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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
In a peaceful town perched high on the rolling brown hills of Oaxaca, Diana Kennedy, cook, writer, and foremost authority on Mexican food, is hard at work on her latest research project. In a white shirt with rolled-up sleeves, khaki trousers, and comfortable shoes, she peers intently over the top of her reading glasses at her subject, a shy, elderly Mexican housewife named Clementina Banos. Kennedy questions her in a way that manages to be friendly and utterly efficient at the same time. "So, Senora, do you let the tomatoes cook a little with the onion before you put in the fruit? For how long, would you say? Ten minutes? Until they dry up a little? And then the fruit is cut up to what size? Cubes like this, hmm? Good!" She writes down the information in a spiral notebook, not hurriedly or unobtrusively, and yet without breaking Senora Clementina's concentration, which is focussed completely on Kennedy like a butterfly's on a lepidopterist.
The research session has been going on for about an hour in the kitchen of Senora Clementina, who, like her interviewer, resembles a sparrow with a tough constitution. Both women are in the vicinity of eighty, but Senora Clementina turns out to have about half the stamina. Kennedy had heard from the senora's son, a Oaxacan photographer, that one of his favorite dishes was poblano chilies stuffed with a picadillo of meat and fruit cloaked in fruit sauce, prepared by his mother for special occasions. Kennedy, who is working on the eighth volume of her ongoing investigation and presentation of the regional cuisines of Mexico, decided that the dish was worth an audition: it sounded interesting and--more to the point for someone who has been tracking down recipes in the farthest reaches of the country for more than thirty years--relatively unknown, even to her.
Standing next to Kennedy, I have my doubts about the recipe--it sounds awfully acidic--but, oh, what a kitchen! It was once a stable, Senora Clementina informs us, but she feels more comfortable cooking in this large, shady stone room with screened windows than in the small, ceramic-tiled kitchen with shiny fixtures that her children built for her in a modern house across the yard. One wall is entirely covered in earthenware pots of every size--mole for a family dinner, mole for a crowd, mole for the entire town--while the opposite wall is home to a set of burners, a small stove-top range, and a traditional hearth for cooking tortillas. A long, rough-hewn table in the center of the room is where the food is both prepared and eaten. A shelf running almost the length of the back wall holds...
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