On Diana Kennedy's 'Oaxaca al Gusto: An Infinite Gastronomy'
Craig Claiborne, the great, benevolent food critic of The New York Times, had suggested that [Diana Kennedy] give classes in Mexican cooking, and with one of those life-changing bits of advice offered casually over dinner, also prompted her to do a book.
Characteristically, she went at it like fury, compiling, testing, teaching herself to write, and then waging an all-out campaign to promote it by cooking her way into the affections of the sales force at Harper’s and then hauling food for booksellers at their yearly convention. Her first book, The Cuisines of Mexico (1972), was revelatory from the very title, emphasizing as it did that Mexican cooking is a high-art form, and that it is as regionally varied as that of China or France. It was immediately successful.
She moved back to Mexico. In the beautiful state of Michoacan she built an adobe house far ahead of its time in its ecological obsession, started an organic garden of edible plants, and, with a camp kitchen fitted into the back compartment of a rattling little truck, she began her endless pilgrimage up and down the Republica Mexicana. A description in My Mexico of a hair-raising excursion to Mascota, Jalisco, in pursuit of the perfect fruit sweets, shows her determination. Following a collision with an oncoming truck and a long negotiation with the local police,
the last two and a half hours were by far the worst. At first the road was shaded by trees along a small river and there were some homesteads and a few children playing while their fathers gossiped over a beer…. We were held up twice by huge machines trying to clear the road of a recent fall of rocks and earth and then began a precarious descent when the road narrowed considerably as it hugged the side of the steep slope. The loose stony surface made it slippery, and the bends were closed and blind…. As we descended, we had a distant view of the broad valley below and soon caught sight of the tiled roofs of Mascota…the Emerald of the Sierra, as it is known locally.
It was by then late afternoon: the restaurant that we had heard so much about was closed for a wedding party, so we hurried along to the lady who was famous for her conserves. She had gone to Mass, a long one, her son said, but he finally took pity on us and showed us in to buy her much acclaimed wares.
Where were the stuffed peaches that we had particularly come to buy? There was no peach harvest this year…. But what a variety of sweets there were: [thick jellies] of local fruits—pears, apples, guavas, and tejocotes, a type of crab apple, thin layers of fruit conserve rolled up with a coating of sugar, the most delicious being a pale green color and sharper than the others, made of steamed green mangoes.
Of course, Kennedy works alongside the cook to learn how to make this last treat, a perfumed concoction that plays on the tongue with so many tingling, contrasting shocks of sweet and tart, mellow and barely ripening, that I once consumed a large block of it in the course of a single day, and felt only sorrow that there was not more…
Perhaps not everyone will feel like making the wasp’s nest salsa that Kennedy collected in the Puerto Escondido area of the state, but what an astonishment it is to read a recipe that seems to come through the millennia straight from the time of the hunter-gatherers. Step one: find your wasp’s nest. Step two: munch on a few of the grubs. Step three: invent corn, develop the tortilla, grind the nest—the part with the wasp eggs in it—in a hollowed-out bit of volcanic rock, and roll yourself a few tacos. “Interesting and delicious” is how Kennedy cheerfully describes the result.
The window Kennedy most often opens to the past looks not onto the Stone Age but onto the dazzling era of the great pre-Conquest kingdoms, with their elaborate court life and ongoing exploration of the exquisite world of “flower and song.” Flowers were for holding to one’s nose while strolling about in a princely fashion, and also for munching. The book abounds in recipes for squash flowers and fragrant plumeria blossoms, for maguey flowers and also palm buds, which I am not aware of ever having tasted.
Then there are the numerous recipes based on masa, or dough, made of ground corn. Corn is all, or nearly all, in Mexican food culture: a drink (atole), a bread (tortillas), a thickener (chilpachole), a dough (tamales). The middle classes are increasingly switching to wheat flour products at home, but most Mexicans still eat some manifestation of corn at least once a day. Take, for example, the typical working-class breakfast of a bread roll stuffed with an enormous, spicy, scalding-hot tamal (torta de tamal), served with a cup of steaming strawberry or vanilla atole, a combination available at dawn for less than two dollars outside every metro stop in Mexico City.
