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Stirring the pot: in her Michoacan kitchen, Diana Kennedy--the Julia child of Mexican cooking--serves up squash-blossom tacos and strong opinions.

Article Excerpt
IT'S NOON AT DIANA KENNEDY'S rambling adobe house outside San Pancho, a hillside village of a few hundred souls located three hours west of Mexico City. The celebrated cookbook author and acknowledged godmother of Mexican cooking is unpacking a basket of magnificent golden squash blossoms we have just bought at the market in Zitacuaro, a charm-challenged city a few miles away. After giving her housekeeper, Consuelo, detailed instructions in Spanish about chopping up the flowers, Kennedy sets out onions, a poblano chile, and a bulbous white Oaxaca cheese next to a stack of blue-corn tortillas prepared fresh this morning. "We'll just make you a taco so you won't starve before lunch, dear," she tells me, her London accent still crisp alter 46 years in Mexico.

Ensconced at Kennedy's big, round kitchen table, mesmerized by the dance of right and shadow on the patio as clouds play eat and mouse with the sun, I've forgotten I was hungry. Inside are more distractions: a wall of burnished copper pots, a blue-and-white-tiled counter bearing bowls of mangoes and stubby bananas, a wooden cupboard lined with bottles of homemade pineapple and banana vinegars, their contents as dark and pungent as balsamic. Suddenly toy reverie is broken. "Oh, damn! The coffee's ground too coarsely," Kennedy explodes. More than four decades in Mexico have not diminished her legendary impatience mid perfectionism either.

The thing that has brought me to Diana Kennedy's kitchen this late-summer day is the release of her newest cookbook, From My Mexican Kitchen." Techniques and Ingredients, by publisher Clarkson Potter. It is the seventh in a series whose importance is almost impossible to overstate. What Julia Child did for French cooking, Diana Kennedy did for Mexican, except that in America she had to counter the near-universal belief that...

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