Diana Kennedy

Born Diana Southwood in Loughton, Essex, in 1923, she met a New York Times correspondent, Paul Kennedy, in Haiti and followed him to Mexico in 1957. Widowed in 1967 and back in New York, she started teaching Mexican cooking in her apartment on the encouragement of the food editor Craig Claiborne, and one of her students, the editor Fran McCullough, turned the classes into The Cuisines of Mexico in 1972. The Essential Cuisines of Mexico gathers that book with Mexican Regional Cooking and The Tortilla Book, revised throughout and enlarged by more than thirty new recipes to over three hundred. Her method was field work. For roughly fifty years she drove a pickup into every Mexican state, slept in it when she had to, and recorded what cooks actually did in markets and home kitchens rather than in restaurants. Mexico gave her the Order of the Aztec Eagle, Britain made her MBE in 2002, and the James Beard Foundation elected her to its cookbook hall of fame in 2014. She died at her adobe house in Michoacán in July 2022, aged 99.