David_sn

A desert traffic light! :o)

I know cactus fruit well as a food. BTW you can als eat leafs or paddles.. They make a great BBQ main slap for vegetarians and side dish for all others when freed of all the nasty pointy parts and marinated in some olive oil with salt and different popular natural flavour combinations. Steak like that can also be served burning for a gag, if covered with some sugared tequila.

Did your people import them for the jam or had it already been around before you founded state and settlement?
I know the spaniards introduced Prickly Pears to the old world not for the culinary merrits and the other good use as living goat fence but foremost as a host of some shieldlouse species that made between rare crimson reserved for royalty and the arrival of anilin dyes for all a just somewhat more affordable red cloth, in the 17th to mid19th century big business but then soon forgotten. So mediterran countries warm and dry enough got their oppuntia farms not too long after America was discovered already. The sweet jam or syrup of the fruit was however just a byproduct then, used for fighting malnutrition in the poor farming families right where the dye was produced and not much else. The cooks of the upper crust in the north never discovered it as exotic delicacy somehow, and also in the USA it did not catch on that widely, it mosty stayed a strictly tex-mex theme dinner thing there as far as I experianced it.

Well, on thing is sure -- before the conquistadores from Spain discovered "Inca Red" as alternative to Crimson and the plant needed to host the wee insect producing it, there where none of the genus in the old world at all anywhere. Yours must have come from either America somewhere in the west of Africa or Europe, iif not with people having comercial interests, then with critters bearing life seeds in their body coverts or scat. After all you live in a climate where they need no special care and protection to grow in the wild.
If you do not farm the Opuntia for the red fruit or the dye but have an abundance as nonnative area weed, I seriously recomend you to try out some paddle recipes. Select only tender leafs, smaler than a man's hand and with a perfectly green unscared surface , as they tend to get inpalatable woody by the time they reach the size of an XXL steak, and then pick any preperation method you like.....

Here are a few good noncomercial recipe pages:

https://www.desertusa.com/lil/lil_02.html

http://eattheinvaders.org/blue-plate-special-prickly-pear/

http://ledameredith.com/foraging-for-prickly-pears-and-recipe-for-nopales-with-scrambled-eggs/