Joya of Cooking
The newly released documentary, Diana Kennedy: Northing Fancy, chronicles the feisty, still vital author who introduced traditional Mexican cooking to the world.
The film follows Kennedy over a six-year span as she accumulates accolades and awards for her work, including induction into the James Beard Cookbook Hall of Fame (2014).
Kennedy, now 97, still drives a beat up, stick shift truck along narrow, rutted roads around her secluded home in Michoacán, Mexico. She walks with the aid of a cane, and mutters about uncomfortable, well-worn shoes.
The film displays Kennedy’s cranky, crusty personality as she takes herky-jerky rides over poorly paved roads and yells “Shut up” to barking dogs and honks as she passes. Starting one of these journeys, she muses, “Oh, dear, I’m almost out of gas,” and just keeps going.
At home, she proudly displays her “jewels” (joyas in Spanish)—an indoor botanical garden of chilies and plants she has collected in a half-century of traveling around Mexico. Outside, there is a forest of cilantro and other fresh vegetables she harvests for cooking.
According to her biography, Kennedy arrived in Mexico from the United Kingdom in the 1950’s when she met and married New York Times correspondent Paul Kennedy, who was based in Mexico.
She became fascinated with traditional recipes from indigenous cultures and “began documenting everything she found in villages, markets, and homes around the country,” traveling alone on rickety buses.
“Over the course of nearly 60 years, Diana traversed the country, meticulously researching, documenting, and mastering the culinary styles of each region,” her biography states.
In the mid-1960’s, the Kennedys moved to New York for Paul’s reporting career. Diana was adrift and out of her element. When her husband died shortly thereafter, Craig Claiborne, then dining critic for the New York Times, suggested she offer cooking classes in her Riverside Drive apartment.
From that idea came notoriety and an opportunity to write nine Mexican cuisine cookbooks. The film name, Nothing Fancy, is the title of one of them.
According to a May 22 story in Eater, film director Elizabeth Carroll explains that Kennedy could have turned her passion into a different kind of profit
“ I think it’s interesting because technically she could have gone down and mastered the recipes and started four restaurants and started a line, and that was not her goal. Making a bunch of money was not her goal. She chose a life of solitary existence in Mexico.”
Still busy in the kitchen, she takes out her molcajete and demonstrates for viewers the right way to make guacamole—no garlic, please, she chides.
Stream the film on iTimes or Amazon Video beginning June 19.
