Food and Drink
Stirring the Pot
In her Michoacan kitchen, Diana Kennedy—the Julia Child of mexican cooking—serves up squash-blossom tacos and strong opinions.
IT'S NOON AT DIANA KENNEDY'S rambling adobe house outside San Pancho, a hillside village of a few hundred souls located three hours west of Mexico City. The celebrated cookbook author and acknowledged godmother of Mexican cooking is unpacking a basket of magnificent golden squash blossoms we have just bought at the market in Zitácuaro, a charm-challenged city a few miles away. After giving her housekeeper, Consuelo, detailed instructions in Spanish about chopping up the flowers, Kennedy sets out onions, a poblano chile, and a bulbous white Oaxaca cheese next to a stack of blue-corn tortillas prepared fresh this morning. "We'll just make you a taco so you won't starve before lunch, dear," she tells me, her London accent still crisp after 46 years in Mexico.
Ensconced at Kennedy's big, round kitchen table, mesmerized by the dance of light and shadow on the patio as clouds play cat and mouse with the sun, I've forgotten I was hungry. Inside are more distractions: a wall of burnished copper pots, a blue-and-white-tiled counter bearing bowls of mangoes and stubby bananas, a wooden cupboard lined with bottles of homemade pineapple and banana vinegars, their contents as dark and pungent as balsamic. Suddenly my reverie is broken. "Oh, damn! The coffee's ground too coarsely," Kennedy explodes. More than four decades in Mexico have not diminished her legendary impatience and perfectionism either.
The thing that has brought me to Diana Kennedy's kitchen this late-summer day is the release of her newest cookbook, From My Mexican Kitchen: Techniques and Ingredients, by publisher Clarkson Potter. It is the seventh in a series whose importance is almost impossible to overstate. What Julia Child did for French cooking, Diana Kennedy did for Mexican, except that in America she had to counter the near-universal belief that Mexico's cuisine began and ended with the No. 1 dinner. By combining fascinating indigenous recipes with tales of her adventures in collecting them, she opened people's eyes to a rich and underappreciated cuisine. And her influence extended to professional kitchens as well. In the mid-eighties a cadre of young chefs in Texas and New Mexico credited her as a seminal influence on the new cooking style they had created: Southwestern cuisine.
But if the reason for my visit is professional, my curiosity about this icon of the food world is also personal. I first met Diana Kennedy 23 years ago at a cooking seminar at Fonda San Miguel restaurant, in Austin, where she lived up to her reputation for being an exacting taskmaster: "You do it this way, not that!" When two women in the back row started whispering, she shushed them like schoolgirls. At the end of the classes, Kennedy wrote in my salsa-stained copy of her first book, the 1972 opus The Cuisines of Mexico: "For Pat—¡Buen provecho! Diana Kennedy." Over the years, I bought more books and followed her career, particularly tales of the quirky "ecological house" that she seemed to be forever building in Mexico. How could I pass up an opportunity to see the culinary lioness in her den?
My day with Kennedy began when she wheeled her white four-door Nissan pickup into the driveway of my hotel. How she managed to drive the truck, which appeared to have no power steering whatever, was a miracle, but she was unfazed. "Good exercise!" she declared, her speech bristling with italics and exclamation points. I jumped in and we headed to Zitácuaro's market, a large concrete building with vendors inside and out. Having fractured a kneecap in a recent fall, Kennedy carried a cane, but she was fearless as we pushed through the throngs of shoppers. Her age is—who knows? "Just tell your editor that at sixty-five I went into a holding pattern," she instructed me. "People label you if they know how old you are, and I can't abide that." The rainy season had turned the morning air cool and damp, and she was wearing a light-brown cardigan, tan slacks, sensible shoes, and a wide-brimmed sombrero atop an unruly crop of short brown hair flecked with gray. For a woman who is 65 and holding, she has a decidedly trim figure. We rambled around, peering at the usual market exotica—piles of gnarly yellow chicken feet, indigo-blue mushrooms, a whole cooked cow's head. Each time a vendor tried to drop our purchase into a plastic bag, the diminutive Kennedy extended an arm like a cop stopping traffic: "¡Sin bolsa, por favor!" ("No bag, please!")
Back at Quinta Diana, we get down to the business of lunch. After our sautéed-squash-blossom-and-poblano tacos, we have delicate field greens tossed with a dressing made from her eleven-year-old pineapple vinegar. Our main course is chicken in mole poblano prepared by a recently departed cooking class. When I compliment the students' work, she says, "Yes, they had a good recipe!" For dessert she brings out a selection of two flavors of ate ("ah-tay"), a Mexican dessert of puréed fruit cooked with sugar until solid—sort of a sliceable jam. Made from guava and quince, they remind me of my grandmother's homemade preserves. "Coffee?" Kennedy asks while I nibble. "I'll treat you to a D.K. cappuccino." In a minute, coffee (homegrown, home-fermented, home-roasted, and home-ground) is brewing on the stove and milk is foaming furiously in a blender. She hands me a cup with the admonition "Don't let it get cold!" Later, apropos of nothing and everything, she exclaims, "I love to cook!" Yes, and I think she loves to feed people too.
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