Foraging the Fruit of the Desert: The Prickly Pear

Local eating in southern New Mexico

For most of my life, the produce rhythms of late summer and early fall have been fairly consistent no matter where I have lived. Tomatoes, corn, and summer squash cede ground incrementally to apples, plums, and winter squash.

Now that I live in southern New Mexico, however, there is a showy newcomer to my seasonal rotation: the prickly pear.

The prickly pear fruit

All around me, the cactuses have begun to look like overzealously decorated Christmas trees. They are covered in regal-looking, purple-red baubles that really stand out against the browns and golds that dominate New Mexico’s autumn.

I have to admit, though, I’m not much of a forager. For better or for worse, I am comforted by the sanitized promise of a grocery store even as I’m aware of the illusion. (Let’s all try and forget what we just learned about Boar’s Head, shall we?)

The unknown variables of plucking something from a plant get all those niggling “what ifs” really hopping in my head, so I generally choose avoidance.

But, once in a while, my spirit of adventure—or maybe it’s my weakness for a bargain—takes over. So when I was told prickly pears were delicious and saw them just hanging out for the taking, I marched myself (and a kid and a stroller) right over there and got some.

My cactus

And even though my tiny little desert dweller repeated my warning of “Prickle! Ouch!” back to me, I did not heed it. Like some arid-Eden Eve, I impulsively reached and grabbed for that fruit, only to be met with fingers full of tiny little spikes. After picking the bulk of them out, I continued my harvest more carefully, and carted the fruit home.

Even though I am new to the southern part of the state, I am no stranger to New Mexico. I am married to a New Mexican. I wrote about the place for my dissertation. I have a day job (well, evening and weekend job) mostly writing New Mexico history. I’ve been coming here for over a decade and have lived in the state full time for several years now.

So what I’m trying to say is, I have a pretty solid New Mexico cookbook section in my collection. Immediately upon returning home, I consulted it to figure out what to do with my bounty.

The inside of the fruit

A Brief Foray into the Prickly Pear’s Uses

The prickly pear cactus and its namesake fruit are not a rare food in the US Southwest, or across the world, for that matter. Actually, in Mexico, Greece, and Italy, they are grown purposely for food.¹

While the plant is newer to the Europeans, those living in the parts of North American where they grow have been using them for millennia. The Mitsiam Cafè Cookbook by Richard Hetzler notes that the Tohono O’odham Nation, now based largely in southern Arizona, derive their word for purple from their name for prickly pear. The color is so rich, he continues, that the Navajo used the fruit as a dye. Other historic uses in Mexico and present-day Texas include as poultice for wounds and as a container. The Kiowa, moreover, made use of the needles for medical reasons and as small arrows.²

Probably most of all, however, they have been used for eating—animals and humans have both made use of the nourishment they offer in otherwise severe environments.

You can, in fact, eat many parts of the prickly pear cactus. Have you more knowledge and/or gumption than I, you can harvest the pads, remove their spikes, and eat those, too. For those lacking in gumption, you can buy the de-spiked pads in certain parts of the country (like mine!). To me, they taste kind of like a cross between okra and a green bean. They’re a bit viscous in the best way.

The Pueblo Food Experience Cookbook, edited by Roxanne Swentzell and Patricia M. Perea, gives direction for both boiling the pads and sautéing them. Once cooked in a bit of oil, they give recipes for mixing them with scrambled eggs or throwing them into a Three-Sister Salad. Or, as Susan D. Curtis recommends in the Santa Fe School of Cooking Salsas and Tacos book, they can be charred on a grill and combined with some chiles to make a salsa.

The Pueblo Food Experience Cookbook: Whole Food of Our Ancestors

The Many Ways to Eat and Drink a Prickly Pear

I was not, however, looking for a recipe for the pads, but rather what to do with my deep purple pears (also called tuna).

And there were, again, many options. The Pueblo Food Experience contained a method for drying the pears, grinding them into a powder, and mixing the result with water whenever a need for juice arose. Surely a wonderful preservation method, but not exactly what I was looking for.

Mark Miller, innovative chef at Coyote Cafe, the hottest spot to dine in Santa Fe circa the 1980s and 1990s, gives a complex sauce recipe in his 1989 cookbook, Coyote Cafe. It is served with Texas Axis Venison. He notes that if you can’t find the prickly pear juice, you can sub pomegranate juice but—drat!—no sub for the Texas Axis venison, and I was clean out.

Coyote Cafe Cookbook

I finally found the answer in Lois Ellen Frank’s 1991 gem, Native American Cooking: Foods of the Southwest Indian Nations. Frank walked through the process of brushing off the spikes, grinding the fruit in a food processor, sieving out the seeds, and cooking it down into a syrup with some honey.

Native American Cooking: Foods of the Southwest Indian Nations

The resulting syrup was delicious—a little sweet, a little tart, a little gelatinous, and a touch floral.

Frank included the recipe as part of a larger meal of Piñon and Blue Cornmeal Hotcakes with Prickly Pear Syrup and Peach Honey.

And while that sounded delicious, I was feeling hot and thirsty after all my hard work. So I reverted to my memories of where I had often seen prickly pear before: on the cocktail menu.

I set out to make a prickly pear margarita, but lacking the requisite orange liqueur, I simply mixed the syrup with the juice of a lime and some tequila, and topped it all off with Topo Chico sparkling water.

My husband called it one of the best cocktails he had ever had. Light, refreshing, and a taste all its own; a twist on ranch water in New Mexico ranch country.

So I might venture out to the local prickly pear again, though this time I will be wielding some long tongs.

1. In other places, an invasive scourge.

2. From Delena Tull’s Edible and Useful Plants of the Southwest, Revised Edition. Not a cookbook, per se, but it contains recipes and a lot of other information that can aid the nervous forager.