Patricia Quintana, Champion of Mexican Cuisine, Dies at 72

Patricia Quintana, the chef and author whose work exalted the range and sophistication of Mexican cuisine, died Monday at her home in Mexico City. She was 72.

Her son Patricio Pasquel Fernandez, who confirmed the death, said Quintana was given a diagnosis of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma several years ago.

Beginning with her first cookbook, “La Cocina Es un Juego” (“The Kitchen Is a Game”), in 1979, Quintana’s work pushed back against the stereotypes of Mexican cuisine with persistence and finesse, deepening the collective appreciation for regional flavors in her country and abroad.

Over several decades she wrote more than 28 books on Mexican food as well as long-running columns for Vogue México and national newspapers.

In 1987, JeanMarie Brownson of The Chicago Tribune called “The Taste of Mexico,” Quintana’s first book published in English, “one of the most exciting cookbooks we have seen in years,” praising its well-rendered recipes, lush photography and attention to regionality.

Traveling across Mexico to document, research and adapt recipes, Quintana often looked to local producers and cooks for practical knowledge, studying the indigenous ingredients she found in home kitchens, whether along stony waterfronts or across agave-speckled flatlands, in adobe pueblos or apartment buildings.

In her writing, she drew from this firsthand reporting, but also from the other kinds of knowledge she valued: stories from her grandmothers’ kitchens in Oaxaca and Veracruz, regional Mexican mythology and art, Aztec poetry and song lyrics.

Her book “Mexico’s Feasts of Life” (1989) extolled the foods of big family gatherings, like weddings, birthday parties and christenings, gleaning vivid details from both her memories and her fieldwork.

“She always kept her mind open to the new,” Mexican chef Enrique Olvera said in a telephone interview. “She was deeply in love with our cuisine, but also deeply in love with new things.”

Quintana had been a mentor to generations of cooks since the 1980s, when she invited several prominent American chefs — Stephan Pyles, Mark Miller and John Sedlar among them — to her family’s ranch in Veracruz. She greeted her guests with smoked pork tamales and mugs of hot champurrado, made from a base of corn and chocolate.

Then Quintana taught the fathers of the Southwestern movement the fundamentals: How to nixtamalize corn to make fresh masa for tortillas. How to toast the seeds and chiles for mole. How to steam fish inside the fragrant, heart-shaped leaves of the hoja santa plant.

“We’d cook, but mostly we’d observe,” said Pyles, a Texas chef who visited Quintana several more times and traveled with her across the country. “She wanted us to see what Mexico was like through her eyes. That was her gift to us.”

Patricia Quintana Fernandez was born in Mexico City on Oct. 28, 1946, the daughter of cattle ranchers. She grew up in the city, spending summers with her siblings at her family’s ranch in Veracruz. There she followed her curiosity about the laborers who worked the land, tended to animals and cooked the food, joining them to simmer clay pots of beans and heat tortillas.

“I wanted to be like them,” she told Food & Wine magazine.

It was unusual for a Mexican woman to travel to Europe for culinary school when Quintana went to L'École Lenôtre in Paris, in the 1970s, taking classes with the pioneers of nouvelle cuisine, including Paul Bocuse, Michel Guérard and the Troisgros brothers. And when she returned, she often wore a white chef’s jacket, custom-embroidered with Mexican flowers, or with the Mexican flag around the collar. The choice was deliberate and defiant.

“Women in Mexico didn’t really wear chef coats,” Pati Jinich, a Mexican chef and the host of the PBS series “Pati’s Mexican Table,” said in an interview. “Even though, yes, historically, women owned the kitchen space in Mexico, they were never seen as professionals.”

Quintana wore a chef’s jacket to quietly indicate her own authority. Fluent in four languages, she led locals and visitors on culinary tours of Mexico; established a cooking school in Mexico City, where she taught classes; and started a food business, Gavilla, out of her home kitchen, selling prepared sauces. They are now available in more than 1,000 supermarkets in Mexico.

Quintana’s marriage to Francisco Pasquel in 1970 ended in divorce six years later. In addition to her son Patricio, she is survived by another son, Francisco Pasquel Quintana, and seven grandchildren. Her sons manage her food business. Quintana rarely spoke about a car accident she was involved in when her children were young; it kept her bedridden for a year and damaged her spine. But once she was back on her feet, she returned to the rhythmic grind of her molcajete, the traditional stone mortar and pestle, as well as the electric blender, which she used when it proved more convenient.

She opened a restaurant, Izote, in Mexico City in 2001. She named it after the dramatic clusters of white flowers that bloom on the yucca plant — a thick, slow-growing palm integral to Mayan cuisine.

At Izote, Quintana synthesized the ancient and contemporary influences that had always guided her work as she became a leader in a culinary movement known as alta cocina Mexicana.

Her restaurant, in the upscale Polanco neighborhood, was a popular destination until it closed in 2013, after Quintana learned she had non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

By then, her lifelong championing of Mexican cuisine was official: Quintana joined the Mexican Ministry of Tourism as a culinary ambassador, making a powerful case for her nation’s food culture until, in 2010, it was declared “a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity,” a title bestowed by UNESCO, the United Nations organization, as an extension of its World Heritage List.

“I’ve always wanted to advance and promote Mexican culture,” Quintana told Food Arts magazine in 2004, “to show that all the ingredients we’ve had since ancient times are still alive.”