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Diana Kennedy at the unboxing of her 19th century cookbooks on Feb. 11, 2019. Among them, an extremely rare copy of “Arte Nueve de Cocina y Reposteria Acomodad al Uso Mexicano” published in 1828.
Photo: UTSADiana Kennedy at the unboxing of her 19th century cookbooks on Feb. 11, 2019. Among them, an extremely rare copy of “Arte Nueve de Cocina y Reposteria Acomodad al Uso Mexicano” published in 1828.
Diana Kennedy at the unboxing of her 19th century cookbooks on Feb. 11, 2019. Among them, an extremely rare copy of “Arte Nueve de Cocina y Reposteria Acomodad al Uso Mexicano” published in 1828.
Diana Kennedy at the unboxing of her 19th century cookbooks on Feb. 11, 2019. Among them, an extremely rare copy of “Arte Nueve de Cocina y Reposteria Acomodad al Uso Mexicano” published in 1828.
If you grew up in the 1970s in New Jersey or Kansas or Oregon — or any other place where Mexican food was an oddity — and have childhood memories of your mother trying to figure out how to flatten balls of masa into something edible, it’s probably because she picked up a copy of Diana Kennedy’s seminal 1972 cookbook “The Cuisines of Mexico.”
The British-born Kennedy, now 96, has been an unrivaled authority on traditional and regional Mexican cuisine for five decades. And now, her life’s work will have a permanent home in San Antonio.
Kennedy recently traveled from her home in Michoácan, Mexico, to deliver her personal archive to the University of Texas San Antonio Libraries Special Collections, which currently houses nearly 2,000 volumes on Mexican cookery. The donated materials include 11 historic 19th-century Mexican cookbooks, reams of papers from her half century of research and Kennedy’s working library of books.
There may be no one who knows more about traditional Mexican cooking and ingredients than Kennedy. Her efforts to document the cuisine of Mexico has taken her to every one of the country’s 31 states. She painstakingly documented those visits in great detail — every ingredient, every technique, every person she crossed paths with. She’s documented so many native Mexican plant species and the recipes they’re used in, that Mexico’s federal agency overseeing biodiversity and ecology, CONABIO, has digitized her records.
Her research has netted nine influential cookbooks, several of which were so authoritative in their respective subjects that they were later translated to Spanish for a Mexican audience.
Kennedy has won nearly every industry award there is, including induction to the James Beard Cookbook Hall of Fame in 2014 and being madea Member of the Order of the British Empire in 2002.
UTSA archivists are currently cataloging and taking necessary preservation efforts with the collection, which will be available for research when their work is finished. A timeframe for completion has not yet been established.
“San Antonio has always been a good crossing point, and I think it would be used here,” Kennedy said in a media release of her choice to give the collection to UTSA. “I think it seems to be a natural bridge between Mexico and the U.S.”
The selection of UTSA was not a spontaneous decision. Kennedy considered several universities to receive the collection, and was in talks with UTSA for more than a year and a half, according to Dean Hendrix, dean of UTSA Libraries.
Amy Rushing, head of UTSA Libraries Special Collections, quickly came to grasp the weight of the library’s new responsibilities. Kennedy insisted on being present when the library staff opened a box containing her 19th century cookbooks. It was a powerful moment for both women.
“She opened the box and took every book out and got very emotional, said they were her babies, and it was hard to turn them over,” Rushing said. “She’s entrusting us with her life’s work. It’s a big deal.”
Kennedy is no stranger to San Antonio. She’s visited the city several times for lectures, book signings and other events.
In 2014, San Antonio chef Stefan Bowers was walking through Southtown on his way to a busy Friday night of service at his South Alamo Street restaurant, Feast. He caught a glimpse of Kennedy signing books in a since-closed store, and made a split-second decision.
“I pulled the entire kitchen off the line and we hauled ass six houses down,” Bowers recalled. “We had a full board of tickets, but I was not going to miss the opportunity to meet her, and I wasn’t going to let my team miss it either.”
Kennedy, Bowers said, was so moved by their initial meeting that she arranged to visit another of his restaurants, Rebelle, during a later trip to San Antonio. For Bowers, the encounters were an opportunity not only to meet an expert in the field, but someone who played a formative role in his own development as a cook.
“I don’t think it’s the case any more, but when I was coming up, cooks that were trying to discover themselves did it in book stores reading,” Bowers said. “I found her book ‘My Mexico’ in 2004, and just starter reading it. There were no pictures. I didn’t know who she was. But I fell in love with the authenticity. It’s real. You can tell when somebody is pure.”
And San Antonio will have an extraordinary chance to see behind-the-scenes details of how those influential books came to life when Kennedy’s archive is opened to the public.
Paul Stephen is a food and drink reporter and restaurant critic in the San Antonio and Bexar County area. Read him on our free site, mySA.com, and on our subscriber site, ExpressNews.com. | pstephen@express-news.net | Twitter: @pjbites | Instagram: @pjstephen
https://www.mysanantonio.com/food/article/Mexican-cooking-legend-Diana-Kennedy-donates-her-13781409.php
2019-04-22 13:00:00Z
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