Diana Kennedy MBE (née Southwood; 3 March 1923 – 24 July 2022) was a British food writer. A primary English-language authority on Mexican cuisine, Kennedy was known for her nine books on the subject, including The Cuisines of Mexico, which changed how Americans view Mexican cuisine.
Her cookbooks are based on her fifty years of travelling in Mexico, interviewing and learning from several types of cooks from virtually every region of the nation.
Her documentation of
native edible plants has been digitized by National Commission for
Knowledge and Use of Biodiversity. Due to her style of work, Kennedy was called
a "culinary anthropologist" and self-identified as an
"ethno-gastronomer". Kennedy
received numerous awards for her work, including the Order of the Aztec
Eagle from the Mexican government, and was appointed a Member of the
Order of the British Empire.
Her Life
Kennedy was born Diana
Southwood in Loughton, Essex, in the southeast of England, on 3 March
1923. Her father was a salesman, and her
mother was a schoolteacher who loved nature and wanted to live quietly in the
countryside.
Kennedy did not attend
university because of World War II and instead, at age 19, joined
the Women's Timber Corps: a civilian organisation that took over forestry
duties from men who had gone off to fight.
Kennedy did not like cutting down trees, so she was assigned to
measuring tree trunks instead.
In 1953, Kennedy
emigrated to Canada, where she lived for three years while doing a number of
jobs, including running a film library and selling Wedgewood china.
On a last-minute
decision, Kennedy decided to visit Haiti in 1957. There she met Paul
P. Kennedy, a correspondent for The New York Times in Mexico,
Central America and the Caribbean. The
two moved to Mexico in 1957, and there they married some time later, remaining
together until his death from cancer in 1967, aged 62. Kennedy had no children, but two
stepdaughters from Paul's first marriage.
In Mexico, Kennedy
became enamoured of the food, and dedicated her subsequent career to its
preservation and promotion. However, she
still maintained her British accent and took tea each day. When she was not teaching, she was either
writing or working in the kitchen on recipes.
She was noted for her brusque, no-nonsense demeanor, having pulled out
tape recorders when police have tried to get bribes from her on her Mexican
travels.
She visited every state
in Mexico, and used diverse forms of transportation, from buses, to donkeys to
her Nissan pickup truck with no power steering (and a shovel to dig it out of
the mud). She travelled to any isolated
areas of Mexico to visit markets and cooks to ask about cooking ingredients and
methods. In the 1970s, she decided to
build her house near Zitácuaro Michoacán, in an area with orchards.
The land allowed her to grow many of her
own ingredients. While she was not technophobic,
she was against electronic forms of cookbooks, believing in the need to make
notes over printed recipes.
Kennedy died at her
home on 24 July 2022, at the age of 99.
First exposure to
Mexican cuisine
During her first years
in Mexico City with her husband in the late 1950s, she learned
quickly that the best food in Mexico was not in fancy restaurants but rather in
markets, traditional family restaurants called "fondas" and in homes. In addition, she was impressed with what she
saw in local, traditional markets. She
also came to appreciate that recipes varied from region to region, travelling
with her husband when he was on assignment, and he would collect recipes when
she could not accompany him. In Mexico
City, she asked her friends about cooking these dishes, and was referred to
their maids. These maids then encouraged her to visit their villages, which she
subsequently continued to do. Kennedy
also began researching documentation on Mexican cuisine, and credited the work
of Josefina Velázquez de León for her having been a pioneer, who had done
similar work collecting recipes by visiting church groups. Kennedy's focus became the food that was not
documented, such as that found in villages, markets and homes, eventually to
preserve native ingredients and traditional recipes being lost as Mexicans move
from rural areas to urban centers.
Kennedy began to share
what she learned informally among expats and her husband's colleagues when they
came to Mexico. This included taking women on tours of traditional markets,
including the stands with animal heads, which shocked Americans. When New York Times food
writer Craig Claiborne was in town, she tried to give him a book of
Mexican recipes, but he refused it, saying "I'll only read a Mexican
cookbook once you have written one".'
At the time, Kennedy thought this was a crazy idea.
Cooking classes and
cookbook writing
At the end of 1965,
Kennedy and her husband moved to New York City, where he died the
following year from cancer. In 1969,
Kennedy began to teach classes in Mexican cooking in her apartment in the Upper
West Side, with the encouragement of Craig Claiborne. This was the beginning of a decades-long
teaching career, which began as her own venture, then in collaboration with
other institutions such as the Peter Kump Cooking School in New York,
as well as offering Mexican cooking "boot camps" at her home in Michoacán.
Her classes focused on the most traditional cooking techniques and ingredients.
For example, while most Mexican cooks now use pre-ground corn or corn flour,
she insisted on teaching students how to soak kernels with lime overnight,
remove the skins and grind with lard to make corn dough (masa). She had the most success with this since the
1970s, when cooking schools grew in popularity.
The work with the
cooking classes led to her first cookbook.
From her time in Mexico City to her time in New York City, she had been
supported in her work with Mexican cooking by Claiborne. She did not have experience writing, but
after Fran McCullough, poetry editor at Harper and Row at the time,
took one of her classes, she offered to help Kennedy put the book together and
eventually collaborated on Kennedy's first five books. To complete the first one, Kennedy decided to
return to Mexico to do further research.
This research, she believed, was what separated her from other cookbook
writers in that she took the time and effort to explore Mexico and do field
research on how the cuisine varies. Her
inexperience led to rewriting the book several times but the result was The
Cuisines of Mexico, published in 1972. This book became a best-seller and
is still one of the most authoritative single volumes on Mexican cooking. It began to change Americans' understanding
of Mexican food, expanding it beyond Tex-Mex into the various
regional cuisines and dishes, and is the basis of establishing authentic food
in the U.S. The 1986 revision of the
book is still in print.
She later published
eight other volumes on Mexican cooking, a number of which have been translated
into Spanish. Her initial influence is the work of Josefina Velázquez de León,
but she credited much of her writing style to the work of English cookbook
author Elizabeth David. Kennedy did
not consider herself a writer, but rather as someone who documented what she
saw in about fifty years of travelling Mexico, including remote areas, to talk
to cooks of all kinds. She financed her
own book research and travels, often sleeping in her old Nissan truck. She preferred the food of central and
southern Mexico, which is more complex and varied. She registered a wide variety of edible
plants, and included more exotic recipes such as those using brains, iguanas,
insects and even whole animals such as oxen. She regularly interviewed and cooked with a
variety of cooks, but especially those from rural areas, cooking for family and
friends. She even apprenticed in a bakery in Mexico City to learn the all-male
trade. Her preference for traditional
home cooking means that her books revolve around foods made with corn dough and
even has an entire book dedicated to tortillas. Her insistence on field research
distinguishes her books for the stories they tell related to food and her
travels. It also led to unconventional
formats. Her book on Oaxaca is
not divided by types of dishes but rather the eleven regions of the state.
Her work made her one
of the foremost authorities on Mexican cuisine, not only in authentic
ingredients and techniques, but the loss and disuse of various ingredients as
Mexico shifts from a primarily rural to primarily urban society. One loss is
the use of local and regional produce. "As
far as I can see," said Kennedy, "I write oral history that is
disappearing with climate change, agribusiness, and loss of
cultivated lands. In the past people had a sense of taste and a sense of where
they came from. They were conscious of what they were eating and what they
consumed and about not wasting. In the introduction of Oaxaca al Gusto,
Kennedy wrote ... "Trying to record the ethnic foods as well as the more
sophisticated recipes of the urban centers presented an enormous challenge and
responsibility … I am sure that if I had known what it would entail to travel
almost constantly through the year, and often uncomfortably, to research,
record, photograph and then cook and eat over three hundred recipes, I might
never have had the courage to start the project in the first place..."
In addition to
travelling in Mexico, Kennedy's work required frequent travel abroad, especially
to the United States, where she gave classes and spoke about Mexican cuisine. She starred in a 26-part television series on
Mexican cooking for The Learning Channel.
She was an influence in the development of Mexican cooking in the United
States and on chefs such as Rick Bayless. She taught Paula Wolfert,
who recommended her to her editor. Chefs
in Texas and New Mexico who came to prominence in the mid-1980s credit her work
as a base for their Southwestern U.S. cuisine. However, Kennedy dismissed most chefs doing
Mexican food during her time because they had not done the travelling and
research that she had and innovated rather than preserved original methods. She criticized chefs who waste food and who
encourage the unnecessary use of plastic, foil, and other items that only get
thrown in the trash. She also did not
like culinary writers who do not live in Mexico, but question her authority
because of her ethnicity. Some of her conflicts
received significant press, citing her throwing chef Rick Bayless out of her
car for being "brash" and her criticisms of Maricel Presilla.
She was careful to credit the
people who have shared their understanding of Mexican regional foods with her,
including, for example, anthropologist and restauranteur Raquel Torres
Cerdán.
Her influence was not
limited to the United States as her work was very well received in Mexico. She
received numerous awards in this country including the Order of the Aztec
Eagle, which is the highest honour awarded to foreigners in the country.
The National Commission for Knowledge and Use of Biodiversity (CONABIO)
has digitized her research including a vast collection of recipes, drawings and
notes both on cooking and native edible plants, resulting in a section of their
website dedicated to her.
Quinta Diana/Diana
Kennedy Center
Kennedy permanently
returned to Mexico in 1976, initially living in Mexico City. In 1980, she moved to eastern Michoacán,
about three hours west of the capital, after a friend introduced her to the
area. There she bought property which
she initially called "Quinta Diana" near the small village of San
Francisco Coatepec de Morelos (colloquially known as San Pancho), in the
municipality of Zitácuaro.
Her homestead was on a
forested hill at the end of a long dirt road, only accessed by pickup or four-wheel
drive. However, this did not stop a
steady stream of visitors from arriving at her cobblestone driveway.
Quinta Diana is an
ecologically minded establishment. She stated in the book My Mexico in
1998 that she wanted a house built of local materials and live a lifestyle
similar to that of her neighbors. The
nearly three hectares is almost off the grid, and centers on her adobe home. This home was built by local architect
Armando Cuevas, and centers around a large boulder, almost the size of
a Volkswagen Beetle, which Kennedy decided not to remove from the site. Around the boulder is an atrium of the open
living room, and from it, stairways lead to various parts of the house. In her home she tested recipes according to
the seasons, and what is growing on her property. Her cooking spaces consist of an outdoor
space with wood-fired grills and adobe beehive-shaped ovens, and an indoor
kitchen, which she called her "laboratory". Her indoor kitchen centers on a long, cement
counter, which is covered in blue and white tiles, with inlaid gas burners. This kitchen is filled with various
ingredients and implements including burnished copper and clay pots on the
walls, herbs and vegetables in wicker baskets, various varieties of dried chili
peppers, and her own condiments, including a pineapple vinegar similar
to balsamic. For her table, she has
authentic Talavera pottery from Puebla, and near the kitchen
window, there are binoculars and a bird book.
Her bedroom is
upstairs, which opens to her study, filled with books and papers about, and
with windows on three sides to look out over the gardens towards the mountains.
Kennedy grew much of
her own food organically. She had a greenhouse to grow various edible plants,
such as herbs and even coffee. The
gardens include grapefruit, apricot and fig trees, chayote vines
from Veracruz, and a section dedicated to the corn she used for masa. Manure
is the fertilizer. All the water used on the property is from tanks that
collect wastewater, with a patch of land serving as a filter for wastewater. Much of the energy is solar.
Since 1980, money from
her books and speaking engagements have funded the property and its operations. However, Kennedy established the Diana
Kennedy Foundation to have tax-free status with the Mexican government, and to
work on projects focusing on the environment as well as food. Her interest in the environment was related
to food in the sense that when the environment is destroyed, foods disappear. It also had roots in her mother's love for
nature and experience with scarcity in wartime England. She argued against the use of genetically
modified seeds, excessive use of packaging and use of bleach for
white linens in hotels and restaurants. The Foundation is also geared
toward preservation, not only of Mexico's food heritage, but of Quinta Diana,
with its immense collection of Mexican cookbooks, other publications and
pottery, along with the gardens.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diana_Kennedy
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