ROAD TRIPPING WITH DIANA KENNEDY
S AN ANTONIO — In a quiet strip mall off highway 85, Britishborn author Diana Kennedy stepped out of the car and into a hot parking lot, cursing.
Not so long ago, Kennedy practically lived on the road, traveling the Mexican countryside in her pickup truck to research her cookbooks. But now that she was 96, a road trip was hell on her artificial hips.
Kennedy started her career with “The Cuisines of Mexico” in 1972. The plurality of that title became the foundation of her work: reporting on the country’s culinary diversity; meticulously recording regional recipes and crediting them to home cooks; contextualizing food with the kinds of observations more commonly found in the work of botanists, anthropologists and historians.
Eight books and half a century later, Kennedy is protective of her legacy. When the University of Texas at San Antonio asked to acquire her many hundreds of slides, notes and scrapbooks, and to restore her small collection of 19th-century Mexican cookbooks, she was thrilled, but there was no way she was going to sit around at home, waiting for the materials to arrive in Texas by mail.
“My work, my books, they’re a part of myself,” she said, adjusting her oversize black sunglasses in the passenger seat. “Would you ship your life off with a messenger service? No!”
Friends took turns driving Kennedy and her work on a two-day journey that started at her home in the countryside of Michoacán, in western Mexico, and ended more than 800 miles north in San Antonio, where a team from the university was waiting.
“This is why I don’t like traveling with other people,” she sighed, as we got in the car in Monterrey, a few hours south of the Texas border, setting off on the second leg of the trip. I’d asked, gently, if we might be stopping for snacks. “If you want snacks, you take them
with you!”
To those in the world of book publishing and food journalism, Kennedy is, by reputation, ferocious. Brilliant. Direct. Uncompromising. She is known for writing irate letters to editors and sending in corrections. In stories about her, and there have been many, she’s often described as “prickly.”
“For God’s sake, I’m not trying to win a popularity contest, I’m a cook!” she said, digging through her ripped leather purse for some lipstick. “There’s far too much mediocrity in this world, and someone’s got to say something.”
As we sped north, past a blur of yucca trees, Kennedy told stories and occasionally cackled, gesturing with thin, sun-browned arms. Her old friend Concha Lupe Garza had taken over the driving.
“What’s that one line, that great line you like to say?” Garza asked her.
“I came to Mexico in 1957 with $500 and a half-promise of matrimony. That one?” said Kennedy.
“That’s it,” said Garza, bursting into laughter.
That year, Kennedy met Paul Kennedy, a foreign correspondent for the New York Times covering Latin America, at the Hotel Oloffson in Haiti. She describes their connection as powerful and immediate, and they did, in fact, get married. But less than a decade later, Paul Kennedy died of cancer.
In the collection of slides that Kennedy brought with her to the library, there is one of the hotel’s facade — framed with lush greenery — and a small, handwritten caption that reads simply, “Where we met.”
After her husband’s death, Kennedy taught Mexican cooking classes out of her apartment in New York — the pair left Mexico for the Upper West Side when he got sick.
Craig Claiborne, the Times’ food editor, attended these classes, including one that focused on a Yucatecan dish of papadzules. Claiborne wrote about it in the newspaper, listing several shops in New York where readers could find sour oranges and fresh cilantro, as well as pepitas to make their own pumpkin seed oil.
Editors in New York encouraged Kennedy to write a book about Mexican food. But how could she do that, she thought, without reporting it properly? Without contextualizing the recipes?
To Kennedy, who moved back to Mexico full-time in the 1970s, recipes weren’t just step-by-steps, or methods to be followed. They were crucial regional histories, socioeconomic documents and records of ecological diversity. “I’m out to report what is disappearing,” she said as the car bumped along. “I drive over mountains, I sit with families, and I record.”
Kennedy brought up her age a few times on the trip, though she never got sentimental or nostalgic. She stressed that she did not intend to live past 100, or become a “burden” to anyone.
She is old enough to have lost many of her professional contemporaries, including the great cookbook authors Marcella Hazan, Elizabeth David and Julia Child. When she reached the library, she did her best Child impression, to the delight of the archivists.
Long before she was a cookbook writer, Kennedy lived through World War II and the Nazi invasion of Europe. At 17, she joined the British Women’s Timber Corps, spending her days in Wales with other civilians, cutting down trees with an ax, making her small, daily contribution toward the war effort. To supplement rations, she roasted potatoes and onions, and fished for trout.
“I learned everything from wartime,” she said in the car. There is still nothing more criminal to Kennedy than apathy, nothing ruder than waste.
A sense of political and ecological activism has been woven into her daily life for decades. She has spoken publicly about washing and reusing every single plastic bag that comes her way, collecting and recycling rainwater, and growing her own coffee beans at her home outside the city of Zitácuaro, about 100 miles west of Mexico City. It is how she believes everyone should live.
In San Antonio, friends said that now, at 96, she was finally considering the sale of that home, and moving closer to her doctors in Texas. Even more so than handing over her archives to the library, it would mark the end of an era. But Kennedy did not care to talk about it.
“I’d like to go on a walk,” she said. “I’ve not had time to do my exercise, which is very important after sitting all day in the car.”