, chefs, families, and entrepreneurs who are dedicated to preserving and expanding Tucson cuisine.

You can read A Desert Feast and many more titles for free on Reading Arizona. 

Carolyn Niethammer has been writing about the food and people of the Southwest since she got out of college in books and newspaper and magazine articles. Four of her ten books are cookbooks, three are books about Native American women, one is a travel book, and one is a novel that features a famous cook from Arizona history. Her work has been translated into German, French, and Korean. Her latest book, A Desert Feast: Celebrating Tucson’s Culinary History, is a look at Southern Arizona’s food history over the last 8,000 years, including the arrival and development of agriculture, and is an answer to why Tucson was named the country’s first UNESCO City of Gastronomy.  

This event is part of the 2023 Arizona Author Series. This program is supported by the Arizona State Library, Archives & Public Records, a division of the Secretary of State, with federal funds from the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

Arizona Center for the Book, a Library of Congress Center for the Book Affiliate.