Diana Kennedy

Diana Kennedy MBE (3 March 1923 – 24 July 2022) was a British food writer.

The preeminent English-language authority on Mexican cuisine, Kennedy was known for her nine books on the subject, including The Cuisines of Mexico, which changed how Americans view Mexican cuisine.

Her cookbooks are based on her fifty years of travelling in Mexico, interviewing and learning from several types of cooks from virtually every region of the nation.

Her documentation of native edible plants has been digitized by National Commission for Knowledge and Use of Biodiversity.

Due to her style of work, Kennedy was called a "culinary anthropologist" and self-identified as an "ethno-gastronomer".

Kennedy received numerous awards for her work, including the Order of the Aztec Eagle from the Mexican government, and was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire.

Kennedy was born Diana Southwood in Loughton, Essex, in the southeast of England, on 3 March 1923.

Her father was a salesman, and her mother was a schoolteacher who loved nature and wanted to live quietly in the countryside.

Kennedy attended South Hampstead High School.

She did not go on to university because of World War II and instead, at age 19, joined the Women's Timber Corps: a civilian organisation that took over forestry duties from men who had gone off to fight.

Kennedy did not like cutting down trees, so she was assigned to measuring tree trunks instead.

During her first years in Mexico City with her husband in the late 1950s, she learned quickly that the best food in Mexico was not in fancy restaurants but rather in markets, traditional family restaurants called "fondas" and in homes.

In addition, she was impressed with what she saw in local, traditional markets.

She also came to appreciate that recipes varied from region to region, travelling with her husband when he was on assignment, and he would collect recipes when she could not accompany him.

In Mexico City, she asked her friends about cooking these dishes, and was referred to their maids.

These maids then encouraged her to visit their villages, which she subsequently continued to do.

Kennedy also began researching documentation on Mexican cuisine, and credited the work of Josefina Velázquez de León for her having been a pioneer, who had done similar work collecting recipes by visiting church groups.

Kennedy's focus became the food that was not documented, such as that found in villages, markets and homes, eventually to preserve native ingredients and traditional recipes being lost as Mexicans move from rural areas to urban centers.

Kennedy began to share what she learned informally among expats and her husband's colleagues when they came to Mexico.

This included taking women on tours of traditional markets, including the stands with animal heads, which shocked Americans.

When New York Times food writer Craig Claiborne was in town, she tried to give him a book of Mexican recipes, but he refused it, saying "I'll only read a Mexican cookbook once you have written one".' At the time, Kennedy thought this was a crazy idea.

In 1953, Kennedy emigrated to Canada, where she lived for three years while doing a number of jobs, including running a film library and selling Wedgewood china.

On a last-minute decision, Kennedy decided to visit Haiti in 1957.

There she met Paul P.. Kennedy, a correspondent for The New York Times in Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean.

The two moved to Mexico in 1957, and there they married some time later, remaining together until his death from cancer in 1967, aged 62.

Kennedy had no children, but two step-daughters from Paul's first marriage.

In Mexico, Kennedy became enamoured of the food, and dedicated her subsequent career to its preservation and promotion.

However, she still maintained her British accent and took tea each day.

When she was not teaching, she was either writing or working in the kitchen on recipes.

She was noted for her brusque, no-nonsense demeanor, having pulled out tape recorders when police have tried to get bribes from her on her Mexican travels.

She visited every state in Mexico, and used diverse forms of transportation, from buses, to donkeys to her Nissan pickup truck with no power steering (and a shovel to dig it out of the mud).

She travelled to many isolated areas of Mexico to visit markets and cooks to ask about cooking ingredients and methods.

At the end of 1965, Kennedy and her husband moved to New York City, where he died the following year from cancer.

In 1969, Kennedy began to teach classes in Mexican cooking in her apartment in the Upper West Side, with the encouragement of Craig Claiborne.

This was the beginning of a decades-long teaching career, which began as her own venture, then in collaboration with other institutions such as the Peter Kump Cooking School in New York, as well as offering Mexican cooking "boot camps" at her home in Michoacán.

Her classes focused on the most traditional cooking techniques and ingredients.

In the 1970s, she decided to build her house near Zitácuaro, Michoacán, in an area with orchards.

The land allowed her to grow many of her own ingredients.

While she was not technophobic, she was against electronic forms of cookbooks, believing in the need to make notes over printed recipes.

Kennedy died at her home on 24 July 2022, at the age of 99.