Southwestern Regional Cookery: Arizona

Most of Arizona remained unsettled until after 1860. Spanish missionaries in the seventeenth century attempted to convert the Hopis of northeastern Arizona, but they resisted the mission program and had little contact with Spanish settlers in New Mexico. Southern Arizona was the northern region of Sonora known as Pimería Alta, where Jesuit missionaries established missions among the O’odham (Pima) between 1687 and 1711. Settlement of the area proceeded very slowly, and Tucson, founded in 1776, remained the northernmost point of Spanish or Mexican settlement. In northern Sonora cattle raising was the most important industry, and beef played a starring role in the diet. Settlers also raised sheep and chickens but few pigs. They grew corn, beans, lentils, garbanzos, pumpkins, and chilies, and they commonly ate posole, atole, and tortillas, as well as stews enlivened by chilies. However, Apache raids into the region after 1821 drove most settlers farther south. Fewer than three hundred people remained in Tucson when the United States acquired the area in 1848, but some Anglos married Hispanas, who continued to prepare tortillas, frijoles, and other dishes. Arizona grew slowly, primarily with immigration from the United States, until 1910, when the Mexican Revolution sent thousands of people into southern Arizona. They brought the food traditions of Sonora with them, including large, very thin wheat tortillas, tamales made of green corn rather than the corn flour made from nixtamal, and carne seca. Beef strips, sometimes unseasoned, other times rubbed with lime juice, salt, and other seasonings, were air-dried in the hot sun and dry air of the region. Later, the carne seca was pounded or shredded and stewed to make machaca.