San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
British food writer elevated cuisine of her beloved Mexico
MEXICO CITY — Diana Kennedy, a tart-tongued British food writer devoted to Mexican cuisine, died last Sunday. She was 99.
Kennedy spent much of her life learning and preserving the traditional cooking and ingredients of her adopted home, a mission that even in her 80s had her driving hundreds of miles across her adopted country in a rattling truck as she searched remote villages for elusive recipes.
Her nearly dozen cookbooks, including “Oaxaca al Gusto,” which won the 2011 James Beard Award for cookbook of the year, reflect a lifetime of groundbreaking culinary contributions and her effort to collect vanishing culinary traditions, a mission that began long before the rest of the culinary world was giving Mexican cooking the respect she felt it was due.
Her longtime friend Concepcion Guadalupe Garza Rodriguez said Kennedy died peacefully shortly before dawn Sunday at her home in Zitacuaro, about 100 miles west of Mexico City.
“Mexico is very grateful for her,” Garza Rodriguez said.
Mexico’s Culture Ministry said via Twitter on Sunday that Kennedy’s “life was dedicated to discovering, compiling and preserving the richness of Mexican cuisine.”
“Diana understood as few do, that the conservation of nature is key to continue obtaining the ingredients that make it possible to keep creating the delicious dishes that characterize our cuisine,” the ministry said.
Her first cookbook, “The Cuisines of Mexico,” was written during long hours with home cooks across Mexico. It established Kennedy as the foremost authority on traditional Mexican cooking and remains the seminal work on the subject even four decades later. She described it as a gastronomy that humbled her and she credited those — usually women — who shared their recipes with her.
She received the equivalent of knighthood in Mexico with the Congressional Order of the Aztec Eagle award for documenting and preserving regional Mexican cuisines. The United Kingdom also has honored her, awarding her a Member of the British Empire award for furthering cultural relations with Mexico.
Kennedy was born with an instinctive curiosity and love of food. She grew up in the United Kingdom eating what she called “good food, whole food,” if not a lot of food. During World War II, she was assigned to the Women Timber Corps, where food was simple and sometimes sparse — homemade bread, fresh cream, scones and berries on good days, nettle soup or buttered green beans when rations were lean.
Millions across Western Europe shared this simple sustenance, but for Kennedy these meals awakened an appreciation of flavor and texture that would last a lifetime.
She talked about her first mango — “I ate it in Jamaica’s Kingston harbor, standing in clear, blue warm sea, all that sweet, sweet juice” — the way some talk about their first crush.
Indeed, that first mango and her husband, Paul Kennedy, a New York Times correspondent, arrived in her life around the same time. He was on assignment in Haiti, she was traveling there. They fell in love and in 1957 she joined him in Mexico, where he was assigned.
Here a series of Mexican maids, as well as aunts, mothers and grandmothers of her new friends, gave Diana Kennedy her first Mexican cooking lessons — grinding corn for tamales, cooking rabbit in adobo. It was another culinary awakening.
The couple moved to New York in 1966 when Paul Kennedy was dying of cancer.
Two years later, she taught her first Mexican cooking class. Soon she was spending more of her time back in Mexico, establishing a retreat there that still serves as her home in the country.
In 2019, the documentary “Diana Kennedy: Nothing Fancy,” showed Kennedy relishing in the production of her garden and driving the bumpy roads of Zitacuaro.