La Reina Diana
The queen of real Mexican cuisine, Diana Kennedy reigns from an exotic villa in Michoacán, serving heavenly uchepos and spicy barbs aimed at pretenders to her throne.
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After extended forays up and down and across the United States, in 1957 Kennedy left Canada on a whim to island-hop in the Caribbean. In Haiti she met Paul Kennedy, the New York Times‘ Mexico City bureau chief, and in short order packed off to live with him there. After they got married, Diana began haunting the Mexican markets, watching her maids cook, collecting recipes. Finally she served a now-legendary Mexican meal to Times food critic Craig Claiborne, who became one of Diana’s chief fans and mentors. It was Claiborne who first encouraged her to write Cuisines, which she began after her husband’s death in 1967. Its success made her much sought after by cooking schools, and she spent the seventies writing and teaching in New York City, her summers wandering through Mexico.
One day, however, Diana knew she’d had it with New York. “I said, ‘My God, I’ve got to get out. What am I doing with all these smells, the doggie odors, the exhaust from restaurants in my face? It’s all so artificial.’” An English friend from Mexico City, who owned one of a handful of weekend homes in San Pancho, introduced her to the area; Kennedy picked out some likely-looking land with an old, untended orchard and proceeded to invent Quinta Diana. At first she had planned only a little food museum to house her collection of cooking artifacts, but a friend told her that museums were always “dead”—the most derogatory word in Kennedy’s vocabulary. So she found an architect and an ecological engineer and began a laborious, Keystone Kops house-building epic. Her waterworks sound and look like something by Rube Goldberg, but they work. Manifold gutters collect rainwater in a vast cistern that looms above the living room inside its own glassed-in greenhouse. The cistern supplies the lavatories with water, some of it warmed by solar heaters or, on cloudy days, by a wood-fired burner. Wastewater drains off through a sloping, triangular herb and vegetable garden—a living filterbed—at the base of which the water is siphoned to a holding tank and pumped back up to the cistern for reuse. Diana scrutinizes every drip and drop, confines herself to two-minute showers, and sees to it that Effy and Lucy wash her mountains of dirty dishes outdoors, in water from a tank warmed by the sun.
Not all Quinta Diana’s ecological features have been as successful as the waterworks. A soaring white windmill generates only token amounts of electricity and is subject to breakdowns; a methane-gas system rigged to run on cowshed manure never worked at all; and several aquaculture tanks full of carp and tilapia were depopulated by Zita the cat. Kennedy pooh-poohs those who think she’s making her life harder than it has to be; she does have her all-important little bodily comforts, the Italian espresso-maker, the Austrian goose-down throws. And she has that commanding view of El Cacique to the east from her study.
Although Kennedy still keeps a base in the States, she does most of her writing here in San Pancho, interrupted by the teaching and lecturing jobs that support her. She also plays guide to a procession of visiting notables, botanists, ecologists, students, and food enthusiasts. But if she sends them away with only one new idea, she feels, the trouble of creating her unruly enterprise will have been worth it. From time to time she thinks about buying land in Arizona for a high-tech rancho, but for now, low tech is home.
So here she is, a Brit in a sombrero, a single woman at large in the land of machismo, a nurturer as bristly as a porcupine, an older woman who has constructed a protean hillside universe of her own devising. I look for clues to her age in an old black and white photograph. It sits on her living room reading table among pictures of Paul Kennedy holding his reporter’s notebook, looking big and full of life. But the photo I keep returning to is a small one, taken of Diana when she first came to Mexico in 1958. It is a handsome, high-spirited portrait of a young woman with a strong profile and a clear, happy gaze. Her short hair falls in waves. Rather a heartbreaker, I imagine. Thirty? Twenty-seven? Thirty-five? The futility of wondering about her age—as we all seem to do, endlessly—makes me laugh. “I never discuss age,” she has told me. Perhaps we all want to know Diana’s age in order to gauge just how far she deviates from our perception of what is normal. Why, I wonder, are we all so curious?
The Dissenting Voice
“I’m furious,” declares Diana as her canary-yellow double-cab Toyota pickup coughs and hesitates its way toward town. The truck was just in for repairs, and it is clearly not fixed. We turn in at a modern Nissan dealership that would be at home on Houston’s Southwest Freeway. Furious she may be, but when the young mechanic materializes, she softens. Immediately she slides into her Mexican mode, putting lots of body English into the negotiations, using expressive onomatopoeia to flesh out her Spanish. She laughs a high little laugh, slips occasionally into a high little voice, and in fact seems positively girlish.
We wait for the diagnosis, sitting on a stone wall out front, watching the colors of the mountains change as the sun drops in the valley. “You know, you can get an excellent two-dollar pedicure here,” remarks Diana as I kick my heels against the wall. That is a luxury to which she has only recently become accustomed. “I was doing nothing for myself, nothing,“ she says disgustedly. “So I sat down and said, okay, D. K.”—which is how she addresses herself when she gives herself a talking-to—”you’d better get with it.”
For a while we swap food gossip, a pastime at which Kennedy is deliciously wicked. Often in her stories she figures as a woman embattled. Take those food stylists from magazine X who contrived to make her food look dead. “Dead food!” she bellows. “And they changed my recipes!” Or take that recent cooking contest she judged not long ago. When the results from the other judges were compiled, Diana was horrified. And said as much. There was “this half-raw tomatillo stuff that was thin and shrieked at you,” she recalls, and one of the recipes used chili powder that stung her mouth. “No depth of cooking,” she finishes sadly. “I’m always the dissenting voice.”
That dissenting voice is one that has informed Kennedy’s four cookbooks, remarkable for an idiosyncratic, uncompromising tone that has grown stronger with time. In The Cuisines of Mexico, Kennedy put readers on notice that her recipes aimed for authentic textures and balance of flavors, considerations she found wanting among “most writers on Mexican food, who have compromised it beyond the point of authenticity.” The Kennedy tone was admonitory, occasionally testy, enormously sensual. She made you smell, hear, feel, and most of all taste Mexico, from its markets and plazas to its street stalls and private kitchens. If there was any one thing that set her apart from the pack of food writers, it was her keen sense of texture, a crucial quality often treated as an afterthought. Kennedy reveled in things slippery, mealy, crackly, smooth, pulpy, juicy, sticky, spongy, crusty, frothy—her range of sensitivity seemed endless and voluptuous.
Kennedy’s was a grass-roots scholarship based on extensive fieldwork, a single-minded devotion to ferreting out the best recipes whatever the cost in personal comfort. And she expected her readers to make a few sacrifices as well, to go find that epazote sprouting in the crack of a sidewalk, to shun inferior commercial tortillas and work at perfecting their own, to brew their own mild pineapple vinegar, just the thing for marinating those antojito garnishes.
After Cuisines came The Tortilla Book, a veritable hymn to the tortilla in its countless applications, and then the delightfully anecdotal Recipes From the Regional Cooks of Mexico—Kennedy at her most conservative, bent on the mission she calls rescatar, to rescue and preserve endangered recipes, dishes headed for extinction in a Mexico increasingly enamored of twentieth-century conveniences. Oddly, the most recent book, Nothing Fancy, shows Kennedy at her most liberal and inventive. A wildly personal synthesis of lovingly remembered British recipes, Mexican favorites, and oddments inspired by Lebanese, Portuguese, Chinese, and French Colonial cooks, it is a blueprint of the Kennedy palate. And if its recipes seem simpler and more permissive than those of her earlier, purist tomes (“Anything goes as long as we don’t call it authentic,” she writes), the tone has developed into something much closer to Kennedy’s actual speaking voice. Amid the gentle reminiscences, Kennedy manages to fulminate and rail in high style against latter-day degeneracies—the dissenting voice honed to fine art.
Yet even though the Kennedy gospel has spread—even though her major revision of Cuisines scheduled for next spring will eliminate many of the first edition’s compromises and substitutes because, Kennedy contends, “people are ready for it”—still, she is discouraged. “Almost nobody knows how to analyze Mexican food, and that depresses me,” she says from her perch on the Nissan dealership wall. “People can’t taste. They drink too much. They smoke too much. They’re in too much of a hurry.” I suggest that people may be scared off from her classic Mexican recipes because some of them are so long and detailed; one amateur cook I know in Austin professes to be overwhelmed by them, I tell her. He says he doesn’t want to spend three days grinding seeds and peeling chiles. Diana looks at me as if I’ve gone bonkers.
“First of all, a lot of my recipes are very simple, very short,” she protests. “The problem is that Mexican food has been presented badly, so people think it’s cheap ethnic food that shouldn’t take all that time.” Some of her recipes read longer than they take, she points out, because her format in the first three books was to itemize each piece of equipment and to give extraordinarily detailed instructions, much the way Julia Child does. “Some cookbook writers never assume anything goes wrong, so they don’t tell you how to put it right,” Kennedy scoffs. But in the world according to Kennedy, things do go wrong, and her cookbooks mirror that view. “Anyway, what’s wrong with saying something takes five days?” she demands. “Some things need maturing. They take time to season.” The easy way is not the Kennedy way.
My Library
