The immigrant who popularized Mexican cuisine
Diana Kennedy 1923–2022
Entranced with the local cooking when she arrived in Mexico in 1957, Diana Kennedy started asking friends for recipes for the wondrous dishes they served. They’d “send me to talk to their maids,” she said. “The maids would say, ‘You have to visit my village.’” Thus began the project that would take over the English native’s life: crisscrossing the Mexican countryside in her pickup truck to learn about local ingredients and techniques and catalog regional recipes, from roasted squash-blossom soup to black-iguana tamales. She shared her finds in a series of popular cookbooks beginning with The Cuisines of Mexico (1972), extolling her adopted country’s diverse culinary culture to an American audience that then equated Mexican food with tacos. Chef José Andrés called her “an Indiana Jones of food” who opened “a window into the soul of Mexico.” The no-nonsense Kennedy gave a less flowery description. “I drive over mountains, I sit with families, and I record,” she said.
Diana Southwood was born in Loughton, England, to a salesman and a schoolteacher, said The Times (U.K.). She served in the Women’s Timber Corps during WWII, then became a housing manager in Scotland.
But she “soon grew restless” and emigrated to Canada, where she worked in a film library and sold Wedgewood china. On a visit to Haiti she met Paul Kennedy, a New York Times correspondent stationed in Mexico City, said The Washington Post. “The attraction was swift and fierce,” and she returned with him to Mexico, where they married in 1958. They were there nine years before Paul got prostate cancer and they moved to New York. After he died in 1967, she began teaching Mexican cooking classes in her Upper West Side apartment. One early student was an editor at Harper & Row, who encouraged her to publish her first cookbook.
In the late 1970s, Kennedy returned to Mexico, said the Los Angeles Times, and eventually turned her adobe house “surrounded by organic vegetable gardens” into a center promoting the country’s gastronomic legacy. Mexico was grateful, and in 1982 awarded her the Order of the Aztec Eagle, its highest honor for foreigners. Well into her 80s, she continued to travel Mexican backroads “with a stack of opera tapes at her side.” She could not slow down, she said, because “there are so many recipes out there.”