By Amber Sampson

Butter, corn, and mesquite: these are the ingredients that make up the recipe reflecting my family’s Irish immigration, culinary adaptations, and native food traditions in our Arizona home today. Specifically, the invention of this recipe was shaped by my culinary background: as a Chef living and working in Phoenix, Arizona, cornbread is a staple on many menus. Sweet from local honey, and zesty oranges, the base recipe for this cornbread was baked regularly to accompany bean stews in my childhood home. 

When my academic career grew outside of the kitchen and into my food anthropology and replication archaeology work, I began incorporating more native ingredients into each dish. As a result, I acquired a new respect for nutritious nixtamalized corn products and the history of native foods in America. Nutty and smokey mesquite flour, foraged from the trees shading my kitchen, easily found a home in this recipe. Finally, through work with the Phoenix Irish Cultural Center and McClelland Irish Library, and my grandparents’ meticulous genealogy efforts, I understood how the local high quality Shamrock butter, from another Irish immigrant family, was tied directly to my Irish ancestors’ brave and butter-filled past. 

Now distinctly it’s own, the sweet, smoky, and nutty flavors of my Arizona cornbread connects cultural groups across time and space, allowing eaters to travel through 200 years of culinary change, and taste the preservation of these cultural stories. 

Butter

As a Chef and Cultural Anthropologist, when asked to craft a recipe that reflects the movement of my own ancestral immigrant communities, butter is the baseline, the fat and foundation of the dish. In the 1880’s, butter and a hunger for more brought my family from County Cork, Ireland, to America. Prior to 1880, my Paternal Irish lineage worked in Cork, specifically in the dairy and butter making business. Eventually, when my maternal family immigrated in the 1880’s, they opened and operated a commercial dairy. Buttermakers are in my bloodline and also that of many Irish immigrants as the Cork Butter Exchange, established in 1769, became the world’s largest butter market. Due to its “rigorous grading system,” the Cork Butter Exchange “transformed Irish butter into the first global food brand, with hundreds of thousands of casks shipped globally.” (Source: NPR) Many global eaters knew Irish butter in their kitchens, on their breads, and in their bakes long before they met someone from the emerald isle. 

Cornmeal

To add body to the recipe, I drew inspiration from the important relationship of hospitality between Native communities in the United States and Irish citizens during the potato famine. Walking though the Cobh Heritage Centre in Cobh, County Cork Ireland, one bag of cornmeal nestled in a display, among lists of passengers names and replications of historic shipwrecks stirred my attention. This bag of cornmeal tells the story of commensality across seas, and also of understanding between two groups, who supported each other through suffering. 

By 1845, crops began failing in Ireland due to an infestation of Phytophthora infestans. As a result of the potato blight, by 1852 over one million Irish people had died of starvation or from disease caused by malnutrition; over one million more Irish emigrated to other countries, including my relatives. 

What connects this cornbread to all of these communities? Their shared hospitality. In 1847, the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, still reeling from the deadly forced relocation known as the ‘Trail of Tears’, learned of the Great Hunger in Ireland, and Choctaw tribal members collected, “$170 (equivalent to about $5,000 today),” sending their donation and corn with recipe cards across the Atlantic to aid starving Irish families. In reflection, the Choctaw Nation has stated that, “This remarkable empathy—donating aid while facing extreme deprivation—forged an unbreakable transatlantic kinship.”

Grains given were never forgotten, and in 2020, at the height of Covid, citizens of Ireland raised over $1 million in relief funds for food and aid for members of the Navajo and Hopi nations. “Adversity often brings out the best in people,” the Choctaw tribe said in a statement. “We are gratified – and perhaps not at all surprised – to learn of the assistance our special friends, the Irish, are giving to the Navajo and Hopi nations. Our word for their selfless act is ‘iyyikowa’ – it means serving those in need.”

Mesquite

Feeding those in need is tricky during the best of times; in the hot, dry desert it’s even more of a challenge. Mesquite flour, our final ingredient, is milled from the dried wild pods growing on varieties of mesquite trees here in the Southwest. It offers a tasty solution as mesquite trees’ flavorful pods are legumes, in the same biological family (Fabaceae) as beans and peas. While you may not be familiar with the flour milled from these pods, modern gastronomers often utilize mesquite wood for its smokey sweet depth of flavor in barbecuing. In my Irish family’s kitchen in Arizona, mesquite has become more than just the flavoring on a packet of potato chips. It shades our home, and provides sticky sweet summer sap, wood for cold winter bonfires, and pods to make the sweet, caramelly flour in this recipe. 

Phoenix is the traditional homeland of the Akimel O’odham and Piipaash peoples, and as long as folks have called the Sonoran Desert home, parallel evidence showcases the utilization of wild and foraged desert foods, like mesquite. The use of these wild foods and later domesticated crop farming, over 4,000 years of O’odham Agriculture, led to the discovery by Archaeologist Dr. Jonathan Mabry, that Arizona is home to the oldest discovered history of agriculture in the United States. Food crops like mesquite and more became part of the State’s history when in 2016, Tucson was designated as the first UNESCO city of Gastronomy.¹

 From an archaeological standpoint, we know from evidence of ancient grinding stones and processing of honey and velvet mesquite varieties that mesquite has long been utilized as a significant dietary staple for Indigenous communities of the Sonoran desert. Some of these grinding stones can even be found on display at the S’edav Va’aki Museum in Phoenix.

In an article written for Archaeology Southwest, preservation archaeologist Aaron Wright describes that, even though native peoples were accomplished agriculturalists, mesquite was one of the most significant dietary staples for Indigenous communities of the Sonoran, Chihuahuan, and Mojave Deserts.”

From a few pods of mesquite one can make a coffee style drink, sweeten breads, and thicken soups, all while adding a warm, nutty, caramel flavor from this drought-tolerant and desert-adapted plant. From a nutritional standpoint, mesquite has a relatively low glycemic index (GI) to most other flours, (25 GI compared to 75 GI for whole wheat flour), is naturally gluten free, and has the potential to benefit in regulating blood sugar levels. Folks in Arizona can purchase mesquite flour directly from Native producers at the San Xavier Co-op and farm. Or try an honorable harvest this summer with tips from Southwest Forager, John Slattery’s 2016 book, Southwest Foraging, on how to best identify, gather, process and use these tasty pods.² All from one remarkable plant, which has become part of my yearly foraging practice and weekly breadmaking ritual.

Making this mesquite cornbread immediately connects me to the land I call home, the land of the O’odham peoples. Each laborious grind of my mill to make this mesquite flour instills in me a future desire to protect and preserve its ecology, its unique cultural traditions. Mixing corn with butter, reminds me of the past stewards of these ingredients and their hospitality. The adaptations and determination of the Choctaw, the Navajo, the Hopi, the O’odham, and my Irish ancestors, all create culinary memories and moments to reflect and savor in this dish. Baked into each bite, are the bonds of people across time, who’s hunger created something I can only satisfy in my kitchen today. 

Butter, mixed with oranges grown in my Arizona backyard and honey from wild desert flowers all swirl together atop this smokey, sweet cornbread. 

Enjoy my Arizona Mesquite Cornbread with Honey Butter, recipe below.

Amber Sampson is an artistic, creative, passionate, activist, public speaker, researcher, and chef, who loves exploring the world through food. Sampson holds two degrees from Arizona State University, Cultural Anthropology, and Food Systems Sustainability. She is also a trained professional Chef, with a degree in Culinary Arts and Nutrition and a Master’s in Gastronomy from Boston University. She studied food and race at Harvard University, brought ancient bread to life with fellow Anthropologists from Yale, and was awarded the prestigious US Government’s Gilman Scholarship for archeological research with Arizona’s O’odham Nations.

Using food as a universal language, her research focuses on the anthropological relationship between food and culture. Her work brings present-day relevance to ancient meals, people, and customs, giving others a taste and connection to our delicious past, revealing a more sustainable and understanding future. She has taught at Boston University in the Gastronomy department and worked with the S’edav Va’aki Museum in Phoenix, as the Indigenous Foodways Facilitator, and as the lead coordinator for the Arizona Native Edible Experience. In 2024, Sampson was selected by the US Department of State to be the Arizona representative for the Global Food Security Summit in Washington, D.C. She currently serves on the board of directors for Slow Food Phoenix and lectures with Arizona Humanities on Arizona’s Ark of Taste Foods. You can find Sampson in the warm Southwestern desert of Arizona, teaching culinary, foraging, cooking, researching, gardening, and exploring our tasty past.

1. Niethammer, Carolyn. 2020. A Desert Feast: Celebrating Tucson’s Culinary Heritage. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. ↩︎
2. Slattery, John. 2016. Southwest Foraging: 117 Wild and Flavorful Edibles from Barrel Cactus to Wild Oregano. Portland, Oregon: Timber Press. ↩︎

Melissa Reynolds

Melissa Reynolds is a PhD Candidate in History at Rutgers University. Her dissertation compares "practical" knowledge in fifteenth-century manuscripts to… Read more

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