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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On the Program
Late morning. Guardian shuffles under the pale blue froth of the plumbago outside Diana’s kitchen door, wanting to be fed. Zita, the cool grey cat (“g-r-e-y,” insists Diana, “not g-r-a-y”), has been hanging around the stove expectantly, and La Condesa’s yelps can be heard from her tether beyond the unfinished wall. Diana lifts the lid of a beat-up caldron and peers inside. Prehistoric hunks of bone bob amid carrots and potatoes, and a savory cloud of steam escapes into the room. This is the animals’ caldo, to be ladled onto torn-up commercial tortillas and hillocks of wholesome bran. Diana can’t resist cooking for her pets any more than she can resist cooking for the rest of her ménage, despite her protests to the contrary.
I watch Guardian inhale his lunch and lift a bran-and-tortilla-coated muzzle contentedly. Zita gets a little pig’s intestine with her carrots and potatoes. I have never seen a semivegetarian dog before, or a semivegetarian cat either. “They like carrots and potatoes and bran?” I ask doubtfully. “Maybe not at first,” says Kennedy. “The new dog would not look at our food for a week. She was used to rice! She got thinner and thinner.” Now, of course, she’s on the D.K. program. “There’s very little waste around here,” says Kennedy proudly, surveying her charges, then, lest I misunderstand, “They get a lot of love, but not overwhelming quantities. To be loved all the time is such a bore!”
To Market, To Market
The streets and sidewalks of Zitácuaro are clogged with foot traffic at 11 a.m., and Kennedy negotiates her yellow truck gingerly past the town’s vast concrete zocalo. Nothing escapes the tart Kennedy commentary. “Look at that awful dress,” she says, spying a luridly polyestered Señorita. “That man has two wives. In the same house. And children by both of them!” She is appalled at the gentleman’s contribution to the overpopulation problem. Zitácuaro itself, a rangy timber-and-ranching city of 100,000, really gets Kennedy’s critical juices flowing. With its rapid recent growth, the town is everything Kennedy’s beloved and seductive Mexican countryside is not. “All these utterly new buildings built by all these engineers—very efficient and clean and awful,” she grieves, inching past the pink cathedral and up a narrow side street. A stout man in a dark suit, gold watch fob strung across his ample waistcoat, forges along the sidewalk like a battleship. “Probably a lawyer,” Kennedy observes pointedly. “We haven’t seen too many of my friends this morning. I sometimes feel like the Queen of England going through here. All the bowing right and left!”
The post office workers greet her with smiles and salutations. It’s Diana this, Diana that, nothing today, Diana. At the tortillería Kennedy loads her straw market basket with a towering stack of tortillas destined for the animals, then shoos me away from them. “There are rats back where they make the masa,” she warns. We check for the latest produce along the street of open market stalls flanking the cathedral. “The first wild blackberries—zarzamoras—are coming in,” exclaims Kennedy, indicating some buckets beside a stall. I think longingly of her wild blackberry ice cream. “Very disagreeable beans,” she says, pointing out a heap of long pods. We sample a cherimoya, its sweet, custardy flesh coming apart in crablike segments, then buy some tiny Mexican limes and move on. There are too many plastic gewgaws and pregnant women out here for Kennedy’s taste. We retreat into the cool, turquoise recesses of the big covered market.
Vendors on all sides greet Kennedy as she marches through, red tassel twitching busily from the back of her sombrero, in search of her favorite baker. (“I’ll never be able to show my face in this market again if I have to come here with one more photographer,” she confides with a grimace.) The baker is nowhere to be found; he is drunk today, we are told. We must settle for second best, which goes against the Kennedy grain; most of the local bakers use too much sugar nowadays, she says. She trails off, heading for the butchers’ stalls in search of pork for a recipe. “Not enough fat,” she insists to one butcher after hefting a slab of meat. Pork in Mexico no longer has that melt-off-the-bone quality she wrote about so lyrically in Cuisines. Finally she selects some nice shin and brisket, the right shin and the right brisket.
Out on the yawning, sun struck plaza, she halts a passing police official in his tracks. Where’s that barbed wire they impounded after the burglary at her house? Diana wants it back. The official says it will take a week. “You said that two weeks ago,” she protests, raising a little hell. To what avail, however, is uncertain; the sidewalk conference ends unresolved. Next Diana makes a run on the bank, where she is a customer to be reckoned with. Antonio, a short, broad-faced fellow in a perfect, pale blue banker’s shirt, hastens to assist her. “Where I have a good balance, I don’t expect to wait in line,” says Kennedy. “I get better service here than in any bank in New York City. The people are smartly dressed. They wear ties. Of course, I always make a substantial contribution to their Christmas party.”
Sounds a lot like noblesse oblige, but Kennedy prefers to think of it as her part in a larger system of reciprocity of patronage. “I always try to do as much extra for people as I can, and they know that,” she says. There are the tire gauges she gave to the man who repairs her tires, for instance, the mirrors and honey for her Toyota mechanic. “And people know about my forestry,” Diana reminds me. That’s her pet project. Periodically the San Pancho padre arranges for a load of baby trees to be picked up by Kennedy at the forestry station, whereupon she rounds up the village children to distribute the trees. After a visit, the governor of Michoacán sent Kennedy a load of fruit trees that she divided with everyone in the village. That sort of thing has been great public relations for La Señorita, whose arrival in the modest farm pueblo of San Pancho occasioned bemusement and even hostility. Now the same woman who once tried to block off Kennedy’s ranch entrance stops to gossip with her in the road. As much as Kennedy has become a part of local landscape, though, she inhabits that ambivalent zone peculiar to expatriates; she is of the place and yet not of it. The jacaranda dispute is a case in point. One day Diana was horror-struck to see six lovely old jacaranda trees had been cut down in front of San Pancho’s rosy church. She called the forestry service to blow the whistle on the offenders (cutting those trees was against the law in Michoacán, a state that’s serious about protecting trees). “It did get a bit tense,” she admits. “I think the jefe of the pueblo was fined, but nobody wants to say.”
The garish Pemex station just east of Zitácuaro is filled with highway noise and dust and late-afternoon sun. Kennedy sits at the wheel of her truck, having reclaimed it from the mechanics for the third time this week, and compliments the attendant on the station’s clean gas. It’s a rival station’s dirty gas that is fouling up her fuel system, she tells him. Suddenly she spies a trucker lighting up a long, brown cigarillo two pump islands over. “Can you believe that?” she hisses to me in English. “Stop him!” she orders the attendant urgently in Spanish. The attendant goes blank and noncommittal. Kennedy persists. The attendant walks off in the opposite direction. So D.K. starts yelling lustily across the pump islands. “Idiota!” she cries to the trucker, outlining in minute and devastating detail what a piece of foolishness he is engaged in. The guy looks over and keeps puffing. D.K. is furious. As we drive off, she gives him one last piece of her mind. His face doesn’t even change expression. A hundred yards down the road, she remembers the attendant. “Damn!” says the queen of Mexican food. “I forgot the tip.”
A Mixed Blessing
By now I should be used to it. I’m sitting at Diana’s kitchen table eating deliriously good food, and she is telling me what’s wrong with it. The homemade chorizo atop the cazuelitas, a molten pan-pillow of masa dough laced with cheese, is a bit too picante, she complains; besides, the final flourish of queso blanco should be a different cheese. Tacos de nopalitos filled with a slippery sauté of fresh cactus pads and epazote are so rambunctious that they make me cough. “Too much chile?” worries Diana. Finally comes the unlucky armadillo in his adobo sauce, roasted in a slow oven and crisped under the broiler, rich and fatty and crackly skinned. Pork crossed with goat? I’m in such high-greed gear that it is minutes before I notice that Diana has only picked at hers. “What about the armadillo?” I ask. Since it’s the first time she has cooked one, I expect a verdict. “I’m not sure,” she replies.
I’m taken aback. The woman who has firm ideas even about ant eggs (loves them fried, hates them stewed) at a loss for words? In the silence, I begin to suspect something even more unsettling: Kennedy’s finely tuned palate is a curse of sorts. I may be having the time of my life, but she cannot quit appraising, calibrating, and qualifying every nuance of the food in front of her. “I’m starting to think of your palate as your curse,” I tell her. She considers me with sudden intensity.” Paul said that, you know. It’s in my last book,” she says quietly. Then the passage comes back to me. Diana and Paul, who is dying of cancer, marooned in a Texas motel dining room as they drive cross-country toward New York. Paul shoves his plate back in disgust. “I don’t know whether to thank you or not,” he bellows at Diana. “Most of my life I could eat anything anywhere, but now look what you have done to me. This damned rubbish.” With that same awful clarity, I see that food back in Houston will taste like poison to me. “A refined palate can be a curse, in a way,” Diana says presently. “But on the other side of the coin, when something is really good, the experience is so joyful.”
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