Fortuna Cooks

Thousands of years ago, the first human came to the Southwest, probably crossing the land bridge of the Bering Sea from Asia. Subsisting by hunting animals and gathering plants from the wild, those who settled here found ample food to sustain themselves in the varied geography of desert and mountains, basin and range. Deer and elk wandered the highlands. Trout glided silently through mountain streams. Across the plains roamed herds of American bison, more familiarly known as buffalo. Everywhere, jackrabbits and cottontails, wild turkeys and pig like peccaries provided other steady sources of protein. The earth, too, provided abundant blessings. Southwestern tribes learned to extract nourishment from the pulp and fruit, beans, seeds and nuts of such wild plants as agave and prickly pear cactus, saguaro and yucca, mesquite and piñon, acorn and sunflower.

They also soon learned to gain more reliable, consistent sustenance from plants they could grow, irrigate and harvest themselves: the culinary holy trinity of corn, squashes and beans. With the more settled life that such early agricultural efforts engendered, three great, sometimes interlinked cultures developed in the Southwest. In the Sonoran Desert and near the Mogollon Rim of southern and central Arizona, the Hohokam built villages that featured intricate networks of irrigation canals. Covering the southwestern third of Nw Mexico and reaching well into central Arizona and northern Mexico, the Mogollon people developed multiroomed villages and dug ditches to water their crops.

2 teaspoon olive oil

3 unpeeled garlic cloves

4 red bell peppers (capsicums), roasted, peeled, cored and seeded (see glossary)

1/2 teaspoon ground cumin

4 oz (125 g) cream cheese at room temperature

2 tablespoons crème fraîche or sour cream salt and freshly ground pepper to taste

*Preheat an oven to 350°F (180°C). Sprinkle the olive oil over the garlic cloves and wrap tightly in aluminum foil. Place in the oven for 45-60 minutes, or until the cloves are soft. Let cool.

*Squeeze the soft garlic cloves from their peels into a food processor or blender. Add the red peppers and cumin; purée. Add the cream cheese and blend until smooth. Transfer the mixture to a bowl and fold in the crème fraîche or sour cream; add salt and pepper.

MAKES ABOUT 1½ CUPS (12 FL OZ/375 ML)

The modern world with its pressures, hectic pace and burgeoning cities makes many of us long for a simpler life in touch with the earth’s natural wonders. Maybe that explains our ever-growing fascination with the American Southwest.

Nowhere does the earth present a more consistently dramatic repertoire of sights and experiences. In north-western Arizona, the Colorado River Canyon, a vision still capable of rendering the most sophisticated travelers dumbstruck. To the north and east, the Colorado Plateau encompasses not only the Grand Canyon but the megalithic sculptures of Bryce Canyon, Arches National Park and Monument Valley, and the sheer cliff sides of Mesa Verde and Canyon de Chelly.

Two hundred miles to the south stretches the austerely beautiful Sonoran Desert, its arid vastness punctuated by jagged peaks and saguaro cactuses, whose forms possess a noble, near-human presence. North to south through New Mexico, the southern trailings of the Rockies cleave the state in half, as the Rio Grande descends from high mountain valleys to low basins of rich, fertile soil. At the Southwest’s easternmost extremes, the Great Plains sweep down across New Mexico and the Texas Panhandle, breaking up into the precipitous bluffs of the Llano Estacado. And where Texas meets Mexico, the Rio Grande marks the boundary between two countries.

The spell cast by the Southwest today is also partly due to its distinctive foods. Southwestern cuisine captures, in microcosm, the appeal of the vast region: corn tortillas and boiled pinto beans, as rugged and earthy as the desert; fresh and dried chilies, as searing as the sun overhead: piñon nuts harvested from wild piñon trees whose smoke scents the air of New Mexico; meat and game seared over glowing coals of wood from mesquite trees, whose gnarled forms decorate almost every vista.