Diana Kennedy sank into a dimpled leather chair at San Antonio’s Hotel Emma, leaned over her whiskey glass, and told me that the real enemy of every writer is mediocrity.
This was in 2019, when she was 96, and decades of in-depth culinary research had made her a leading authority on Mexican food for British and American home cooks, both despite being a white woman of British descent , as for that. . I thought of that moment when friends confirmed that he had died on Sunday, at his home in Michoacán, Mexico.
I met Mrs. Kennedy on a bumpy two-day road trip from that home in the western Mexican countryside to the University of San Antonio, some 800 miles to the north. By then I had followed many of her recipes and knew her voice on the page: confident, thorough, precise.
In person, she was more brilliant, brutal, and devastatingly funny than I’d imagined, telling libidinous jokes and punctuating conversations with vicious, eloquent swear words. He happily shared the details of long-standing vendettas. She giggled and grunted. She complained about everything that didn’t meet her standards: cookbooks, compliments, foreign policy, cupcakes.
Ms. Kennedy was not trained as a journalist and never identified as one, but she created her own model for reporting recipes as she went, traveling around Mexico in her pickup truck, working alongside chefs and home farmers and documenting their work. .
Then came book after book, demanding that the British and American public recognize the depth and breadth of Mexican food. He extolled the country’s diversity of regional ingredients, styles and techniques, lamenting shifts towards industrialisation, monoculture and prepared foods.
In the articles about her, the image that always stood out to me was a variation of Mrs. Kennedy in khakis and boots, standing in rural Mexico next to her dented white truck, her hair usually wrapped under a scarf and a wide-brimmed hat. . She painted the food writer as something of an adventurer, and often talked about carrying a gun and sleeping on the road, tying a hammock between two trees wherever she wanted to rest. Anything for a prescription, he said.
Over the decades, the journey was constant, frenetic and obsessive: an escape, she would say, though she never said what. Mrs. Kennedy lost the love of her life, Paul Kennedy, a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, in 1967, and until he was diagnosed with cancer, they had lived in Mexico City, where he was stationed. Time and again throughout her career, she recounted how after her husband died, Craig Claiborne, the paper’s food editor, talked her into teaching Mexican cooking.
Many of the home cooks she apprenticed under Mrs. Kennedy, the people she learned and lived with on the road, the people she built her name and career with, were rural women. Mexican women, indigenous women and working class women. Some of them worked as cooks and maids in their friends’ homes.
Their food had not been celebrated before in books in English and had rarely been featured in books published in Mexico. Mrs. Kennedy saw beauty in her everyday cooking and her enthusiasm was magnetic.
He changed the way millions of people perceived Mexican food and enjoyed power in that role. But when he appeared on television, teaching Martha Stewart how to make bean tamales from the Sierra Norte de Oaxaca, didn’t he miss something? His answer would be no. But the fact that Zapotec cooks are not yet in the international spotlight, as experts in their own food say otherwise.
Mrs. Kennedy never considered the recipes she published to be her adaptations or interpretations. Instead, she saw herself as a guardian and conductor of Mexican culinary history. Although he was very concerned about credit, and most of his recipes named their sources, beginning with his first cookbook, “The Cuisines of Mexico,” in 1972, his work never managed to illuminate the women he learned from, only his food. And she never counted on her authority on Mexican cuisine as a white British woman. When asked about this tension—and often, much to her chagrin—she dodged the question or fought it, as if the rigors of her work might make her unassailable.
He emphasized specificity and technique, and rarely suggested substitutions or shortcuts. Once he learned a recipe inside and out, practiced it and published it, he guarded it fiercely. In his mind, the recipe was his now and his job was to ensure its survival, no matter the cost.
He never backed down from his ridiculous position of rejecting Mexican food from Tex-Mex, California and all the rich regional cuisines that emerged from the Mexican diaspora. He also disparaged the creativity and adaptation among Mexican cooks in Mexico who dared to alter classic dishes as he had recorded them, the most paradoxical of his positions.
I often think about how Ms. Kennedy, a cooking instructor with an insatiable appetite for the road, compared herself to Indiana Jones. He envisioned the dishes as artefacts that he could rescue from extinction, display and teach; and he did the extraordinary and essential work of documenting so many of them.
The problem, however, and I think it must have felt like a problem to Mrs. Kennedy, is that the plates cannot be contained as artifacts behind glass. That Mexican cuisine, like all others, exists as a shared idea and a practice, belonging to a collective, not only alive, but twisted, impossible to stay still.