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.
(Page 5 of 6)
Correctness is not a quality shared by the lush fields of gladiolus marching out from San Pancho. “They’re a damn nuisance,” says Kennedy. “They wear out the soil because they require so much fertilizer. They’re stiff. They look man-made! They have no scent! And”—worst of all—”you can’t eat them! An awful flower,” she concludes darkly. Nothing is too small for her to weigh in on; nothing escapes the gimlet Kennedy eye.
The innocent-looking avocado groves unfolding around us fall under her scrutiny next. “This area is overplanted in avocados just the way California wine country is in grapes,” she observes disapprovingly. “They’re growing the grafted types like the Haas and the Fuerte here. I started to graft mine, but I stopped because there’s always a demand for the little local criollos.“ A clump of oak trees catches her eye. Zitácuaro is famous for its bakers, all of whom prefer to fire their outdoor clay ovens with oak because it burns hot and smokes less, says Kennedy. “So our oak forest is being diminished,” she laments as we careen down a switchback into a light-filled valley plumed with smoke columns and lavender jacarandas.
“They have a lot of irrigation water down here,” Kennedy notes enviously; meshed in the reality of her sere hillside, she always suffers a lustful twinge when she spies an exuberantly watery spread. Everywhere along the narrow two-lane highway, people are walking to school, picking wild blackberries, prodding burros, brushing a child’s hair in the sun. Diana basks momentarily in the scene. “That’s the difference between the countryside here and the countryside in America,” she gloats. “Here, it’s full of life, full of people doing things. There it’s empty and dead.” That’s Kennedy the Mexico romantic talking; the next moment, Kennedy the Mexico realist is quailing and curses a precipitous driver. “They’ll all pass on a corner here,” she groans, wrestling her pickup onto an awesomely bad dirt track that slices through a banana-clad canyon. Coppery wisps hover in distant fields below—African marigolds, explains Kennedy, to be fed to the local chickens to give them their characteristic golden skin. Whether that is good or bad she neglects to say, and the road has jostled me into such submission that I don’t bother to ask.
Hundreds of vertiginous feet later we pass through a homely wooden archway announcing, “Welcome to Enandio,” as a wooden waterwheel churns and sluices near a sugarcane graveyard baking in the sun. Diana wants to take photos, but the universe is not cooperating. “Damn!” she exclaims. “The sun’s in the wrong place. “Mankind is balking as well; the owner is missing and must be summoned. We kick idly among the dry stalks. “The three boys were working together when I left this morning,” Kennedy observes apropos of nothing. “That’s never a good sign.” Across the street a shy woman stands on her porch, flanked by leggy impatiens and five children in all stages of growth. Diana, with nothing better to do, addresses the woman gently but ever so firmly. My Spanish isn’t great, but soon enough it clicks: Diana is telling her she’s got enough children, that the laws of God don’t require it, and a bunch of other stuff I can’t quite decipher. The woman smiles inscrutably, stroking her daughter’s hair. “She’s not controlling herself,” Diana says to me sorrowfully.
A young man arrives with bad news—the owner of the mill is not available. No sugar today. Diana sighs resignedly, none too surprised, then drives up the mountain toward an even more remote and rustic mill. Early-morning Enandio is heartbreakingly beautiful, plastered with polychromatic vines and gay flowerpots affixed to facades wholesale, in the Michoacán manner. A church tower like a white paper cutout is the kind of spire any postmodernist worth his pediment would swoon for, I remark to Diana. “Too modern for me,” objects she, steering around a flock of pecking chickens. And another thing: “It’s all T-shirts and baseball caps now,” she mourns, as a clutch of chirping children trails excitedly in our wake. Diana regrets the passing of the indigenous peasant costumes, but the eighties will out. Ahead, a hose blocks our path, and a man and his wife leap to lift it, crying “Pásele!” Diana inches under it, her own twentieth-century triumphal arch.
Now the earth is black and volcanic, rich with ancient trees and rivulets, the road hewn straight upward into rock. At last the yellow truck heaves up into a cane-field clearing where the mill steams and fumes and clatters like a sorcerer’s workshop. A pungent, caramelized smell smites us—raw sugarcane juice stewing in vats the size of horse troughs. D.K. approves. “Pure sugar, nothing taken out or put in,” she exults, pointing her camera at a primitive, waterwheel-driven conveyor that sends cane stalks chattering through a shredder. Their juice trickles down a sluiceway to the vats; it will simmer for six hours before workers skim the liquid and pour it into conical wooden molds, where it will crystallize into the hard, brown piloncillo. Fifteen kilos will last Kennedy most of the year, grated for cookies or tea things and stirred into her ever-present pitcher of sour-orange drink.
The price, however, is not right. “What did we pay last year?” Kennedy asks Efigenia. “Sesenta,“ replies Effy. Sixty pesos per kilo, and now the owner of the mill wants 95. A handsome, graying man flashing a set of movie-star teeth, he is called to the shed for negotiations. He and Kennedy bend their sombreroed heads together, uttering histrionic “eeehs” and “aaayhs,” his hat a grimier twin to hers. The transaction is attracting the interest of every man on the premises, and soon we’re all jammed into the dark shed, where aromatic sugar cones are heaped beneath a saint’s portrait. The boss is unyielding. “He says everything has gone up,” Kennedy reports. “Nothing goes up ten to twenty per cent here; everything goes up fifty to one hundred per cent.” She’s not about to give up, though. As the owner weighs out her sugar, D.K. informs him that he’s reducing his topsoil by using chemical fertilizers. Adjusting the hooks on his ancient hanging balance, the owner is obviously not buying her argument. “I give my lectures on fertilizantes and birth control all over the place,” says Diana. I snap a photo of her and the owner. She wheels, dismayed. “My hat was crooked,” she reproaches me. Then, after a moment, she softens the remonstrance. “I’m particular because I do look awful sometimes,” she says.
A D.K. Drubbing
On our way down from Enandio, some fallen mangoes beneath a roadside tree demand inspection. Effy leaps out of the cab, pinches, confers with Diana. The verdict: mango season is still a ways off. Out on the highway again, Diana goes into high gear. She decries the way commercial fertilizers render water unusably saline. She castigates the big chemical companies. “Everybody’s greedy. That’s the trouble with the world. And there’s too many people!” She heaps scorn on a papal nuncio who opined that the population has not reached its limits in the tropic zones. “Doesn’t he know that the closer you go to the equator, the less flexible is the land?” she asks rhetorically. Reagan takes a D.K. drubbing too. “I think the prolife people are out of their goddam minds,” she harrumphs. “With millions of people starving, millions of children that shouldn’t be born, it’s terrible that the president is bowing to these fanatical groups.”
Then she’s back on the chemical companies and their wretched propellant sprays. “The manufacturers say, ‘This is what the public wants.’ Well, why the hell don’t they do some educating?” she demands. “It’s like those awful packaged foods. The public has no palate because everything has to taste alike. I deplore the mediocrity! I deplore the consumerism!” McDonald’s gets it next: “It just drives me mad to think that they’re destroying rainforests to give the over fed American public a cheaper hamburger,” she rants, deep in a full-fledged snit. She honks in annoyance at some rude tailgaters who roar past us on a curve. Then she’s on, in the best Kennedy all-over-the-map verbal tradition, to the development of the San Joaquin Valley (“a rich, producing area being built on”) and the lamentable way Los Angelenos waste water. “I’m the only one at Peter Kump’s New York cooking school who forbids people to wash up under a running tap,” she informs me. “A single basin of water is all you need!” My head is spinning. “Why accept blue toilet paper?” Diana asks suddenly. “It’s awfully bad for your bottom, for one thing, and the dyes contaminate the water. Why do we have to be such a pampered public? Why do we need little flowers printed on our tissues?” I have no rejoinder, having been exposed to more pronouncements than even I—no stranger to them—can quite absorb. It’s not even 10 a.m., and I’m mentally exhausted. I am coming to understand that Diana doesn’t have opinions; she’s about opinions. They define her against the world. As if she can read my mind, Kennedy fixes me with her bright gaze. “People tell me, ‘You’re so opinionated,’” she says. “If I’ve arrived at this age and don’t have opinions, I think I’ve rather wasted my life. They say, ‘What do you think of this lovely dish?’ I say, ‘I think it’s awful.’”
My Library
