Grand Canyon Times

PHOENIX – Writer Carolyn Niethammer will speak 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 1pm MST, Thursday, May 11, and will be held virtually on Zoom. Attendees are encouraged to register at https://azsos.libcal.com/calendar/starl/may2023 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. With these rich traditions, it is no wonder 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.

A Desert Feast: Celebrating Tucson's Culinary Heritage is the recipient of the Southwest Book of the Year Award and the Pubwest Book Design Award. You can read A Desert Feast and similar titles for free on Reading Arizona.

Since her college days, Carolyn Niethammer has been writing books and newspaper and magazine articles about the food and people of the Southwest. Of her 10 books, four are cookbooks, three are 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, covering the arrival and development of agriculture, and providing an answer to the question of why Tucson was named the country's first UNESCO City of Gastronomy.

Register for the Event Here

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.

This is a virtual presentation. For more information, contact the State of Arizona Research Library at 602-926-3870 or visit the website at https://azsos.libcal.com/. The library also provides information on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/starlazlibrary/ and Twitter: https://twitter.com/StateLibAZ.

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.

Original source can be found here.