6 Reasons To Love the Southwest

In spring 2018, we launched a series of illustrated books that’s near and dear to our hearts: the Little Local Cookbooks. Each one of these small, giftable books acts as both a cookbook and a travel guide: celebrating the quintessential flavors and landmarks of its place of origin.

The latest book in our Little Local series, The Little Local Southwest Cookbook, honors a region that’s won our hearts with its scenery and architecture, its eye-catching cacti and, above all, its amazing food. The region can be challenging to truly grasp—depending on the source you consult, the “Southwest” might include Texas, Oklahoma, Colorado, and Utah, along with New Mexico and Arizona. But our Tempe-based writer, Marilyn Noble, helps readers get to the heart of the matter, with recipe selections that embrace the flavors of the wild desert, from piquant Hatch green chiles to sweet-tart prickly pear fruits. These recipes are complemented by illustrator Courtney Jentzen’s glowing watercolor images, which nod to the open road, open sky, and the wide-open spaces that define the Southwest.

We couldn’t be happier to highlight this beautiful, dynamic region and its rich culinary culture, which draws on flavors and techniques of the local Native, Latinx, Black, and Anglo populations. Here are six reasons to love the Southwest:

1. Stunning Sunsets

Anyone who’s witnessed a Southwest sunset can tell you: there’s something truly remarkable about it—the clarity, the brightness of the colors. This might sound subjective, but in fact, it’s scientifically true! The conditions in the Southwest really do make for incredible sunsets.

First, some physics. Sunset colors are created by a phenomenon called “Rayleigh scattering.” Sunlight contains every color of the rainbow, from red to purple. But at sunset, all those light rays have to travel further to reach us than they do at midday, meaning that the colors that have shorter wavelengths (blue, green) get filtered out before they reach our eyes, leaving only yellow, orange, and red. You’ll see these familiar warm hues every evening at sunset, with a catch: the more particles there are in the air between the setting sun and your eyes—in the form of, say, pollution and water vapor—the more those colors get muddled and watered-down. That means that, the fewer particles there are in the air, the more vivid the sunset will be. Since the air in New Mexico and Arizona is exceptionally clean and dry, the hues in the sky at sunset are so brilliant and perfect, they look like they were lifted straight from a crayon box. Scientists call this phenomenon “spectral purity.” We just call it awesome.

2. Tortillas

If the Southwest has a culinary mascot, then surely it must be the tortilla. The thin, round cake—which originated in Mexico around 10,000 B.C.—is ubiquitous in Mexican and Tex-Mex cuisine, starring in just about any dish you can name. The traditional corn tortilla stars in enchiladas, quesadillas, and tacos (enfolding cheese, beans, and meat), while chefs deploy the flatbread’s fried cousin—the tortilla chip—in migas, tostadas, and tortilla soup. Flour tortillas, meanwhile, are often larger than their corn counterparts, meaning they can hold more goodness inside (see: fajitas and burritos). In Texas, the tortilla is so beloved that Texas Monthly ran a feature on the staple, which included a list of tortilla factories across the state that sell directly to individuals. In each description, the editors ranked the factory’s flour and corn tortillas, based on flavor, texture, thickness, and freshness.

3. Distinctive Architecture

Perhaps it’s the stunning red rock or the impossibly blue skies. Or maybe it’s the wide-open landscapes, or perhaps it’s due to what Frank Lloyd Wright called the “abstraction of line and color” so common in the desert. Whatever the reason, the Southwest inspires visionaries to dream—and to create beautiful, unusual architectural treasures.

It began nearly a thousand years ago, when native people flocked to the Sangre de Cristo Mountains and the tributaries of the Rio Grande. These tribes then built pueblos—complex, multi-story villages—atop mesas, beside rivers, and beneath the brows of cliffs. Many of these pueblos are still occupied, and two —the Taos Pueblo and the Acoma Pueblo’s “Sky City”—are among the oldest continuously inhabited settlements in the United States.

Centuries later, Arizona became a hotbed for a totally different style of architecture: mid-century modernism. It started by happenstance, when Frank Lloyd Wright came to Phoenix to work on the Arizona Biltmore. The renowned designer immediately fell for Arizona’s rugged landscape, then built his school, Taliesin West, in nearby Scottsdale. Wright spread the gospel of mid-century modernism—a style marked by clean lines and a blending of the indoors and outdoors—among his students, including Frank Henry (designer of the “Dendriform Column” bank branch) and Edward Varney (the mind behind the Hotel Valley Ho). The style proliferated, and today, there’s so much mid-century architecture in the Valley of the Sun, there’s an annual event devoted to the style, Modern Phoenix Week.

4. Chiles

Spend enough time in New Mexico, and someone will inevitably ask you the Official State Question: “Red or green?” They’re asking, of course, about New Mexico’s pride and joy: the chile. Each year, local farmers produce some 60,000 tons of the small, spicy peppers, and fall harvest season promises chile-centric menus, chile-eating contests, and the sweet scent of roasting chiles all over the state. Las Cruces is even home to the Chile Pepper Institute: the world’s only organization devoted solely to the research of chiles.

For a little pepper, the chile has a long history: farmers first cultivated the crop some 6,000 years ago in northeastern Mexico and, over the centuries, the spicy vegetable became a staple in Mexican cooking, appearing in soups and salads, tucked into enchiladas and quesadillas. Eventually, farmers and cooks north of the border fell head-over-heels for the vegetable, incorporating the pepper into sauces (such as Tabasco), appetizers (bacon-wrapped jalapeño poppers), and even desserts (chocolate chile fondue).

5. Prickly Pear

Devil’s-tongue. Woollyjoint. Old man’s whiskers. There’s no doubt about it: prickly pear cacti boast some of the best nicknames in the Southwest. The evocatively named succulents—which grow in abundance throughout Mexico, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona—are marked by their flat paddles and brightly colored flowers. If you think that the plants look pretty enough to eat, you’re right: People have been harvesting the cactus’s flat paddles (nopales) and spiny fruits (“prickly pears”) for centuries.

Nopales have a bright, tangy taste, and they often appear in egg dishes, or swapped into tacos and burritos in place of meat. Meanwhile, the prickly pear’s eponymous fruit tastes like something of a cross between watermelon and bubblegum, and bartenders use the fruit’s neon-pink juice to enliven everything from lemonade to margaritas.

6. Route 66

It’s true: Route 66 begins among Chicago’s skyscrapers, along the shore of Lake Michigan, and the highway ends overlooking the Pacific, at the Santa Monica Pier. But make no mistake: the storied 2,450-mile road—which passes through Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California—really belongs to the desert Southwest.

After all, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona are home to the long stretches of open road and expansive red rock desertscapes that have come to symbolize Route 66 in our collective consciousness. It’s this hot, harsh landscape that shaped the protagonists of The Grapes of Wrath, and it’s these wide-open vistas that fed Jack Kerouac’s adventurous spirit as he traveled west on the journeys that led him to write On the Road. It’s the rust-red washes, buttes, and mesas along this stretch of the highway that inspired the world of Cars, and it’s the towns of Arizona and New Mexico that Nat King Cole crooned about in “Get Your Kicks on Route 66.”

Yes, there’s no doubt about it: Route 66 belongs to the Southwest, and the Southwest to it.

For more reasons to love the Southwest, check out The Little Local Southwest Cookbook, available on Indiebound and wherever books are sold.