Fabled lands book 3
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Since the late 1970s she resided in an ecological house with solar and wind power, surrounded by four acres of organic vegetable gardens in Coatepec de Morelos, a village near the city of Zitácuaro, about 100 miles west of Mexico City. “Kennedy's labor of love and scholarship belongs in the home library as a chronicle of culinary culture, regardless of whether or not cooks decide to turn their kitchen into cantinas,” declared a 1989 review in Publishers Weekly of her book “The Art of Mexican Cooking.” “My books are for learning, and for cooking,” she said. She gave instructions for these techniques in several of her books, but said she didn't expect that most of her readers would follow them. (Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times)Īt home in her Mexican kitchen, Kennedy made everything from scratch, grinding corn kernels into meal for tamale dough and gutting a chicken to prepare it for roasting.
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Here she is traversing the market of Zitácuaro, Michoacán, Mexico. Kennedy was known affectionately in the town where she lived as the "gringa loca," or crazy white lady. At first he couldn't find the fresh ingredients he needed, even in Texas, so he imported chipotle and a wide variety of chiles. “We knew the kind of food in that book was exactly what we wanted to serve in the restaurant,” Gilliland said.
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The array of regional dishes impressed them. Gilliland and the restaurant's late chef and part owner, Miguel Ravago, had both read her book “The Cuisines of Mexico” before they met her. She helped him plan the restaurant's first menu after she visited it in the early 1970s. Her integrity stands out,” said Tom Gilliland, a friend of Kennedy and owner of Fonda San Miguel restaurant in Austin, Texas. Kennedy's books include “The Tortilla Book” (1975), “Mexican Regional Cooking” (1990) and “From My Mexican Kitchen” (2003), with her final release being a 2016 reissue of her semi-memoir "Nothing Fancy: Recipes and Recollections of Soul-Satisfying Food."Īlthough Kennedy wrote for home cooks, she inspired restaurant chefs and owners as well, who wanted to offer something new to generations of eaters who loved Mexican food but were eager to try new-to-them styles. She was taught to make the dish with the devotion included, she wrote in 1998's “My Mexico,” and she did so even though she was a pantheist. “Open the steamer and bless it with a double sign of the cross” she wrote in the instructions for “tamales de espiga,” a type of corn tamale that threatened to be bland. Her writing exudes a “ferocious desire to explore, reveal and preserve” traditional Mexican dishes, noted a 1999 review in The Times.Īt times Kennedy added a taste of the cultural life that flavored a recipe. She was an amateur food anthropologist as well as a cook who traveled the country to learn more about her subject. “Diana went to Mexico and got it, right away, that she was in the presence of something extraordinary, something that wasn't particularly valued even by the Mexican people,” Fran McCullough, Kennedy's editor for more than 20 years, told The Times. “As much time and trouble should go into the preparation as into that of any intricate French dish.” “This, with its strong peasant roots, is the haute cuisine of Mexico,” she said of the more complex recipes in her books, in a 1992 interview with The Times. Throughout her career she held to her view that fine Mexican dining was the equal of any in the world. She also tucked recipes into her books for tarts filled with a mash of aquatic flies' eggs and stews of black iguana. She provided regional versions of such familiar fare as enchiladas and tamales and also introduced her readers to such subtle and complex dishes as duck in pumpkin seed mole and cream of squash flower soup. Starting with her first book, “The Cuisines of Mexico,” published in 1972, Kennedy did for Mexican cooking what Julia Child had done for French cuisine.