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The Essential Cuisines of Mexico is the result of a British woman devoting her life to documenting Mexico's regional cuisines more thoroughly than anyone else, Mexicans included.
Diana Kennedy was born in Essex in 1923 and arrived in Mexico in 1957. When she later ended up in New York, Craig Claiborne encouraged her to teach Mexican cooking, and in 1972 The Cuisines of Mexico was published. She then spent decades on the road in a pickup truck, often alone, recording recipes village by village before they disappeared. She remained in Michoacán, living in a house she had built herself, until her death in 2022 at the age of ninety-nine. The Mexican state awarded her the Order of the Aztec Eagle, the highest honour it can bestow on a foreign national.
This volume brings together three of her books in one, with more than 30 new recipes added.
The central argument is that Mexican food is not one cuisine but many. Oaxaca, Yucatán, Michoacán, Veracruz and Puebla differ from one another as much as European countries do, and grouping them all together as Mexican is roughly as meaningful as grouping Sicily with Normandy.
The foundation is nixtamalised maize, kernels cooked with lime before being ground into masa, which both makes the nutrients available and gives tortillas their flavour. Then come the dried chillies, each with its own role, ancho, mulato, pasilla, guajillo and chipotle, and the moles that can contain thirty ingredients and take days to prepare.
Kennedy was famously uncompromising about authenticity and had no patience for shortcuts. It makes the book demanding, and that is precisely why it still matters.
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Clarkson Potter
ISBN: 9780307587725
Language: English
First published: 1972, this collected edition: 2000
