Pati Jinich on Her Mexican Heritage in Upcoming Cookbook

Television star and cookbook author Pati Jinich pushes herself and her culture forever forward

Within a minute of walking into Pati Jinich’s Maryland home, I’m standing in her kitchen—the Mexican-tiled television set her PBS fans know and love—and she’s holding out a bag of tea she secured from a recent filming expedition in Montana. “Smell that. So good, right?”

I inhale a mixture of cinnamon and rooibos. She’s right. As she hands me a mug, I realize this warm, inviting, nurturing, and curious nature of hers is exactly the same as what you see onscreen.

We walk through the home, which seamlessly blends her style: sunset yellows, burnt oranges, and natural wood, accented by wrought iron, tiles, and pottery, much of which comes from Mexico. The artwork is striking and personal, some of it secured by Jinich’s mother, an art dealer, like one hyper-realist piece by Diego Rivera’s grandson; some of it created by her three sons.

If her canon of work, which includes hundreds of hours of television programming, four cookbooks, and countless articles and recipes, didn’t already prove it, her home does: Pati Jinich loves her native country of Mexico fiercely. If you were to consume everything she’s produced, you’d be given a master class in Mexican culinary heritage and history.

Through 15 seasons of Pati’s Mexican Table, she’s traveled across the country to meet with home cooks, food producers, and farmers, bringing the recipes back to her home kitchen to cook for viewers, and usually her family. (She’s trying to get to all 31 states.) La Frontera with Pati Jinich is a docuseries exploring the people and foodways that populate either side of the Mexican-American border. And Pati Jinich Explores PanAmericana is a multiseason series wherein she’s attempting to travel from Alaska down to Argentina to further define the term “American,” all through food and personal stories.

Throughout it all, her passion, love, and gratitude for her culture is contagious. But what you don’t see on television is that Jinich is quietly a powerhouse. Yes, there are production, publishing, and photography teams. But she is the one fundraising and securing underwriters for every episode. She’s the one writing and producing. She’s the one building her own culturally defined media empire.

That’s why it took 10 years to produce her latest cookbook, coming out this fall. Pati Jinich Foods of La Frontera: Recipes and New Taste Frontiers from Both Sides of the Border (Harvest), took years of research, including during multiple seasons of Pati’s Mexican Table and La Frontera.

“To me, the border is where two countries that I love connect. There is immense richness and beauty that people take for granted or narrowly define,” she says, gesturing with her hands, her thrill for the topic hard to contain. “It’s a region of the world that has gifted the world with so many culinary treasures.”

The idea for both her docuseries and cookbook started years ago when she was in Laredo, Texas, promoting one of her previous cookbooks. “I walked to the river, and I felt this crazy mad magnetic pull. So many people have died there, so many people put their hopes and dreams there. There’s so much beauty, so much ugly. It’s kind of electric, really,” she says.

She went on to speak at a culinary high school program, where none of the kids raised their hands when she asked if they were Mexican or even Mexican American. But as soon as she asked where to find good tacos, they all lit up and started talking at once. It turned out every one of them was Latin or Mexican American. “But they were ashamed. And I’ve felt that, too. I grew up Jewish in Mexico City, and no one else I was in school with was. Everyone was Catholic, taking communion, and I felt outside, other, because of it,” she says. And she, too, is an immigrant, like many of the kids she met that day.

So, she gave the students her speech: “You guys are so powerful because you have two countries to draw from, two cultures to draw from, two languages to draw from. They are your blessing. But you have a double responsibility because you have to do right by Mexico, and you have to show the US that you are worthy to stay here.”

Meanwhile, the idea had landed—she set out to research and share more about the borderlands. “It was a very tough idea to pitch because, this is 2018, 2019, and everybody was talking about the border in a very negative way,” she says. “But then I became relentless. I feel a duty to do this.”

A New Home

Raised in Mexico City, the fourth daughter of Jewish parents, Jinich’s heritage was shaped by grandparents who had fled to Mexico during World War II; her Austrian grandmother’s family had been killed in Auschwitz or landed in Mexico after going through Ellis Island, while her Polish family had tried to go to America but a quota pushed them farther south.

Just as her grandparents were immigrants raising their families in Mexico, Jinich is Mexican and raising her sons in the US. As a historical scholar, she has been fascinated by the migration of people and cultures, especially how they all mix, marry, and mingle with Indigenous communities to build new cultural identities. Her thesis covered the evolution of Mexico’s federalism and the creation of its states. She imagined a future in academia, studying to become a political analyst.

Food didn’t call to her until she left home, after she’d married her husband, Daniel, and moved to Dallas for his career. Jinich was not fluent in English and, as she claims, “hardly knew how to scramble an egg.” As she worked on her thesis, feeling isolated without family or friends and a husband who traveled frequently, she yearned for food from home. She couldn’t travel back to Mexico because as she was in the process of applying for a green card, so instead, she’d get on the phone with her mother and sisters, asking them how they made their soup or their rice. At the grocery store, she’d stalk other customers, watching to see who purchased certain Latin ingredients like jalapeños, and would then approach them to ask what they were making.

“It was like a moving cooking class, because I would just go up to someone and they would tell me, ‘I’m making red rice’ or ‘I’m making soup.’ And then many times, they would tell me, ‘I live nearby; why don’t you come and try it?’” The handful of times she was invited over, usually by people who were from other parts of Mexico, she would taste, ask questions, and then re-create those dishes at home—which led her to understand how vastly different the cuisines of Mexico could be from state to state.

“I was cooking like a madwoman, home alone, and I became desperately hungry to get to know the Mexico that I thought that I knew but that I didn’t know,” she says. “It was the beginning of eating my way through Mexico without being able to go.”

This part of the immigrant story is in her blood; her own grandmothers had done the same when they arrived in Mexico from their countries. Her great aunt started the first Austrian bakery in Mexico City. “[She] would make apple strudel with Mexican canela, or sacre torte with Mexican chocolate, or an apricot chicken with chipotle. I saw how they were able to make Mexico their home by weaving what they brought with Mexican ingredients,” she says.

As she studied and cooked, she also watched the Dallas affiliate of PBS to learn English, which is where she saw a promotion for a documentary about the Mexican revolution. She went to the station, looking to volunteer. That production had already wrapped but they were working on another one with Southwestern chef Stephan Pyles. “The whole idea was that he would go down to Mexico, get inspired, and then come back to his restaurants and adapt something,” she says. “It was a shoestring budget and small team. But I loved doing the research and logistics and connecting people.”

Along the way, she traveled to Oaxaca and went to the home of Diana Kennedy, the authority on Mexican cuisine at the time. “I had no idea who she was. I had no idea who Julia Child was! I had no idea that cooking shows were such a thing,” she says. While television as a career was not yet on her radar, especially since she preferred being behind the scenes, the experience planted a seed.

She considered entering a food science program but decided against it to honor the fact that her parents and family had just supported her degree and the expectation was that she would go into a career with that degree.

But soon, she was pregnant with her first son, Alan, and then Daniel took a job in Washington, DC. There, determined to follow the path that her education afforded, Jinich took a job at a think tank—within one week, she was miserable. By the time she was pregnant with her third son, Juju, she was ready to take the leap. With Daniel’s encouragement, she quit her job and enrolled at L’Academie de Cuisine in Gaithersburg, Maryland, taking classes at night and raising her children during day. She was there, not to pursue a career as a chef, but to learn the language of cooking. “If I don’t understand the bones, how can I write about the meat?” she says. The curriculum, like most culinary schools at the time, was Eurocentric, so she was learning technique and foundational French dishes. But there were no chiles, no moles, nothing about cuisines outside of Europe. She spotted a wide gap in the market. No one was teaching Mexican cooking. But her friends were desperate for it.

She and Daniel were now part of a broad, international social network in DC. “It’s a very big Latin community, so Argentinians, Ecuadorians, Peruvians, and a lot of mixed marriages—so I wasn’t the only one with an accent anymore,” she says with a laugh. Friends would ask how she made her tacos or tortillas, so she invited them into her kitchen to show them how. An idea formed to teach classes. She put together a curriculum by regions, ingredients, and historical periods. She also took a food writing class and started pitching article ideas to various publications. One of her first, on the topic of chorizo, landed in The Washington Post.

To me, the border is where two countries that I love connect. There is immense richness and beauty that people take for granted.”

“Whenever she wrote for me at The Post, readers loved it,” says then-food editor Joe Yonan. “First because Pati was—is!—so relatable, and later because they were already fans of her public-television show and the cookbooks. My favorite piece by her grew out of an ongoing debate she and I had over Tex-Mex food, which I had long defended as a cuisine of its own and not a bastardization of ‘real’ Mexican food. She came at it from a place of skepticism, but she tasted and researched and interviewed, and wrote a compelling argument of her own for its legitimacy.”

By that time, she and Daniel were building a new house in Chevy Chase, Maryland, and she designed the kitchen as a teaching space, centering it with a broad, square island large enough to accommodate several students who could cook along with her. It wasn’t necessarily needed, though—she soon connected with the Mexican Cultural Institute in DC, who offered her a much larger space to teach, as well as a platform to promote herself.

That’s when Jinich started hustling. Determined to sell out every class, she went to her local television and radio stations to do cooking demos. Editors and producers immediately took note of her authentic voice and dynamic personality.

“She captivated me with her openness, curiosity, and obvious depth of knowledge about Mexican food, but she was also pretty self-deprecating,” Yonan notes. “Her sheer joyful enthusiasm infected everyone in the room—a crowd of more than 100 people—and that was before we even tasted anything.”

Soon, the Food Network came calling, but after much back and forth, Jinich decided it wasn’t the right fit. She turned to her educational touchstone, PBS, a place she knew would take her ideas seriously and produce shows with intention. But that would require even more hustle because she was tasked with finding her own underwriters, which meant endlessly pitching the show and asking for money. Pati’s Mexican Table aired its first episodes in 2011. Now in its 15th season (episodes begin airing in September), Jinich is still hustling—constantly bringing on new sponsors to help build her production budgets. “Yes, it’s exhausting, but I’ve grown to appreciate all of it,” she says. “It gets harder because you get pickier, you want to make better content. When you do it once, you’re like, I need to do it again and do it better.”

Hungrier Than Ever

Around Jinich’s home, it’s evident that her sons are her priority. Artwork by her youngest, Juju (Julian) and eldest, Alan, line her office walls, and photos of the family, including middle son Sami, are everywhere. Now ages 20, 24, and 26, the boys have appeared on set with their mother over the years, and it’s influencing who they’ve become—Alan now works as a journalist with Story-Corps, and was part of the production team on La Frontera; his photos are captured in her latest cookbook. All three boys have worked on set.

Never a prop on the show, the boys and Daniel serve as her audience—standing alongside, she teaches them how to cook a beef tongue for tacos de lengua or has them taste her tinga de pollo. Her boys are distinctly Mexican American, just as Jinich is distinctly Mexican in America.

“It used to be that if people called me Mexican American, I would be insulted, because I thought it takes away from my love of Mexico, which grows stronger all the time. But my kids are very much Americans and Mexicans and now I understand that you can be these two things and be very proud of that,” she says.

That teaching of Mexican foodways to an American audience is one of the reasons her cookbook editor, Rux Martin, formerly of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, has worked on all four of her cookbooks.

“Pati wasn’t a chef but a real, living, extraordinary cook who had three young boys at that time and was cooking Mexican food every day in her Maryland kitchen,” Martin says. “In Treasures of the Mexican Table, she really reinvented herself and went back to who she was, which is somebody who was enormously well informed about Mexican history, politics, all of it. She was able to deliver up this encyclopedia of the greatest Mexican dishes, not Americanized, but sort of reinterpreted for an American audience.”

For Foods of La Frontera, a cookbook that weaves together a beautiful yet complicated and truthful story, Jinich and Martin sometimes went head-to-head on whether certain words or phrases needed to be translated into English. Often, Jinich won, arguing that her audience didn’t need the translation. In that, Martin sees a new path forward for other cookbook authors. “This is hopefully a part of the movement to take back [peoples’] voices and cultures.”

Jinich has published around 600 recipes on her own website, plus all those she’s put into her books. Her ability to capture recipes is impressive: She can watch someone make a dish and then taste, before re-creating it.

“When I come to my kitchen, I make a plan. I know that it has these ingredients, so I’m gonna try boiling, I’m gonna try roasting, I’m testing one recipe three different ways,” she says. Much of her work involves capturing recipes that have been made for centuries but have never been written down. “I love doing those, especially for the Mexican diaspora. Many people have left Mexico, and they will never go back. They’re never going to taste those flavors again, so I want to give them that recipe,” she says.

Despite all that she has produced, and having passed the age of 50, Jinich is not slowing down. If anything, she sees this moment as a catalyst to do more. “I know I have less time. People tell me they have time to kill and I’m like, give it to me, I’ll take yours!”

If her latest series, PanAmericana, is any indication, she’s maximizing the time she has. The series is a sweeping look at the Americas, which has her traveling from Alaska down to Argentina—she’s two seasons in and has at least four or five more to go to get herself to the bottom of the continent. “And that’s not yet including the Caribbean!” she adds with a laugh.

“To me, her combination of a dedication to academic-level research on history and culture with a bright and open attitude that makes interview subjects open up makes her a worthy successor to the likes of Anthony Bourdain,” notes Joe Yonan.

And she’s striving to be better all the time. She can be critical when looking back at previous seasons and episodes of her shows, saying there was too much voiceover or she was talking too much. “I want to learn to give people the microphone back,” she says. That’s part of the reason she remains loyal to PBS, an outlet that values where stories come from and how they’re told.

This summer, on top of two James Beard nominations—and one win—for her television shows, Jinich was inducted into the James Beard Foundation’s Broadcast Media Hall of Fame; she’s the second person to win the honor, after Martha Stewart.

“Honestly, my husband is scared,” Jinich says with a laugh. “Like there will be no end. I want to know more; I want to travel more. I want my boys to know their home country like I do. I’m not more satisfied,” she says. “I become hungrier with age.”

Get Pati Jinich’s Recipes

Arroz Rojo Tejano Mexicano (Tejano Fried Rice)

Espagueti Verde (Green Spaghetti)

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