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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And this is not an easy week, but then Kennedy’s weeks never are. For starters, there’s the broken truck—the mechanics still haven’t finished with it, even though the sun is disappearing and a high-altitude chill is creeping into the air. And at Quinta Diana, “everything’s in an uproar,” Kennedy says. Wheelbarrows keep breaking, water hoses keep giving out, the old dog needs a better bed and the new dog needs a kennel. The tall white windmill that propels a supplementary electric generator is on the blink. The winter rains didn’t come, and the water commissioner keeps changing the time when Diana will be allowed to open her irrigation gates for five allotted hours a day. And all of a sudden the toilets won’t flush, which makes it hard to have guests and forces Diana to tote a lavender plastic pail of water along when she uses the John.
Worse still, many of her precious tools have been stolen, along with three rolls of barbed wire and a treasured rechargeable flashlight and the living, buzzing nuclei from all her beehives. Now she’s having a six-foot wall built around the house, to be topped off with a bristling forest of broken glass. There is cement to be ordered and linseed oil to be boiled down to make a varnish for the massive front gate, and of course the linseed oil caught fire last week, and the gardener didn’t show up today. “I simply don’t have enough hours in the day,” moans Diana. “You have to baby the staff. One of the boys wants to tell me about every bowel movement from every cow.” She rolls her eyes, then rallies. “I’ve had a lot of shocks, but somehow it works,” she says. “The only thing I can do is run to my typewriter and use it as my shoulder to cry on.”
The sun is down now. The truck is fixed. Somehow I think Diana doesn’t do too much crying over her old Smith-Corona electric, up in her pack rat’s study overlooking El Cacique. Sure, her hillside microcosm is fraught with complications, seems in fact perpetually on the brink of running out of control. But if all ran smoothly, what could be more boring?
Epiphany in a Banana Leaf
Night. A high insect song vibrates over the hillside. Kennedy is poking at a Persian lime tree with her flashlight. Capturing three limes, she retreats to her kitchen, which is deeply shadowed now and bathed in small pools of overhead light. These aren’t the right limes, Kennedy qualifies, pouring herself a small glass of Herradura white tequila tempered with a bit of lime juice and salt. Little Mexican limes would be better, but there are none on the premises right now. While Kennedy puts two liters of raw milk on to boil, the way the boys like it—a nightly ritual—I squeeze limes in a hand press for my margarita, nervous to be at large in the master’s kitchen. Sure enough, I squeeze the juice into the wrong container and drip some onto the stove top, a maneuver guaranteed to spoil its finish. Diana duly notes my errors—not unkindly—and moves in to mop up.
Afterward Diana disappears into a larder lined with all manner of curious jars and pans. Small rattlings and mutters are heard; then she emerges, bearing a big, battered tin marked “Ye Olde English Mints.” Inside are her sourdough breadsticks, the very ones I passed by cavalierly in Nothing Fancy, thinking breadsticks beneath my notice. Wrong. Kennedy breadsticks could revise the whole genre’s reputation. I amaze myself by eating two. “You didn’t come here to eat breadsticks,” I chide myself, reaching for a third.
Supplicants appear at the kitchen door: the boys from the hut below the gate—los jóvenes, Kennedy calls them, the young men—here with questions and various bits of intelligence for La Señora. The milk changes hands; so do an outsize flashlight and a .20-gauge shotgun, another nightly ritual. “Most people carry guns at night around here,” Diana reports matter-of-factly. A disturbance in the night? A barking of dogs? Los jóvenes will shoot in the air a few times, or perhaps Diana herself will fire a couple of blasts out the bedroom window with her .32-caliber pistol. “It doesn’t hurt to let people know you’re armed, when you’re a woman and live alone,” she says, seizing a wooden spoon and marshaling her forces for supper.
Shouts emanate from below. Shortly, one of the boys reappears at the door.” Shouting here, that’s the thing,” explains Kennedy. “That’s how we communicate. I’ll be in the middle of dressing, and there’s a shout. Or I’ll have my pants halfway down in the john, and there’s a shout.” Life at Quinta Diana is a ceaseless parade of interruptions, digressions, crises both great and small.
“What was it like to have cooking classes here in your home?” I wonder out loud, thinking how particular she is about each detail in her universe. Not so hot, admits Diana. “I don’t have a nice enough personality for that,” she says, hanging up a swaddled cheese to drain overnight. “Playing house mother is not my thing.” During night classes there were problems with the lighting level in her kitchen. “Occasionally, I’d get snappy because I wasn’t in control.” She pauses a moment, ladling out sopa de flor de calabaza—squash-flower soup—tinted the tenderest green. “I like being in control,” she finishes, emphasizing each word ever so slightly.
But I’m deep into the mystery of squash flowers, which until now I have only read about. The soup tastes hauntingly of—what? Flowers? Squash? Spring? I’m blissful, but Kennedy is full of warnings. The soup has been frozen; the flowers are from small-petaled zucchini plants rather than the highly desirable calabaza criolla with its bigger blooms. Kennedy finds that some restaurant versions of this soup are sorry affairs made with “awful, closed-up flowers.” Some cooks commit the sin of removing the little buttony flower base, which harbors flavorful juice. “The secret is the freshness of the flowers,” instructs Kennedy. “And a very good chicken broth, and at the end a very little, very good cream.” (Preferably raw, from your own cow, but she is merciful enough not to mention that.) She adds a bit of chile poblano. “No thickening!” she admonishes. “Just the flowers!”
I’m still trying to fix the taste of flores de calabaza in my memory, but Kennedy is tenderly unfolding a shiny banana-leaf packet on my plate. Inside is one of the most extraordinary things I have ever eaten, a Veracruz-style tamal possessed of a startling power and delicacy. Simple enough, really—a thin layering of light, slightly grainy white masa dough; a few morsels of tender pork set against a musky chile ancho sauce; and a big, anise-flavored leaf from the velvety hoja santa plant that Diana has planted in these parts. Yet the whole dish is impossibly subtle, the textures miraculous, the colors riveting, from the deep green of the leaves to the white of the masa to the brick-red of the ancho. The masa comes from white corn that has been soaked in lime and sent to the mill next morning to be ground.
“One Mexican anthropologist and gourmand said they were the best he’s ever eaten, and he’s not the type to be smarmy.” I feel like crying. Here’s an epiphany wrapped in a banana leaf, and in Houston my chances of duplicating it are slim to none. I’ll never have the proper custom-ground masa, let alone fresh hoja santa leaves, and I know in my heart that the avocado leaves Kennedy recommends as a substitute in her Cuisines recipe won’t do. “This is why people say, ‘Oh, Diana, you’re impossible,’ “ she says, arching a brow. “But this is what food is about—perfecting a recipe and doing it to the highest possible standard.” She is obviously pleased with her handiwork. But not too pleased. The masa, having been frozen for a rainy day, has lost an iota of flavor, she complains. I can’t begin to tell.
Next Kennedy turns her attention to her salad of fennel, lettuce, fresh tarragon, and parsley dressed—but for God’s sake not overdressed; that drives her mad—with oil and vinegar. She complains about the lettuce while cleaning her salad plate in record time. “I do eat fast,” she apologizes. “Terrible habit! I always think, ‘Onto the next thing!’” I am still lingering over the last of my Veracruz tamales, only to be further distracted by two potent dollops of Kennedy ice cream, one of wild blackberries and one of homegrown passion fruit, clean and tart. The blackberry has an untamed taste sharp enough to clear one’s head. Made with natural brown piloncillo sugar and some thick cream, it is the most intense specimen of ice cream that has ever crossed my path. Kennedy chafes at the ice crystals that have invaded but concedes, “I don’t mind saying this is inspired. You can see now why I’m such a snob about food.”
My Library
