WHY DOES DIANA KENNEDY HAVE US SO DIVIDED?
THERE is one scene from my 1992 interview with Diana Kennedy that I’ll never forget — mostly because there are many ways to interpret it. The British-born author of “The Cuisines of Mexico,” who died July 24 at her home in Michoacán state at the age of 99, was making tamales for a big dinner and had two young Mexican cooks helping her. She showed them how she wanted the corn husks folded around the masa — as a compact envelope with a thin husk tie. “Bonito!” she said.
“But this is the way we do it in Mexico,” one of the Mexican assistants told her as he showed her a simpler method of tucking one end of the husk over the masa, leaving an opening on one side.
“Ah,” she told him, “but this is the way we do it in my part of Mexico.”
Neither side would concede to the other. She continued to assemble the tamales her way while her male assistants stuck to their way.
Was this tamale standoff an example of a snobbish white lady trying to tell Mexicans how to cook their own food? Or were the young male cooks too dismissive of a woman who had spent years traveling the regions of Mexico and knew that there was more than one way to make a tamale?
When we grow up eating the foods of our culture — in my case, I think of my grandmother’s nopales, albondigas soup and red-tinged menudo, not to mention the thick atoles she loved to give us on cold mornings — we have an intimate relationship with what author and former
Times journalist Victor Valle, with Mary Lou Valle, called “Recipe of Memory.”
But can this intimate relationship cloud our view of a cuisine’s possibilities? A friend and I sometimes go back and forth on what makes a proper birria — goat or beef. Having spent years happily eating goat birria at L.A.'s El Parian, the dish to me should always be made with goat. But my friend’s family is from Nogales, Ariz., where she says beef is the birria norm. To her, goat in birria is just plain wrong. Does it take an outsider like Kennedy to show the breadth of a cuisine — or as Kennedy so wisely titled her book, “The Cuisines of Mexico”? Yet does that outsider also have to take care in how those cuisines are presented to those who’ve grown up inside the culture?
Some of these questions have come up in the remembrances of Kennedy this week. Food editor Daniel Hernandez was lucky enough to visit Kennedy at her Michoacán compound. He writes of having a soft spot for the author who blazed her own trail and didn’t seem to give a damn about what others thought of her. To those who accuse her of cultural appropriation, he writes that “she’d meticulously credit the women originators of the recipes she’d perfect alongside them.” Although Tejal Rao, in the New York Times, points out that the Mexican cooks she credited didn’t achieve her level of fame. L.A. Times columnist Gustavo Arellano praises her for elevating people’s conception of Mexican food but criticizes her for dismissing Mexican American food.
“United States of Arugula” author David Kamp recalls how Kennedy confirmed the story that she left chef Rick Bayless “by the side of the road” in Mexico, burnishing her reputation as a “difficult” woman.
But San Francisco chef Pim Techamuanvivit doesn’t like the “difficult woman” label for Kennedy. In a tweet, she writes, “The more I read how people talk about Diana Kennedy the more incandescent with rage I get, too. She was not unkind or mean just to be vicious, she just refused to shut up about things and issues that meant so much to her. And for that she was called a cantankerous woman.”
This story is excerpted from the July 30 Tasting Notes newsletter. Sign up for it at