The food writer Diana Kennedy, who has died aged 99, concentrated almost exclusively on the Mexican kitchen. In an astonishingly active career spanning more than 60 years, she published nearly a dozen books unmatched by any of her contemporaries, which investigated and portrayed the long, complex culinary traditions of her adopted homeland.
She was one of a group of women whose immersive technique, fine writing and red-hot enthusiasm delivered to us a vast range of new things to eat as well as introducing to our worldview new civilisations. Elizabeth David, Claudia Roden, Paula Wolfert and Naomi Duguid are among them and they, and Kennedy, have often been described as anthropologists, something Kennedy usually denied, though ultimately accepted by dint of constant repetition.
