In the summer of 2010, I attended a fund-raiser for the CCNMA: Latino Journalists of California, a trade organization for—yep—Latino journalists. I attended for a couple of reasons: CCNMA is a great group that raises money for scholarships for aspiring Latino journalists entering a lily-white field. This also was a meeting organized in honor of Ruben Salazar, a pioneering Chicano journalist for the Los Angeles Times who lost his life to a tear-gas canister through the head fired by sheriffs while covering a demonstration in East Los Angeles in 1971.
I also attended to hear the keynote speaker: Jonathan Gold, the food critic for the LA Weekly (the mother paper of my home base, OC Weekly), and the only food critic ever to win a Pulitzer Prize. We correspond frequently, mostly via Facebook, but I had only met him thrice up to that evening. CCNMA had invited Gold to offer remarks on Salazar, which had some in the audience of professionals, reporters, and activists wondering what a gourmand knew about a martyr in their field.
Gold felt the same way, confessing his own incredulity about the idea of a restaurant reviewer offering the keynote address that night. But doubters obviously don’t know Gold, who can wax poetic on everything from the complexity of a properly formed block of Chinese-style tofu to the poetics of gangsta rap and, yes, the history and importance of Ruben Salazar. After spending a couple of moments on Salazar’s career, noting that the icon enjoyed nothing more than a fine French dinner while conversing with friends, Gold weaved a seamless transition onto the question of “authenticity” and how it pertained to Mexican cuisine.
The gossip in Southern California food circles during that time swirled around the opening of Red O, a restaurant that counted on Rick Bayless as a consultant. Bayless, of course, is one of the most famous chefs in the United States and perhaps the country’s best-known booster of Mexican food. From his home base of Chicago, Bayless has created an industry: two restaurants, Frontera Grill and Topolobampo, which class up Mexican food to the realm of high cuisine, and a couple of smaller restaurants; multiple cookbooks, almost all instant best sellers; and the PBS series Mexico: One Plate at a Time, where Bayless teaches viewers about some of the rarer dishes in Mexico that he says are truly authentic, as opposed to the stale tacos and runny enchiladas he insists characterize Mexican food in this country. America’s most ardent defender of “authentic” Mexican: not a bad gig for a boy from Oklahoma.
Everyone in the CCNMA audience knew of Bayless; some admitted to cooking from his books despite being of Mexican heritage, others had even dined at his restaurants. The question of whether a white man had the skills to cook Mexican food wasn’t in question. But Gold took issue with Bayless, describing him as a “good” chef who knew his way around Mexican recipes, but sneering at Bayless’s nerve in coming to Los Angeles and presuming to introduce Angelinos to “authentic” Mexican cuisine. In particular, Gold zeroed in on Red O’s inclusion of chilpachole (a seafood soup from Veracruz) as some rarity; Gold said the soup was easily available in the Southland, alongside dozens of other Mexican regional specialties Bayless assumed didn’t exist in the birthplace of Taco Bell and El Torito. Then Gold hit below the belt, describing the decor of Red O as “if it survived a nuclear blast,” much to the mirth of the crowd.
The food critic went on to extol Southern California’s homegrown Mexican cuisine—the burritos with no real ties to Mexico, yet wholly Mexican; the baked nachos; the tacos. Gold mentioned Lupe’s #2, a legendary stand in East Los Angeles. The woman who had run it for decades wasn’t Lupe, and there was no first location, but that was okay: their burritos were heroic, as he once wrote, “crackly skinned marvel … filled to order while the tortilla is still on the griddle so that it develops both intense toasted-grain flavor and spurting fumaroles of spicy beef stew if you are so bold as to slide it out of its paper wrapper as you eat.”1
I wrote about Gold’s mini-lecture for our OC Weekly food blog, “Stick a Fork in It,” figuring it might spark a fun debate about the merits of Southern California’s Mexican-American favorites. What I didn’t expect, however, was for Bayless to not only read about the event but also respond. And bitchily:
First of all, I’m incredulous that Jonathan Gold didn’t check his facts. I know it’s all the rage for journalists to go into unsupported hyperbole, but I never said I was going to introduce Southern California to “authentic” Mexican cuisine. I said I was going to bring the flavors of Frontera Grill to Los Angeles. Which is completely true. I guess getting a Pulitzer doesn’t mean you’re beholden to truth. But I’m sure it made for a “fun” evening for all gathered there. Such is the state of modern journalism.
Yikes! We have many “celebrity” commentators on our OC Weekly blogs, luminaries such as Abraham Lincoln, Pope Benedict XVI, and the ghost of Robert E. Lee. But this was the real Rick Bayless: not only did the URL match a Chicagoland IP address, but also Bayless tweeted the article to his fans, and they immediately attacked Gold and me.
Others jumped into the conversation as well. A source directed me to an interview Bayless gave to KNBC-TV, in which he explicitly says he helped open Red O because the expert was intrigued by “how the true flavors of Mexico, from central and southern Mexico, would play in Southern California.” I updated the post—all of this on a Sunday afternoon, when few are reading—and it became a national story for a couple of days.
It also cost me my opportunity to interview Bayless for this book. I had contacted him before about my interest in speaking with him about his career; he passed me off to his office, which never returned my multiple calls, all before this incident. After the incident? I didn’t really want to talk to him. Oh, he’s getting his passage in this chapter, because Bayless is a seminal figure in motivating people to move on beyond fast-food and casual-dining Mexican meals and into the realm of lesser-known Mexican dishes and how to prepare them at home. But such a thin skin! So disappointing … anyhoo, on to the rest of this chapter … okay, let me play nice. Do over!
At 445 North Clark Street in Chicago, diners can gaze into two luscious fantasies. To your right is Frontera Grill, where “loud” is not a suggestion but an order: colors so vibrant they make you exhale rainbows, artisan crafts gleaming on shelves, the chatter of diners eagerly waiting for the latest Mexican regional dish unearthed by Rick Bayless, the greatest cook of Mexican food in the United States.
The atmosphere is more refined next door, at Topolobampo—and if you don’t believe me, listen to her. “If Frontera rocks and claps, Topolo slinks,” its website purrs. “She is the quiet, sleek, classy sister. And she invites you into an elegant Mexican fantasy world and to dress up a notch for its incomparable, authentic, regional flavors.”
Because of Bayless’s popularity, most visitors can only gaze: though walk-ins are accepted, reservations at Frontera Grill and Topolobampo have a weeks-long wait, at least. The two restaurants share a bar, a front door, and a case displaying all things Bayless—cookbooks, T-shirts, other mementos meant to exalt this modern-day Tlaloc, the man who helped make Mexican food more than fast or sit-down, but rather alta cocina—high-end.
That smile Bayless always beams from the covers of his books, his promos, framed by a salt-and-pepper beard and goatee: it’s not just because the guy’s personable, it’s also because he and others took the easiest step in Mexican food’s American evolution—cutting and pasting and gathering and selling recipes on Mexican dishes to an American public with no care for who wrote the book but wanted to learn how to cook Mexican food on their own.
Try this experiment, just like I’m doing right now as I write this sentence: type in “Mexican cookbooks” into Amazon’s search engine. If you sort by “Relevance,” you’ll see that Hispanic-surname authors wrote only two of the books listed. Set your parameters to “Best-Selling”—how did Paula Deen sneak into the list, especially when Paula Deen’s The Deen Family’s Cookbook has nothing to do with Mexican food?
Okay, extremely unscientific query, but my point remains: the Mexican cookbook industry, a multimillion-dollar operation whose bookshelves expand every year, is an overwhelmingly American-written one. Mexicans write books about Mexican food, for sure—since the beginning of the trade, actually. But a succession of white authors and acolytes have prodded Americans out of their Mexican-food comfort zone, challenging the public to not only taste new dishes but also to prepare them at home themselves. In the process they introduced a fraudulent concept to the question of Mexican cuisine in this country: the idea that the food they documented was “authentic,” while the dishes offered at your neighborhood taco stand or sit-down restaurant were pretenders to be shunned.
Americans, arbiters of “authentic” Mexican. That smile Bayless always beams? P. T. Barnum approves.
Recipes for Mexican or “Spanish” food had sneaked into recipe collections of Californian women’s groups and other social organizations as early as the 1870s; as shown earlier, recipes for Mexican dishes even entered the official cookbook for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. But collecting dozens of Mexican recipes wasn’t codified as a new book genre until the Los Angeles Times hired the son of a New England Methodist preacher to walk from Ohio to the growing city, write about his travels, and become city editor upon arrival. If the tamale men lit the match that started the fire that was popularizing Mexican food nationwide, that scribe, Charles Fletcher Lummis, threw an ocean of propane onto the inferno. Only historians of the West nowadays are aware of him, but Lummis is one of the most influential people in the realm of Mexican cuisine, even if he insisted on calling it “Spanish.”
Lummis was a Harvard dropout, a reporter for a no-name Ohio paper itching for an opportunity to escape the Midwest. It came via a family friend, a treasurer for the Los Angeles Daily Times (later just the Los Angeles Times) who sent copies of the paper to the young Lummis. The publication so wowed him that he wrote a proposal in 1884 to the Times’s publisher, Colonel Harrison Gray Otis: hire me, and I’ll walk from Ohio to Los Angeles and keep a diary of my travels. Otis, a Civil War veteran and native Ohioan, had purchased a controlling interest in the paper just a couple of years before with the intention of using it as a bully pulpit to turn Los Angeles into the beacon that drew Americans to visit or migrate to Southern California. To have such an enterprising reporter keep a journal of those travels guaranteed attention to the Southwest in general, so Otis agreed to Lummis’s idea.
The journey started in Chillicothe, Ohio, where the editor of the Chillicothe Leader agreed to publish a weekly Lummis letter from the road. Lummis reached Colorado and originally meant to continue through Utah before deciding to head south into New Mexico. He knew of the region—as Lummis’s biographer noted, two of his idols, the anthropologist Frank Cushing and dimestore novelist Mayne Reid, had written of the area, spreading stereotypes of insolent, feckless Hispanics who needed civilization. To his amazement, Lummis found only warmth and camaraderie among them. “I find the ‘Greasers’ not half bad people,” Lummis wrote in his first letter from New Mexico. “In fact, they rather discount the whites, who are all on the make. A Mexican, on the other hand, will ‘divvy’ up his only tortilla and his one blanket with any stranger, and never take a cent.”2
Those entries were some of America’s first that didn’t involve backhanded compliments or outright degradation of Mexican food. In Alcalde, Lummis ate fried mutton (a northern New Mexico specialty) and downed it with coffee spiked with aguardiente (Mexican liquor derived from sugarcane), along with three tortillas. “Perhaps you don’t sabe [know] what a tortilla is,” Lummis wrote, already going native, mixing in Spanglish. “It is a thin sheet of unraised bread, cooked in a frying-pan, indestructible as leather, but very good eating, withal.” A couple of days later he ate “a queer preparation of wheat, tasting like the New England ‘Indian pudding’” that he called “panacha.” In Carnuel he tried a stew of onions, red peppers, and meat: chile colorado. “This was my first venture [with the dish], and will be my last,” Lummis wrote. “One not used to eating fire might just exactly as well chew up a ripe red pepper raw and swallow it.”3
Lummis had to chew up his words as well; he sang the dish’s virtues throughout the rest of the journey. By the time he reached Los Angeles, Lummis respected Mexicans, but he also foresaw and feared their inevitable demise. He entered Sonoratown, the area of the city that now constitutes Olvera Street, where most of the remaining Californios and Mexican immigrants lived, and used the curious metaphor of a dog to describe a city that he felt was “a brilliant sample of a tail that has come to wag the whole dog,” the dog being Mexican Los Angeles and the tail the new American migrants. Sonoratown, he felt, was “the original dog—a diminutive, lazy and ill-conditioned pup … over 100 years old.” The tail, on the other hand, “is as wide-awake and beautiful as the dog is neither, and makes more noise in a day than the dog does in a year. In less than another generation there will be no dog left at all, his whole personality being merged and lost in that greedy tail.”
Lummis became an indefatigable reporter for the Times, filing stories on the growing city and documenting the decaying vestiges of the Californios as the Ramona phenomenon echoed across Southern California and throughout the United States. But he worked only three years for the paper before suffering a mild stroke and relocating to New Mexico. There, he penned a series of books based on his travels and experiences that further portrayed the American Southwest as a quaint Eden ripe for American development. Lummis didn’t return full-time to Southern California until the late 1890s, when he assumed the editor’s role at The Land of Sunshine, a magazine funded mostly by the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce to promote Southern California. Lummis changed the name to Out West in the beginning of 1895, and—like his former boss Otis—used it to pontificate about his interests: the celebration and salvation of the Southwest’s “Spanish” heritage.
The easiest project was California’s mission system, long abandoned and almost all run-down. The same year he took over the newly named Out West, Lummis created the Landmarks Club to fund-raise for the restoration of those missions. After stalling for nearly a decade, the club hit upon a wildly successful fund-raising vehicle in 1903: a cookbook, its main selling point an opening section devoted to Mexican food.
In an introductory essay titled “Spanish-American Cookery,” Lummis made an impassioned plea for readers to enjoy the indigenous dishes of the Southwest, in honor of its past but also because of their taste: “In a word, diet must be adapted to climate.”4 The Landmarks Club Cook Book devoted only 17 of its 261 pages to Mexican recipes, and there were more included from Peru than the American Southwest, but Lummis’s point stood: Americans needed to assimilate into Mexican food, not the other way around. He knew that Southern Californians were demanding instructions on how to cook Mexican food—it was no longer enough to eat solely from street vendors.
Lummis’s former employer the Times also had discovered its readers’ appetite for Mexican recipes. In 1898, it published a group of “Spanish Dainties,” explaining that “the interest in early California and Spanish souvenirs has been so great of late years.”5 In 1902, in anticipation of its first-ever collection of reader-submitted recipes, the Times published seventy Mexican recipes in the paper: “Taken as a whole, they will doubtless be regarded as the finest and most valuable collection that has yet appeared in the series, and will certainly be prized wherever the paper goes.”6 What was most remarkable about the series, among the many recipes for tortillas, enchiladas, chili con carne, and other Mexican standards, were their authors: nearly all non-Mexican women. The Times continued the series for decades, growing nearly every year as Los Angeles did.
The newspaper’s efforts, along with Lummis’s pioneering collection, proved the nationwide selling potential of Mexican cookbooks. In 1905, Harriet S. Loury published Fifty Choice Recipes for Spanish and Mexican Dishes out of Denver. The following year, May South-worth came out with 101 Mexican Dishes, part of a series of cookbooks she authored involving a theme and 101 recipes; this title was the only ethnic entry in the series. But the true heir to Lummis’s torch was a midwestern housewife named Bertha Haffner.
Not much is known about her life; newspaper clippings claim she won a medal for baking at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, and that she taught popular classes on homemaking across the country during the 1910s. In 1911, Bertha (now Haffner-Ginger) stopped by Los Angeles to conduct public lectures; the appearances attracted hundreds for each sitting. The Times hired her the following year to open their School of Domestic Science, which immediately attracted eager students. The lecturer taught women the basics of cooking and baking in an auditorium in the Times’s office building specifically built for such purposes.
The Times’s offices were in downtown Los Angeles, not far from Sonoratown. One day, Haffner-Ginger decided to stroll through the neighborhood and take in her new city. She walked into Elías & Guzman, a tortilla factory partly owned by Arturo Elías Calles, a former Mexican consul (and half brother of future Mexican president Plutarco Elías Calles) who had left his post to open the business, seeing that thousands of his countrymen were arriving in Los Angeles (and many more were following) and needed a taste of home. At Elías & Guzman, Haffner-Ginger watched a dozen women making fresh tortillas, enchiladas, and tamales. The sight so delighted the home economist that she invited the owner of the factory to demo tortilla-making for an American public.
The Times advertised the event, as they did all of Haffner-Ginger’s classes, but this class drew one of its largest-ever crowds. The unnamed “Spanish” woman spoke no English, but no language was needed: the crowd sat and watched, mesmerized as the mujer turned masa into tortillas. Then Haffner-Ginger swooped in. The teacher announced she would “Americanize” the enchiladas so as to not upset any stomachs, but Haffner-Ginger’s students didn’t care for those; instead, they asked how to obtain the materials to cook the authentic version for themselves.7
An idea was planted. In 1914, Haffner-Ginger published California Mexican-Spanish Cook Book. It was at once fantastical, patronizing, and influential. The cover featured an improbable pastiche of a Mission Revival mansion on the Pacific coast, palm and pine trees flourishing in the sand. “An announcement that my lesson for the day would be Spanish dishes, invariably brought record-breaking crowds in any city in the United States,” Haffner-Ginger revealed in the introduction to her collection, but she had a correction for her devoted readers: “It is not generally known that Spanish dishes as they are known in California are really Mexican Indian dishes.”8
The pages of California Mexican-Spanish Cook Book mixed laughable illustrations (a drawing of decrepit Indians with the caption “The mission of the old padres was to make life brighter for such as these”) with pictures of “types” of Spanish—dancers from Cafe Verdugo (one of the last Californio restaurants in Los Angeles), brides, and musicians. There was an advertisement for a “regular” dinner and photos of Ramona’s purported marriage site and Mexican women making tortillas. But the book is also remarkable for including the first-ever documented recipe and picture of tacos in the United States, although her creation called for sealing the folded tortilla with egg, then deep-frying it and covering it with chile. Toward the end of the book, a picture displayed an auditorium filled with hundreds of American women watching intently as Haffner-Ginger taught them how to make a “Spanish” omelet.
Haffner-Ginger didn’t return to the Times’s School of Domestic Science after that initial run of classes, but the wild success of the series convinced the paper to continue lectures and demonstrations and to print recipes in the paper. Alas, they stuck to the Californio romanticism that Lummis and others propagated well into the twentieth century—a plug for a class in 1932, for instance, promised singing cooks and dancing señoritas to “revive memories of the old pueblo days.”9 Those classes, under the patronage of “Marian Manners” (the pseudonym for the head of the Times’s Home Bureau Service, the section of the paper responsible for the classes), produced Mexican recipes syndicated across the country. Not to be outdone, the Hearst newspaper chain also had their own domestic goddess, “Prudence Penny,” who offered Mexican recipes as well.
Still, Mexican cookbooks didn’t advance much for the next couple of decades after Haffner’s publication. The Gebhardt Mexican Foods Company, the country’s first mass producers of chili powder, produced almost-yearly editions of Mexican Cookery for American Homes, a howto guide for its customers to use their products (and a company we’ll examine in more detail later). Random titles trickled out over the years, none particularly memorable. But no one emerged as a national authority on Mexican cuisine until the 1940s, in one of the country’s more remarkable up-by-your-bootstraps chronicles, whether Mexican or American.
Elena Zelayeta was the daughter of Spanish immigrants who settled in Mexico but fled to San Francisco after the Mexican Revolution. They were cooks by trade, so Zelayeta learned the craft but didn’t strike out on her own until the Great Depression, when she and her husband lost their home and had their car repossessed. Desperate, they served meals out of their living quarters—chile rellenos and enchiladas and a stray Spanish dish here and there. Customers demanded that the Zelayetas open a proper restaurant, so they found a bigger location, in a luxury hotel in downtown San Francisco. Called Elena’s Mexican Village, it wowed the city with murals depicting lazy Mexican life, waitresses in Mexican costumes, and Zelayeta clicking castanets every Sunday and Thursday night to the cheers of the crowd.
“Those were the days when anything Mexican was very popular,” Zelayeta relayed years later in her memoir. “The ladies did not have to travel all those miles to the border. They could gain a vicarious thrill by coming to my restaurant, eating my Mexican and Spanish food.”10 The success was short-lived: Zelayeta succumbed to an illness that left her blind just a year after her Mexican Village opened. The restaurant closed, and Zelayeta sunk into a deep, understandable depression. But she bounced back, learning how to cook by scent, hearing, and touch. Zelayeta resumed the fiestas she used to hold for friends, and in 1944, the San Francisco Center for the Blind asked her to teach a cooking class. Zelayeta so impressed students and onlookers that a group of home economists urged her to publish a book of recipes, if only to raise enough funds so she might afford a guide dog.
Elena’s Famous Mexican and Spanish Recipes, published in 1944, sold briskly, and she embarked on a decades-long career teaching Mexican cooking classes across the country. Three other cookbooks followed, each increasing her following. By the time Zelayeta’s final cookbook appeared, in 1967, no less a culinary authority than James Beard wrote the foreword. “Elena is a traditionalist, but she can also pull an inspired new combination of foods out of the air—and make you feel it is the most authentic dish you ever ate,” he wrote. “She knows how to prepare a classic, and she also knows how to give it the Zelayeta flair. In short, she has greatness.”11
Zelayeta’s story made her a national name for decades. “This inspiring woman is one of the most marvelous examples of positive thinking I have ever run across,” Norman Vincent Peale wrote in his second book on positive thinking. While dining at her home, he asked her for her secret. “Always act as if it were impossible to fail,” she told him, “and God will see you through.”12
High in the forested hills of Zitacuaro, a picturesque town in the Mexican state of Michoacán, a diminutive Englishwoman with a shock of gray hair and gnarled, nearly brown skin lords over the world of Mexican cooking in the United States. Famous chefs make pilgrimages to her compound, a Xanadu of gardens, drying coffee beans, and peppers strewn about, and centered around a gorgeous, expansive home. But beware the person who shows up unannounced: you’re likely to get chewed out, if even allowed to enter. A letter of recommendation from previous guests is recommended, as is an obsequious demeanor. That’s how Diana Kennedy likes it.
In some ways, Kennedy faced a harder task than men such as Glen Bell and Larry Cano: not only convince Americans that the cuisine was more than fast food and combo platters, but also that it was regal and attempt to motivate amateur cooks to not take any shortcuts while they attempted plates most Americans had never heard of. But she succeeded, and Kennedy is now a dining deity—the Mexican government rewarded her with the Order of the Aztec Eagle, the country’s highest honor for foreigners, in 1981, more than twenty years before her birth nation rewarded her with an MBE.
She had no experience with Mexican food of any kind until moving to Mexico City in 1957 to join her future husband, Paul Kennedy, Mexico City bureau chief for the New York Times. While Paul covered the region, the dutiful housewife took solace in the kitchen, accompanied by Mexican maids who taught her Spanish and the secrets of regional cooking. Mexico was modernizing, and the middle and upper classes were eschewing Mexican dinners in favor of American, French, and other Continental cuisines. Kennedy’s maids, however, turned her on to the specialties of their states, piquing her interest not just because of the fantastic flavors but also because of their endangered status.
The Kennedys frequently feted Mexico City’s expat community, with Diana mimicking the cooking styles of her workers. One of their frequent visitors was Craig Claiborne, the influential restaurant critic for the Times who had his own history with Mexican food. He grew up in Indianola, Mississippi, where the tamale men sang their song long after their type disappeared from the big cities of America. “The Mexican walked the streets of the town with a pushcart that cradled some of the most tempting, mouth-watering hot tamales you could hope to sample,” Claiborne wrote in his memoir. “They consisted of incredibly well-seasoned shredded meat encased in a finely ground and sumptuously rich casing, the whole wrapped in dried corn shucks and steamed.” But Claiborne felt “hoodwinked” the day he discovered the Mexican had been banished from town: according to the authorities, the tamalero had used cats for his meat filling and they had the skeletons buried under his cabin to confirm such a grotesque claim.13
In the pages of the Times, Claiborne championed Mexican cuisine, reporting on Zelayeta’s Gotham appearances and breathlessly reporting any hints of Mexican food in his cosmopolitan city. With Kennedy, he realized her potential to transform its status in the States. He urged her to write a cookbook collecting the recipes of her maids; Kennedy demurred, as her husband was suffering from cancer, which forced the couple to relocate to New York City in 1965. After Paul passed away two years later, Claiborne asked Diana to teach Mexican cooking classes to occupy her time, but Kennedy again refused. But the critic’s insistence paid off, and she taught her first class in 1969, with Clai-borne warning the curious, “Don’t go there expecting chili con carne and hot tamales.”14
One of those early students was Frances McCullough, Sylvia Plath’s editor at Harper & Row and a California native who ached for the Mexican food of her homeland. She suggested that Kennedy pen a cookbook, but Kennedy refused again, now claiming she wasn’t a writer. But the two eventually collaborated, and The Cuisines of Mexico appeared in 1972, to already self-congratulatory importance. In his preface, Claiborne wrote that he and Kennedy agreed that Mexican food was “peasant food raised to the level of high and sophisticated art … if this book is a measure of Diana’s talent, it will probably rank as the definitive book in English on that most edible art.”15
A monarchy arose from those books. Following the first was The Tortilla Book, then The Art of Regional Mexican Cooking; and she combined those three to create The Essential Cuisines of Mexico. Kennedy, on her own, traveled the back roads of Mexico, to places the country’s intelligentsia dismissed as backwaters, interviewing and chronicling and then publishing the recipes. It’s easy to dismiss Kennedy’s cookbooks as using the people she insisted she was rescuing from oblivion by printing their recipes in best-selling books; or for bouts of romanticism as egregious as Lummis’s—it seems that every woman in Kennedy’s Mexico is a housewife or a maid never far from the kitchen, every male a peasant. But the influence those books exerted was extraordinary. Although the number of Mexican cookbooks in the United States had increased since in the 1950s, nearly all concentrated on Mexican-American meals; few bothered with Kennedy’s regional rarities.
The grande dame, for her part, waged war on those Mexican-American foodways. In a 1985 interview with Texas Monthly knowingly titled “La Reina Diana” (“Queen Diana”), Kennedy dismissed Tex-Mex food as “over-seasoned, loaded with all those false spices like onion salt, garlic salt, MSG, and chili powder … they play havoc with your stomach, with your breath, everything.” She also called Ninfa’s, a Houston institution credited with introducing fajitas and tacos al carbón to the American mainstream, a “disgrace.”16
Such pugnacity, however, did nothing to discourage fans. One of them was doctoral candidate Rick Bayless, a native Oklahoman whose family operated a barbecue pit in Oklahoma City. The area had a couple of Mexican restaurants in those years, mostly Tex-Mex parlors, given the state’s proximity to the Lone Star State. Bayless had an affection for Mexico from a young age; at fourteen, he asked his parents for them to vacation across the country. By the time he was a doctoral candidate at the University of Michigan, studying Mexico yet again, Bayless decided to drop the academic career and focus on culinary ventures. He consulted for a sit-down chain, El Paso Cantina, and hosted a public television series, Cooking Mexican, in the late 1970s, in Bowling Green, Ohio, although he didn’t actually cook or offer his own recipes.
Bayless and his wife lived throughout Mexico during the 1980s, tasting and gathering and planning. In 1987, the two scored a double debut: Frontera Grill, and Authentic Mexican: Regional Cooking from the Heart of Mexico. The release immediately brought the nation’s food reviewers to sit in Bayless’s pews and hear the man preach. “American-Mexican food has its own style, but unfortunately it does not have the depth and range of dishes as found in Mexico,” he told a reporter. “My goal with this book is to bring that depth into American homes.”17 Claiborne, for his part, gushed that Authentic Mexican was the “greatest contribution to the Mexican table imaginable.”
Another Kennedy acolyte was Marilyn Tausend. Unlike Kennedy or Bayless, she had an earlier, more intimate relationship with Mexican food. Her father worked in produce, and Tausend accompanied him during her childhood to migrant worker camps and the fields across the West. “Tortilla and beans—they’d make them right there,” she remembers. “They didn’t have money, they didn’t have any of that, but they immediately accepted me in and offered food. It was nice being part of their families.”
Tausend didn’t eat much Mexican food in her adult life, living the classic mid-twentieth-century American housewife experience, someone who’d “never done any real cooking, and only in quantities” to feed her children. The publication of Kennedy’s books, though, inspired her to try out the cuisine again. When her husband, an attorney, had business that took him to Michoacán, Tausend tagged along. According to her, they magically took a wrong road and found Kennedy’s estate. “If you know Diana, you don’t just call her up,” she says now with a laugh, “but if you know my husband, you do.”
Instead of inviting them into her home, Kennedy sent them to an inn at the base of her estate. A friendship sprouted from that inauspicious introduction, and Kennedy suggested that Tausend do some culinary work with her. From that sprung Culinary Adventures, Tausend’s gastronomic tourism business. People who sign up (chefs and regular people alike) accompany Tausend and Kennedy to different parts of Mexico, shopping at markets and cooking from their finds.
“I want the people going on the trips to have a better understanding not just of the food but of the culture,” she says, “because you can’t cook the food without understanding the people.”
Culinary Adventures’s audience is now worldwide, and Tausend wrote her own cookbooks. Bayless is a frequent guest, both as student and coinstructor, and their families have spent every Christmas season in Oaxaca for the past twenty years. But she’s wary of the school of purism preached by him and Kennedy. “I hate that word ‘authentic,’” she admits. “Anything out of your kitchen is authentic!”
She also has issues with the fact that non-Mexicans get most of the acclaim for Mexican cookery in the United States. Tausend is currently writing a cookbook with Ricardo Muñoz, a Mexico City–based chef who has emerged as one of the country’s premier chroniclers and practitioners of regional Mexican recipes.
“Ricardo, he’s finally going to get his due,” Tausend says. “But there’s others—Patricia Quintana is one—there hasn’t been enough talking about their food, and I think it’s unfortunate. When Diana says, ‘My Mexico,’ I say, ‘Come on, you’ve lived there a long time, but?’”
Downtown Santa Monica, California, during the weekend is a mix of tourists, beach bums, the wealthy, and the hungry. Those tribes often congregate at Border Grill, beckoned by a cursive arrow-shaped, multibulb marquee, feminine and sassy, swooping down and inviting people in. Inside, the walls and ceiling contain whimsical drawings rendered in the simplistic black-lined, multihued, flat-dimensioned paintings of Putumayo world music album covers, the bright colors suggesting Latin America. One side is the main dining room—that’s where women in sunglasses and jewelry eat and gossip while their children play in their weekend sports league. Another room features a long bar that serves mimosas and other elixirs for the early afternoon. A counter next to the bar displays Mexican Food for Dummies, its traffic-yellow book cover radiating as a Latina stands nearby, rolling pastries.
One of the two owners of Border Grill, Susan Feniger, approaches the front. She’s short, wiry, a kitchen Dietrich mixed with Garland—pinstriped pants, hair pulled back by a bright orange bandanna, and wearing tortoiseshell-framed glasses. Her voice can disintegrate cinder blocks—it’s not obnoxious, not domineering, but firm, powerful. Feniger has popped out of her office for about two minutes but has already greeted multiple guests, texted, placed a phone call, and accepted another—and apologized for her lack of time. See, she needs to be somewhere else. She just ventured out on her own for the first time with Street, a restaurant that combines global street food with Hollywood’s hip vibe. But Border Grill is her first love, the Mexican restaurant that set her and her business-cooking partner, Mary Sue Milliken, onto the path to television shows and cookbooks—and now a food truck.
Feniger digs through her chips while nursing her sore throat with English breakfast tea and mineral water before marveling how a Jewish girl from Toledo became an authority on cooking Mexican food. The first Mexican restaurant she experienced was Loma Linda’s, just outside Toledo Express Airport in the city of Swanton and open since 1955—the first and oldest Mexican eatery in the region. “Terrible,” she remembers, “but at the time it was just—we’re talking forty years ago—great. I can’t even remember the food. My guess was that it was very Tex-Mex, but I loved the feel of it. It was small and almost cantina-y. People thought back then that that was Mexican food.”
Toledo was too small a town for an outsize person such as Feniger, so she set off on a journey of self-discovery—attending college in Vermont, moving to California, learning French cooking, and meeting her cooking partner, Milliken, while working in Chicago. Feniger worked under Wolfgang Puck at Ma Maison, where the Austrian was creating the idea of the celebrity chef. She convinced Milliken to relocate to the West, where the two opened City Café in 1983, a small storefront that became the talk of Los Angeles with its charismatic owners’ bold take on California cuisine.
For a vacation they accompanied prep chef Tacho Nielsen to his hometown of Mexico City. “Every morning, his mom took us to the market. We came back to the house and cooked all day,” Feniger remembers. When they returned, Feniger and Milliken resumed the daily grind. Most nights in Mexico City ended with the ladies treating their workers to a late dinner at a nearby taqueria. “We’d also go there after lunch and get carnitas tacos, which wasn’t something we were too familiar with back in Toledo,” she says. “Now you can find them anywhere, but definitely not then. Wrapped in butcher paper, forty of them at a time. Delicious. We asked ourselves, ‘Should we open a great taco place, or a noodle house?’”
Kennedy had already introduced Mexican food beyond Cal-Mex and Tex-Mex to the United States, but few had seriously thought that a restaurant offering regional specialties, operated by Americans, might work. Feniger insists that the viability of such a place in those days never entered the conversations of the two. “We’d never gone to that place of whether it could work,” she says. “We just wanted to open a restaurant that we love, and food that we love. And that was authentic Mexican food.”
Los Angeles’s Mexican-restaurant scene at the time was trifurcated: fast food; Mexican-majority eateries with great food but little ambience for non-Mexicans; and El Torito clones with buzzing social scenes but inedible grub. “Maybe you want a cocktail and a scene along with your tacos,” Feniger says. “That’s what we thought we could create.”
In 1985, Feniger and Milliken returned to Mexico City, renting Volkswagen Bugs to reach Veracruz and the Yucatán. “As we drove, we were writing the menu [for our new restaurant],” she says, remembering the street stalls and fondas (inns) where they stayed along the way. Finally the two ended up in Valladolid, a colonial city near the ruins of Chichen Itza. They walked through the town until tumbling upon a taqueria with a large window. “There was a big guy with platters of tiny bites. Shrimp, turkey, avocados, radishes, peas. The place was jammed. He’d get a tortilla, stuff it with his ingredient, and do it again. We stood there for an hour, taking notes. Eventually he brought us tacos, beer, and a smoked red bean stew, served with an ancho salsa. It was fucking awesome.”
They returned to Los Angeles inspired but hurried, with only a week to prepare a menu. That first Border Grill menu featured not a single Feniger or Milliken creation, but rather recipes collected from their recent trip. One of those items was panucho, a specialty of Yucatán yet to penetrate mainstream Mexican restaurants in the United States. “You push [customers] to make them try new things,” Feniger says, and they pushed non-Mexican Los Angeles into unfamiliar terrain. Tongue tacos. Cactus salad. Cayenne with jicama, a staple of Mexican households during summertime but one combo that they finally dropped because “no one ever bought it. Literally—no one.” Feniger and Milliken weren’t too doctrinaire: they introduced a tostada on the menu soon after their opening “because customers wanted it.”
Border Grill opened in 1985, in Los Angeles’s trendy Melrose district. Then–Los Angeles Times restaurant critic Ruth Reichl sparked the buzz with the first sentence of her review: “I knew the minute I looked at the menu at the Border Grill that I was in trouble. I wanted to eat everything on it.” The rest of the write-up was no less gushing, with Reichl concluding, “It looks like all the people who keep asking when Los Angeles is going to get a great Mexican restaurant may finally have an answer.”18
The careers of Feniger and Milliken soon took off. In 1989, they opened another Border Grill, in Santa Monica, taking their cuisine to the Los Angeles area’s ritzier Westside. Their first cookbook, Mesa Mexicana, arrived in 1994; two years later, the two became national stars with the debut of Two Hot Tamales. (“Tamales can be terrible and most of the time, they are up here,” Feniger says, explaining the name. “But it’s one of those great dishes—so simple, yet so complicated.”) With it, the acerbic Feniger and the reserved Milliken became the Hope and Crosby of the then-fledgling Food Network, cooking regional Mexican food in a populist manner that further demystified the cuisine for the curious. The show ran for nearly four hundred episodes and spawned cooking tours à la Haffner-Ginger and Zelayeta. They even released Mexican Cooking for Dummies, part of the iconic 1990s series that explained the obscure to the hoi polloi. The two opened another restaurant, Ciudad, and other Border Grills.
Others took their cues, publishing cookbooks and creating series. Two Hot Tamales ended; the cookbooks stopped, along with restaurant expansions. But Feniger doesn’t mind. “That’s the capitalism thing,” she says. “You have French-raised chefs doing Mexican. Once that gets attention, people go into the restaurant. Then they want more than cheddar and jack at home; they want panela or queso fresco. You can influence people’s decisions. Then the customers want to make their own guac or margaritas—but the grocery stores don’t stock them. They go back to the restaurant to order the salsas. Then they want to make them, but they need tomatillos. And the supermarkets start stocking them, and it becomes an accepted part of the cuisine.
“A young chef of mine once tried to do a manchamanteles, this legendary Oaxacan mole,” she adds. “He tried to put a spin on it, this hot-shot from culinary school. It was terrible. Do it the way it’s supposed to be made, or don’t do it at all.”
“Authentic” flavors are what Feniger, Kennedy, and Bayless purport to practice, and their legion of followers carry their torch. But while the authentic-Mexican warriors rose during the 1980s, a different, homegrown school of thought emerged as a counterpoint, one intent on treating unadulterated authenticity as fool’s gold and preferring instead to fuse the ancient with the modern. The Southwestern cuisine movement is now nearly forgotten, derided as a bad ’80s fad à la hoop earrings, but when it was around, it further changed the concept of what America considered “Mexican” food.