Desert Terroir: Exploring the Unique Flavors and Sundry Places of the Borderlands (Ellen and Edward Randall Series)

gary nabhan has written another book as good as his 1985 offering of gathering the desert. it is part travelogue, part heritage food xploration, and a good dose of mixing with the local cultures. there is alot of good history on how some old world foods ended up in the americas and vice versa. along the way in the travels you will meet some interesting people, hidden oases and other locations, and get acquainted with some beasts of burden! this is the kind of book that you can certainly read at home, but i would suggest to really savor it, take it along backpacking, or sit down under a ponderosa pine in the summer, or a saguaro in the winter and read it!

I just reread this short book. I like Nabhan's writing. This book (as with some of his others) is heavy with personal accounts of interacting with many people, in this book people who deal with some aspect of food in the desert area of the Southwest US and adjoining Mexico. For example, he has a chapter on fishing with Mexican fishermen (no women) in the Gulf of California, a fine chapter; and getting a Hispanic woman to make him some mesquite tortillas, which she later starts a business doing. The stories are lively, excellent and usually positive. Nabhan sometimes makes loaded comments, such as his story of boating down the Rio Grande sampling local cuisines on both sides of the river, which he now notes has been completely closed off by Homeland Security.As readers of his books will know, Nabhan is an American of Lebanese (and ultimately Omani) origin, making connections with the American and Middle Eastern deserts. He describes grass-grown cattle and traces their origin to Mexico, the Canary Islands, Spain and Morocco. In a little place in Baja, he sees traces of Moorish and Sephardic Jewish culture. And of course, terroir because all the stories center on food.He intermixes history as well. The first chapter discusses Mostafa al-Azemmouri, a Moroccan Muslim, converted to Christianity as a slave, better known as Esteban with the four survivors of Cabeza de Vaca's expedition, told through how Mostafa/ Esteban would have found similarities with the African desert he knew. Then there's the chapter, somewhat wry, about camel chorizo, which tells of eating camel, and also much about Hadji Ali, the chief cameleer (if that's a word) for the US Army, which brought camels and Hadji Ali to Texas in the late 1850s. Both stories, please note, along with his own, show people of Arab and Muslim background to be part of American history.

I think this might be Gary Nabhan's best work since Coming Home to Eat. For those who aren't familiar with him, Nabhan is an ethnobotanist who writes beautifully about the intersection of food, culture, and geography.In Desert Terroir, he focuses on the flavors of the US/Mexico borderlands. He details the tastes and traditions of foods like mesquite, fish, and camels. There is a good bit of history in this book, including an extremely interesting section on some shipwrecked Moroccons and Spaniards who traveled across the Southwest in the 1500s.Nabhan is a talented storyteller, and he is able to describe sensory details so well that you almost feel like you have already experienced what he is writing about. I'd also like to mention that the illustrations (done by Paul Mirocha) are a perfect fit for the book and really add more depth to the whole story.