| | |  Entertainment | Books | November 2008 
In Search of Mexican Cuisine: These Two Connoisseurs Live for the Food They Write About
 Ed Hutmacher - MexicoBookClub.com
| | Like eating a meal at a fine restaurant, reading a book written by either of these connoisseurs is a culinary delight. For more information on these or other books with Mexico-related themes, please visit MexicoBookClub.com. | | |
In North America, Diana Kennedy and Rick Bayless are household names among foodies with a hankering for Mexican cuisine. Both are famous for their best-selling books, which taught a generation of foreigners that Mexican food meant more than tacos, nachos, chili con carne and that ubiquitous slapdash, the Mexican combination platter. And both share an unwavering passion for discovering authentic Mexican food.
What makes their books popular and so special to readers are the "word pictures" and narrative asides that accompany the mouth-watering photographs and recipes. In her book, The Cuisines of Mexico, Kennedy describes her discovery of escamoles — "delicious ant eggs," she says.
Not all such experimentation, said Kennedy, turn out so palatable: "The most awful thing I ever ate in the name of research was a grotesque beetle with a fetid smell that I tried in Chilapa, Guerrero. Everyone stands around, waiting for you to bite into it and laughs as you gasp! But my motto is, you have to try everything once, even if you have to close your eyes."
Readers find her stories as satisfying as her recipes and especially enjoy the adventure tales of, say, attending a weekend-long community-wide barbecue feast in Oaxaca or apprenticing in a Mexico City bakery to learn the secrets of the all-male trade. Kennedy also peppers her recipes with citations and explanations from ancient Aztec codices or the prayers of Spanish nuns and priests who grafted European cooking onto an already zesty pre-Columbian cuisine.
For Bayless, who has made a cottage industry out of his books and popular PBS television series (and owns with his wife the acclaimed Frontera Grill in Chicago), retelling stories about his culinary discoveries in Mexico helps to make him a better chef.
"The story can give the flavors on the plate more dimensions. Think of it this way: if a painter was just about the paint, or the sculptor was just about the clay, there wouldn’t be very much there. You have to engage the life and translate it into your medium, and that’s what I try to do with the food I serve and the recipes I write. Because I love the food, I love being able to tell my stories through the food."
Before either can tell a story, they have to live the experience. And their experience, perhaps as much as anything else, is what separates Kennedy and Bayless from dozens of others who write books about Mexican cuisine. Both of them spend years hunting down the cultural aspects of Mexican food with the zeal of an anthropologist.
At one point, Bayless lived in Mexico for five years and, since opening his restaurant, makes annual pilgrimages there to "keep things fresh and learn new things," he said. "We change the menu in our restaurant every four weeks, trying to be responsive to the seasons and to new ideas in Mexico."
It’s on these culinary excursions to Mexico that Bayless discovers even more back-story to add to his already voluminous knowledge. In his book, Authentic Mexican Regional Cooking, Bayless explains in depth how commonplace flavors—tomatoes, chilies, coriander, lime, onion, garlic—are transformed by proportion and cooking method to produce regional differences.
The cross-country cookery expeditions are relatively easier for the 80-something-year-old Kennedy, who has lived in Mexico over fifty years. Her last field trip took her to the far-flung corners of Oaxaca, where she describes both the food and the culture unique to each of the state’s 12 provinces. To her, Oaxaca is a microcosm of all that is best in Mexico's cooking traditions: its intensity and imagination, ritual and art, its love of nature and privileged place within the life of a community. Her writing exemplifies her belief that cuisine is as essential a part of a nation's culture as its art or music.
Like eating a meal at a fine restaurant, reading a book written by either of these connoisseurs is a culinary delight, even for cookery novices. And you’d be surprised at some things one can learn, such as...
Are chocolate and chilies aphrodisiacs?
"Chocolate is the most high-energy food in the world and chilies create a warmth that pervades the body," explained Kennedy. "They dilate the blood vessels and their vitamin C makes us more alert so, in combination, they can be explosive in many ways. But chilies, like love, are unpredictable. You can never tell how spicy they will be until you taste them."
Ed Hutmacher is Editor in Chief of Mexico Book Club. For more information on these books or other books with Mexico-related themes, please visit the website at MexicoBookClub.com. |
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