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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But then she’s off on her next project, grabbing her reading glasses and leafing furiously through a stack of books and papers while I dawdle over her homemade tuiles (“Not as dainty as they should be,” she opines. “Second-rate sugar”). The Festival of Southwestern Cookery in Houston is a week and a half away, and Kennedy will be a featured speaker. So will Anne Lindsay Greer, chief apostle of the so-called New Southwestern cuisine and den mother to most of the young Texas chefs who practice the style, which is based largely on French methods and incorporates many of the Mexican ingredients Kennedy has avidly promoted for years. Kennedy clearly sees the New Southwesterners as rivals for her turf, if not outright upstarts. “Nouvelle cuisine from France was great; it did its stuff,” she concedes. “But people are trying to skip that classic training and add a few ingredients and call their food nouvelle Mexican or something. They’re trying to be too chichi without knowing how to do the real thing.” Lines must be drawn; somebody must hoist the banner of purism. So, red ballpoint in hand, Kennedy is going over every inch of Greer’s cookbook, The Cuisine of the American Southwest, marking the many typos and bits of mangled Spanish with a copy editor’s meticulousness. She has peppered Greer’s glossary with X’s and no’s; one page sports a huge red inkblot where Diana’s pen has thrown a fit. “Look at this! ‘Helote’ instead of ‘elote,’ and ‘Chihauhau’ instead of ‘Chihuahua,’” sniffs Kennedy.
Greer, it seems, has gotten some of her chiles wrong. An illustration of a serrano is incorrectly labeled. “Serranos are never roasted and peeled,” chides Kennedy. “She simply doesn’t know what she’s talking about.” A photo catches her eye.” Look at that guacamole. It looks like the worst mess you’ve ever seen.’’ Kennedy sighs, thumbing through the book. “She’s got some awful things in here. Chile polcas? Tomato-melon salad. Jalapeño jelly—I can’t stand it. And look where she advises people to place their salsa cruda under a strainer and run cold water over the chile-and-onion mixture to extract ‘the bitter milky liquid.’” Kennedy rolls her eyes. Greer’s recipe for tortilla soup makes her throw up her hands. “Chilipowder! Cumin! Oregano! What the hell do you want all that for?” demands Kennedy. “It’s so overspiced. You need only one branch of epazote and good crumbly, mealy tortillas.” She pauses ominously. “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.”
What’s to be done? However vehement she is here in her own kitchen, Kennedy realizes that it would be impolitic to flail away at the festivalgoers or to savage Greer in public. “How about this?” she suggests, scrutinizing a Dallas Times Herald article on New Southwestern cuisine. “I’ll say that I’m confused by some of these new dishes I read about in the press. I’ll slap them about gently and then offer to send them all Spanish dictionaries. And then they’ll say, ‘Well! She’s scolded us!’” Kennedy looks not at all displeased by the prospect. “Maybe I’d better ask for a table for one.”
The Texas Connection
Another thing Kennedy hasn’t got much use for: Tex-Mex. “It’s so overseasoned, loaded with all those false spices like onion salt, garlic salt, MSG, and chili powder,” declaims Kennedy. “They play havoc with your stomach, with your breath, everything. The thing I simply cannot stand is that stale oil, cheap oil that breaks down fast and has a lingering flavor. It comes back to me all night.” As far as she’s concerned, Tex-Mex is one big nightmare, from the moment the waiter produces “those awful tortilla chips with that sauce that destroys your palate.”
We’re at lunch in Diana’s kitchen, and unfortunately a big plateful of killer carne de puerco con uchepos—uchepos are esoteric Morelia tamales of new field corn—is keeping me from mounting a suitable defense of my native Texas delicacies. The field corn (a.k.a. horse corn) makes each of the uchepos a tiny cloud of richly astounding sweetness; they are moist, fragrant, the essence of corn, in their simple sauce of broiled tomato, chile, and a little garlic. Blackish-green chilaca chile strips add a concentrated pepper taste and a hint of heat; white rectangles of Diana’s queso fresco and runny sour cream from Señorita Esperanza, a neighbor down the road, add cool, tangy notes. “This cheese is too rubbery,” carps Kennedy, interrupting her meditation on Tex-Mex. “It should melt right into the sauce.” It is a little squeaky and chewy, this cheese, but I am drunk on uchepos and care only about eating as many as I can. Any resemblance between these ravishing morsels and Tex-Mex tamales is purely coincidental; at the moment, Lord forgive me, I can hardly remember what Tex-Mex tastes like.
But Kennedy can. “All that cumin,” she sighs. “Spoons and spoons of it, when a pinch would do. It’s such an overwhelming spice.” She reminisces about her first fajitas, sampled this spring in Fort Worth at a restaurant whose name she has forgotten. “The meat was divine, but why do they mess it up with all those unnecessary seasonings?” she asks. If I knew the answer to that I’d be rich, I tell her, snooping around the stove in search of a few more drops of sopa de fideo—”the boys’ soul food,” as she describes it, a comforting kettle of vermicelli fried with a bit of onion and garlic and a single chipotle chile, then soothed with Señorita Esperanza’s sour cream.
“Did you know that flour tortillas are taking over Texas?” I ask Kennedy as I spoon up my sopa. “Some places don’t even bother to offer you corn tortillas anymore, even with dishes that need them.”
“Texas would,” retorts Kennedy. “What idiots! A flour tortilla is not nearly as nutritious. It’s got fat in it; it’s got salt. A corn tortilla is just corn, lime, and water, and it’s good for you. A flour tortilla isn’t as versatile either. You certainly can’t do chilaquiles with it. It’s a trend, that’s all,” she concludes with finality.
There must be some Mexican restaurants in Texas that you like, I suggest a bit timidly. Diana manages to restrain her enthusiasm. “Chains like Ninfa’s are a disgrace,” she says flatly, although she remembers a soup there that was fairly edible. I gulp, remembering my beloved green sauce and queso suizo. San Antonio? “Sometimes I’ll go down to Mi Tierra for the menudo.” offers Kennedy. That’s it? “I haven’t really tried that much Mexican food in Texas,” she admits. “I tend to avoid it, so I can’t be too unfair to them.” When she travels, eating Mexican food is the last thing on her mind; she wants things she can’t get in San Pancho: fresh seafood, dim sum, French food at the interesting new places. She did once deign to eat the soups in three Mexican spots in San Francisco, but all things considered, she’d rather be at Chez Panisse or the vegetarian temple Greens.
There is, however, a Texas restaurant with which the Kennedy name has been widely associated—Fonda San Miguel in Austin, the restaurant that brought the polite (as opposed to the working-class) food of interior Mexico to the attention of Texans. Kennedy’s name was frequently invoked when the restaurant opened in 1973, but today Diana minimizes her connection with the place. She won’t admit to a falling-out, but she stresses that all she did was give classes to the owners, Mike Ravago and Tom Gilliland, and help with a menu. “They did not buy my name with that. I never have been associated with the restaurant,” she insists. What does she think of San Miguel’s food? “Sometimes something comes off,” says Kennedy. “But it’s too large to do custom food, and I told them that from the start.” There is one thing she’s unhappy about. Ravago and Gilliland have taken “Cuisines of Mexico,” the title of Diana’s venerated cookbook, as the name of their umbrella company. “I don’t think that’s very nice,” says Diana shortly.
Kennedy’s Texas connection, though healthy, is not as strong as one might suppose. Texas is not the number one market for Kennedy’s books or for her classes. California takes those honors. And though a Fort Worth cooking school, the French Apron, is on Kennedy’s A-list (“They really treat you like a guest chef there”), Houston currently rates way down on the Kennedy scale. “I will never again do a benefit in Houston,” she informs me. She is still smarting from an experience last fall that left her in tears on the last day of her demonstrations. “Those Houston women are too rich and too spoiled,” she says, remembering one who balked at her mention of raw milk (“Where’s their sense of humor?” she gripes) and another who scolded her for scolding the noisy attendees. Then she’s off reminiscing about Houston classes past, including the time she moved out of the house of a famed cooking-school proprietress because things were not comme il faut and the time one of what Kennedy calls the fifty-dollar ladies had the temerity to apply her makeup while sitting right there in one of Kennedy’s classes. Hilarious? Sure, but somehow it has the uncomfortable ring of truth. Sitting at Kennedy’s table, I’m convinced that the certain kind of monied Texas lady who feels it her sacred duty to cook Mexican is ill-equipped to deal with the full-blown reality of Diana.
“Too Modern for Me”
At 7:45 in the morning, Kennedy jounces down to the San Pancho crossroads in a billow of dry-season dust, ready for her annual expedition to a piloncillo sugar mill in the tierra caliente—the hot country two thousand feet below her semitropical valley. Efigenia sits quietly in the back of the truck, exuding practicality. Diana dispenses a thermosful of homegrown Kennedy coffee and the first of a nonstop stream of opinions that mark the day like mileage signs on an interstate. “It’s third-rate coffee,” she sighs as I sip, “but it’s ours.” After Kennedy’s handy men harvest big sacks of the cranberry-colored beans from her coffee trees, she dries them under the roof for a year, runs them through a coffee mill, stores the shucked green beans inside a huge earthenware olla, and eventually roasts and grinds them. In truth, it is commanding coffee, fuerte and smoky as the brew you get in Veracruz, where customers sit amid the blinding white tiles of La Parroquia and bang spoons against glasses, demanding refills. Kennedy agrees with the comparison but not with my inflection. “It’s Pa-RRO-quia,” she says with a schoolmistress’s crispness. Things must be correct.
My Library
