INTERVIEW: Capturing the culinary life with Diana Kennedy in Mexico
Photo: Diana Kennedy, right, is a chef who has lived in Mexico for decades. Photo courtesy of Greenwich Entertainment / Provided by press rep with permission.
Diana Kennedy, the famous expert of Mexican cuisine who has entered her ninth decade and is still going strong, is the subject of a new documentary from director Elizabeth Carroll. Diana Kennedy: Nothing Fancy, now available on VOD, transports audiences to the Mexican countryside where Kennedy, a British ex-pat, lives and cooks with the most scrumptious of ingredients.
The film, according to press notes, blends the footage that Carroll was able to capture of Kennedy around her house, cooking and living, plus archival footage of how she ended up in Mexico in the first place. Alice Waters, José Andrés, Rick Bayless and Gabriela Cámara count themselves as friends (and fellow cooks), and they provide further insight throughout the documentary.
“I think it was half inspiration and half cosmic chance,” Carroll said in a recent phone interview about the origins of the project. “So I was living in Austin in 2013, and I had just decided to start doing some research for a project about Mexico and the food in Mexico, specifically looking at the transmission of recipes and culinary traditions and how that most likely happened among women and how historically that responsibility has always been on women to pass down those traditions, whether it’s to their grandson or their granddaughter or whatever. That’s, from an English-speaking perspective, what we think of, and so I was just curious about learning more about how that looked in a contemporary setting.”
Carroll, who is making her feature-film debut with Diana Kennedy: Nothing Fancy, started to conduct internet searches on female Mexican chefs, and she landed on the Wikipedia page for Kennedy.
“I was confused why I had never heard of her before and felt really motivated to understand her better and knew that she wasn’t Mexican,” the filmmaker said. “So that wasn’t exactly what I was looking for, but she was clearly an expert on the subject and probably had some pretty massive insight that I felt I would really benefit from. So at that point I was resolved to find her, but I didn’t really know how to start. And I didn’t know if she had an email address that I could look up or whatever, so I kind of looked around, didn’t find anything. I knew she lived in Michoacán in the woods in the mountains in the middle of nowhere, and she was 91 years old. That’s all I had at the time, and I basically gave up. So then I went to this bookstore in Austin, Texas, about half an hour later. It’s called Book People, and I drove into the parking lot. And I looked at the marquee, and it said, ‘Book Signing With Diana Kennedy Tomorrow.’ So it was this bizarre, amazing, serendipitous connection.”
Immediately Carroll started moving on a possible interview. She went into the bookstore and confirmed that Kennedy was going to be signing the next day, and then she headed home and emailed the chef’s publicist to see if an interview might be possible.
“I spent the whole evening writing an email to this publicist and saying, ‘Hi, Diana, I would love to interview you for just a short period of time. No pressure. You can be as involved or not involved as you would like, but just to have you for five minutes would be amazing,'” the director remembers. “I didn’t hear anything back the next day, but I was going to the event anyway. And so I watched YouTube interviews with her all day. I was trying to get a sense of how to talk to her, and then I went to the event. And as I’m walking in a little early, I look to my right, and she’s walking in at the exact same time. So I approached, and I was like, ‘Hi Diana, I’m Elizabeth Carroll.’ She turns around, and she goes, ‘Oh, yes, you’re the woman who wants to make the film about me.’ Thinking back to the email in my head, I was like that’s not at all what I said, but if Diana Kennedy is willing to make a film, so am I. I was basically like, ‘Yeah, that’s me. How are you doing? Nice to meet you.’ That was the beginning of it.”
The filming process was an interesting one for Carroll. She found Kennedy both hilarious and difficult, sometimes in a good mood and rabble-rousing, other times a bit tense. “So it was interesting vacillating between those two realms with her on any given day,” the filmmaker said.
The ultimate question in the film is how Kennedy came to fall in love with Mexico and Mexican cuisine. She moved permanently to the country and has become a common presence in her local town. Hovering around her decision to devote so much of her life to this part of the world is the tragedy involving her husband, who died at a fairly young age, only 10 years into his relationship with Kennedy.
“She lost the love of her life at a pretty young age,” Carroll said. “They had been together not even 10 years at that point when he got cancer and passed away. … She always said, ‘I never would have gotten married, but I ended up meeting the love of my life.’ … So I think she probably associated Mexico with that, with him, with her husband, with this ultimate sense of freedom and exploration and possibility.”
Carroll added: “I just think that Mexico as a culture and as a country is so warm and deeply kind and inviting and amazing. In the U.S. especially, media around Mexico has been pretty negative for the last several decades because of the cartel wars and everything, and obviously those are legitimately terrifying and really awful. But that’s not all of Mexico, and so I think the parts of Mexico that aren’t experiencing that level of cartel violence are gorgeous and really, really special places to be. I can see why someone would fall in love with Mexico, and I have myself.”
The director called the chef a brilliant person who cooks with a scientific and anthropological approach. Kennedy, in Carroll’s mind, is after discovery and possibility, and she is determined to ensure that these traditional Mexican recipes are never lost.
“In the ‘50s, early ‘60s, industrialization was becoming more of a common infiltrated practice throughout Mexico, and I think there was a concern that maybe there wasn’t going to be enough of an official record around some of the ingredients and recipes that were so traditional to certain regions,” she said. “And so she took it upon herself. She saw the need. She identified that problem and saw an opportunity to make sure that she could help protect those traditions, so I think she was very driven and motivated by that crusade of hers — but also out of passion and personal interest.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Diana Kennedy: Nothing Fancy, directed by Elizabeth Carroll, is now available on VOD. Click here for more information.
