BOULDERS FORMED one wall of Diana Kennedy’s adobe home in Zitácuaro, around 170 kilometres west of Mexico City. Her gardens overflowed with herbs, chillies and other edible plants; the home itself was built from locally made, often recycled materials. Cisterns collected rainwater, which solar panels heated; once used, it was recollected, filtered and used again. Shortly after her death, Mexico’s culture ministry called Quinta Diana, as she christened her home, “an example of sustainability and conservation of nature and biodiversity”.
Ms Kennedy bought the land in 1980 and the plot sprawled in the subsequent years. At its centre was a hacienda-style kitchen, lit by a single dangling light bulb. She and her husband, Paul, had moved to Mexico in 1957 and she soon began research on her first book, “The Cuisines of Mexico”, published in 1972. The plural was deliberate: no Anglophone writer before her was as dogged in seeking out and celebrating the immense breadth of Mexican food and cooking.
Her environmental concerns and devotion to Mexican culinary diversity make her sound like a radical. In fact her work was deeply conservative, in the best sense. “I’m out to report what’s disappearing,” Ms Kennedy told a journalist who braved an 800-mile road trip with her. She had seen Mexico modernise and develop, and she drew attention to the culinary downsides: the increasing use of convenient but inferior corn flour rather than earthy, sweet fresh masa for tortillas; the tendency to rush rather than luxuriate over preparing food; the vanishing of Mexico’s forests.
To her, recipes out of context were meaningless. That was why she was so determined to travel to every corner of Mexico, asking, prodding, chronicling and tasting. Born in Essex, England, in 1923, she had no formal culinary training and worked at a variety of jobs, eventually emigrating to Canada and falling in love with Paul, a journalist for the New York Times. (He died in 1967.)
She was more culinary anthropologist than inventor; she did not create recipes, she gathered them, testing them dozens of times until the taste was as she remembered when she first tried them at a market or roadside stall. She had supreme confidence in her approach, taking 14 years to research her final book, “Oaxaca al Gusto: An Infinite Gastronomy”, which was devoted to that state’s deliciously complex cuisine. Anglophone publishers initially rejected it, believing it was too abstruse, historical and detailed to succeed commercially. After a university press picked it up, it won a James Beard award for Cookbook of the Year.
In this endeavour she was aided, says Shaw Lash, a chef and restaurateur whom Ms Kennedy mentored for several years, by an exquisitely sensitive palate. Ms Lash recalls Ms Kennedy recognising a single ingredient in a marinade for a cut of pork that went on to be braised, fried and served in a torta with numerous other strongly flavoured ingredients.
She was a staunch advocate of traditional dishes, as created by Mexico’s indigenous population, which gave her an outsider’s advantage: middle- and upper-class Mexicans may have liked eating this food, but did not consider it worthy of the sort of attention that Ms Kennedy paid to it. She understood that Mexican cuisine often has a sort of austerity to it, using few ingredients at the peak of their ripeness, prepared to let every flavour shine. She was deeply suspicious of culinary innovation and furious about the debasing of what she rightly considered one of the world’s great cuisines. In “The Art of Mexican Cooking”, her book of 1989, she raged about this trend: “Far too many people outside Mexico still think of [Mexican foods] as an overly large platter of mixed messes, smothered with shrill tomato sauce, sour cream and grated cheese preceded by a dish of mouth-searing sauce and greasy deep-fried chips.”
As that tone suggests, Ms Kennedy could be unsparing with those whom she deemed to have cut corners—in the kitchen or anywhere else. She fired off acerbic letters to editors of substandard recipes; she was equally unsparing about her own cooking. To read one of her cookbooks is to step into a thicket of corrections, complaints and in medias res arguments: “No, [chalupas] are not flat and fried; those are tostadas.” “Quesadillas have degenerated since I first went to live in Mexico.” “And cumin! Used in microscopic quantities…it is pleasant, but added as it is con bravura in many southwestern-type recipes, it has a sweaty taste.”
This was not punctiliousness or contrarianism for its own sake. It was underpinned by a strong sense of how things should be, and a ferocious attachment to a vanishing world. “She noticed in her lifetime how the ingredients were starting to change, with mass agriculture and chillies imported from China,” Ms Lash explains. “Tomatillos were getting bigger, tomatoes were getting more watery. Even now if someone tried to do what she’s done, it would be different, because the chillies have changed, the onions have changed—the flavours have changed.”
By The Economist
