Culinary Icon: Diana Kennedy

We travelled to Mexico to meet the "Mick Jagger of Mexican food” to discuss her passion and understanding of Mexican cuisine, her thoughts on sustainable eating and her love of a good porkpie.

Photography by Ana Laframboise and Daniel Almazán Klinckwort

Words by Joy Yoon

To say that 99-year-old Diana Kennedy knows a thing or two about Mexican food is like saying David Attenborough is kind of interested in the natural world. Having written nine books exploring Mexico’s disappearing gastronomic history, Diana is an authority on Mexican food— but she’s also a polarising figure in the world of food, equally loved and lambasted. She’s been labelled as everything from a champion of Mexican food to the scourge of gastronomy, for her never-ending diatribes of what is wrong with food today. We revisit our meeting with “the Mick Jagger of Mexican food”, as she focuses on her latest challenge: how to save us all from an unsustainable and tasteless death.

Over the past six decades, Diana Kennedy has tirelessly amassed a priceless collection of information on Mexican food and its culture. By pairing an amateur’s approach with an anthropologist’s sensibility, Diana has recorded data over her life that is vital to the preservation and protection of Mexico’s original regional cuisine and biodiversity. And some very important people are now paying close attention, specifically the CONABIO (National Commission for Knowledge and Use of Biodiversity). By collaborating with Diana, they now have access to her notebooks, slide and books—all scanned and digitised—which contribute to their overall knowledge of the changes in Mexican diets. “I was quite surprised,” said Diana, “but I’m very proud that they have recognised my work.”

But long before the acclaimed author and chef traded her “hellos” for “holas” she grew up in Middlesex, England. The daughter of a teacher and a talented cook, Diana grew up with an appreciation of good food, the know-how to stretch a limited budget and the building blocks of cooking—vital ingredients for her future life.

As an avid and savvy traveller, she ventured throughout Europe before settling in Canada in 1953. From there she continued to explore the U.S. and the Caribbean. In Haiti, smack in the middle of a revolution—an unlikely place for romance—she met Paul Kennedy, a foreign correspondent for The New York Times stationed in Mexico City, and it was instant. “Cupid’s arrow struck…The juicy bits aren’t really publishable,” she declares. Whenever Paul travelled to Mexico for work Diana joined him and so began her lifelong obsession with Mexico and its cuisine. 

From the moment Diana arrived in Mexico, she began visiting markets and was immediately captivated by the colours and the chillies. “My mother used to make curries, so I love things that are picante.” Also drawn to the purity of their seasonal offerings, she travelled throughout Mexico year-round to study the unusual and diverse produce.  “Everything was coming in from the country,” she says. “Totally different. The textures, the contrast of flavours, the spices, and the smells, oh those smells!” She soon began collecting and cataloguing recipes and information about plants. “I just started when my husband was away on reporting assignments.”

When it comes to food, Diana prefers home cooking, comida casera—meals that focus their attention on the details. “The simpler dishes are much more difficult,” she says. “If you don’t have a lot of experience with them, it will show.” The key to Mexican food, Diana explains, is building layers. “You treat every ingredient as it has to be treated,” she emphasises. “Skipping steps causes flatness and takes away facets of flavour.” And elements cannot be thrown together haphazardly. “The new generation doesn’t know,” says Diana. “Eating is about understanding and learning that it takes time to do something properly.”

Diana made her first trip to Oaxaca in 1964. Just the mention of this region has her excited. You can hear the electricity in her voice as she recounts trekking through the mountainous topography, the various herbs and the 24 varieties of uncommon chillies. “Oh my God, Joy!” she exclaims. “It was mindboggling.” Listening to her, I feel transported as if I’m in the mountains with her. But knowing my lack of stamina and Diana’s incredible fortitude, she’d probably have had me wait with the car. However, the journey wasn’t always easy. “I’m the only one who took the time and spent the money, season after season, year after year, to travel through the countryside. I slept in my truck and collected stories, seeds and recipes. It's why I’m not rich!” she laughs. In the end, it took fourteen years for Diana to publish the seminal Oaxaca al Gusto: An Infinite Gastronomy and she acknowledges that it was an immense yet incredibly rewarding struggle. Soon after, Harper and Row’s Frances McCullough came knocking and asked if she wanted to write a Mexican cookbook. The meeting resulted in the first of nine groundbreaking and influential cookbooks, The Cuisines of Mexico.

After the death of her husband in 1967, Diana continued to travel back and forth to Mexico for years conducting in-depth research for future books. In 1976,  she decided to return to create her personal Mexican food centre and settled in a rustic adobe-style homestead, dubbed “Quinta Diana”, in the hills of Michoacán, four hours west of Mexico City. Diana took an old orchard, and under her attentive and unyielding supervision, transformed it into an organic oasis. All achieved, she proclaims proudly, “without destroying the land.” She uses metal solar stoves in the backyard, methane gas to cook, rainwater, carefully collected, is monitored and used throughout the property, while the guest toilet uses natural filters to irrigate her organic garden. Nothing is wasted; even plastic bags are washed and dried for reuse.  

What we overlook and fail to appreciate about Diana is her strength. She's adventurous as she is gutsy and what she's accomplished was done alone. Were you scared of travelling alone in the beginning? “No.” She did, however, enlist local drivers in mountainous areas to take her along the often unpaved and unguarded roads as – “I have vertigo.” As for the language, Diana speaks Spanish, “albeit with an English intonation but, between cooks, there is an innate understanding,” she explains. Physical touch and guidance are just as important as exact verbal directions – showing someone how long to stir a dish until it has reached a specific texture, guiding a hand for the perfect pinch of salt or handful of ingredients, this is how Diana was shown, “If the women who taught me to cook were using a certain wild green or herb or chilli, they would take me to see it growing so I could take a photograph and taste it.”

And it’s with that same openness, respect, and appreciation, she acknowledges and credits every individual that has given her their recipes. Diana also credits. Josefina Velazquez de León, who explored Mexico’s regional cuisine in the 1940s as “the first.” “Josefina opened my eyes,” says Diana.

Unfortunately, this cannot be said about others, and Diana is outraged. “A horrible book came out by Phaidon called Mexico: The Cookbook by Margarita Carrillo Arronte,” Diana states, highly irritated. “She ripped off 14 of my recipes!” According to Diana, Arronte called her knowing she was angry. “I said, ‘Look, you did not spend your money and time driving to Oaxaca and then going up into the mountains with a sleeping bag and cot like I did. You did not spend hours with the cooks and their families,’” says Diana heatedly. “It took ten days to go down there to get one recipe, and I objected!” Arronte admitted that she had not checked the translations done by the culinary student and Diana hung up. “I nearly exploded,” she says, disgusted. The book was published, but Diana refuses to remain silent. “Make no bones about it, it is a false book,” she warns.

Diana has always been honest and her honesty has inspired generations of cooks. Thomasina Miers, the founder of Wahaca, calls the author of her favourite cookbook, Recipes from the Regional Cooks of Mexico, “a heroine and her inspiration.” She ceaselessly fights to give the rest of us a chance. Her toughness and tenacity are born of necessity and driven by passion and altruism. For decades, she’s been battling a seemingly unwinnable war against an opposition comprised of careless chefs, poor researchers, GM foods, corporations, and governments intent on ruining our planet for profit, yet she pushes on. “Is there anyone willing to stand up for us and make whoever is in charge taste what we’re eating?” asks Diana. “It’s not popular to talk about it, no one wants to be bothered, but I don’t give a shit. I really don’t.”

Diana vehemently declares that we should not demand or expect certain produce year-round and that we need to stop polluting our oceans and landfills with horrible plastics, sous vide bags in particular. She wants us to protect biodiversity as well as local farmers. She proclaims with a roar that GMOs are distorting flavours leaving everything inflated with nothing left to savour. She is emphatic that cooking schools should offer classes for eaters, believing that exposing them to the same dishes prepared badly, okay and well, will help inform them. “People are losing taste,” she states. “Not just in Mexican food, but our palates.” Up in arms about sustainability, she demands it be taught in every school, drawing attention directly to waste. “Everyone should be accountable for what goes in their garbage!” But she knows she cannot win them all and hopes that through education, things will change, and people will start listening. “I don’t have children, never wanted them,” says Diana. “But I want to think that I’m leaving my mark to help future generations.”

With our conversation drawing to a close, I ask Diana what makes her happy. “Oh God,” she laughs before taking a moment to answer. She lowers her tone as she does when she wants to convey the seriousness of her response. “Sitting down with some friends, a max of six,” she says. “Great food, great wine and having that glow only a good meal gives to people.” She quickly adds, “Choose your guests very carefully.”

Diana’s life is a constantly growing collection of recipes—a culinary history that spans nearly a century. It is with that perspective she looks to the future and understands all that we’ve lost. “I do as I can, I could have done better,” she says almost solemnly. “But what I’ve done, it’s been appreciated.”