🥘 Arizona's First Menu: Tubac, 1766
On an inspection tour of the northern garrisons of New Spain (today’s northern Mexico and the American Southwest) for the King of Spain, Field Marshal Pignatelly y Rubí initiated a set of rations for the presidio soldiers stationed at the adobe frontier fort of San Ignacio de Tubac, the first recorded menu in what is now the state of Arizona:
"He shall give each soldier for his fifteen-day ration: one fanega of maize or wheat, or in its place an equivalent quantity of flour [a fanega is 55.5 liters or 14.6 gallons]. For the same fifteen days time he shall issue for each four soldiers one beef…
If beef is lacking, each soldier is provided one sheep as equivalent to the aforesaid quarter of beef...
To all this shall be added the corresponding beans or vegetables which are easiest for the captain to supply with sufficient chile, sugar, soap, salt, and other necessities which because of their daily consumption also are to be issued exactly every fifteen days."
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📖 Source: Dobyns, Henry. “Tubac Through Four Centuries.” Through Our Parents' Eyes The University of Arizona, August 1999. https://parentseyes.arizona.edu/node/154
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Want to learn more about Tubac, Arizona? Join us for Borderlandia’s Tubac’s Heritage Tour, to gain a deeper sense of place in the Sonoran Desert.
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