New Books In Latin American Studies

Diana Kennedy, Nothing Fancy: Recipes and Recollections of Soul-Satisfying Food (University of Texas Press, 2016). Don’t be misled by this title. Its author, Diana Kennedy, has written nine cookbooks and spent forty years researching, preserving, and protecting the cuisines of Mexico. She teaches its regional cooking techniques in her kitchen at the Diana Kennedy Center, Quinta Diana, in Michoacan, Mexico, as well internationally through cooking tours as an ambassador of authentic Mexican cuisine. Her expertise grew through decades of driving the length and width of Mexico in her truck, learning cooking techniques and ingredients from local cooks in towns and villages. Along the way, she kept notes on the locales, growing seasons, and uses of all the herbs. She even learned how to deal with the occasional scorpion (there’s a spray). The word redoubtable certainly applies. Kennedy is English; she spent the war years in the English Forestry Corps in Wales and Wiltshire, to which she attributes the a