SHE'S BEEN CALLED the Julia Child and the Escoffier of Mexican cooking, even
the savior of authentic Mexican cuisine. But Diana Kennedy would seem an
unlikely candidate for such culinary acclaim. She was born in England, not a
country renowned for a tradition of gastronomic excellence.

'The important discoveries in my life have always happened by chance,' she
says and Mexico was no different. She would never have ended up here at all
had she not decided to make an impromptu stopover in revolutionary Haiti in
1957. There she met husband-to-be, Paul Kennedy. They married in Mexico
City, where Paul was correspondent for the New York Times,

Diana was immediately struck by how extraordinary everything tasted. As she
accompanied her husband on assignments, she became fascinated by the
distinct foods of each region. Every village had its own recipes, dishes
that had been passed down for centuries but never written down.

Upon her return to Mexico City, she'd ask her Mexican friends how to cook
these electrifying dishes. "They'd laugh and send me to talk to their maids.
The maids would say, 'You have to visit my village', and that's how I
started driving all over the country tracking down recipes.'

She hunted down foods with the zeal of an anthropologist. Perhaps more than
any culinary writer, she has served as the conduit for preserving a
wonderfully traditional regional cuisine by traveling more than a million
kilometers around her adopted country, alone, in a simple pickup truck,
seeking sources for documenting the techniques and ingredients passed down
orally in remote villages for centuries.

When famed New York Times food writer Craig Claiborne visited she gave him
her favourite book of recipes. 'He refused it, saying, "I'll only read a
Mexican cookbook once you have written one".'

The opportunity to do that came sooner than she would have liked. In 1967, a
year after the couple had moved back to New York, Paul died of cancer. 'I
was sad and worn from the experience but also needed to earn a living. Craig
got me a job teaching Mexican cooking, which, at the time was almost
completely unknown. One of my first students was the woman who was to become
my editor. She asked me to turn the class into a book.'

That book, The Cuisines of Mexico, became a best-seller and taught a
generation of Americans that Mexican food meant more than tacos, nachos and
chilli con carne. What makes her books special are Diana's 'word pictures':
her adventures, such as her hunt to find escamoles - 'delicious' ant eggs; a
barbecue that lasts all weekend in Oaxaca; her apprenticeship in a Mexico
City bakery to learn the secrets of the all-male trade. She peppers her
recipes with citations from the ancient Aztec codices, as well as prayers
from the Spanish nuns and priests who grafted Mediterranean cooking onto an
already elaborate pre-Columbian cuisine.

With eight books under her belt and two more in the works, she has become
the pre-eminent authority on Mexican gastronomy. In America she is an icon
for foodie set and in Mexico she is revered - she has been awarded the Order
of the Eagle, the highest honor that can be bestowed on a non Mexican.
Now in her 80s, she has lived in Michoacán for many years in an
extraordinary solar-powered adobe eco-house situated on a seven-acre
organic ranch..

Her newest book, anxiously anticipated by her legions of fans, focuses on
Oaxaca, describing both the food and the culture unique to each of the
state's diverse regions.

To her, Oaxaca is a microcosm of all that is best in Mexico's cooking
traditions: its intensity and imagination, ritual and art, its love of
nature and privileged place within the life of a community. Her new book
exemplifies her belief that cuisine is as essential a part of a nation's
culture as its art or music.

"Too many chefs tend to look down their noses at Mexican food, thinking only
of greasy tacos,' she says. 'But just ask them what they would do without
tomatoes, chocolate, corn, turkey, squash, avocados, chillies and beans -
all gifts from Mexico"

Some people set out to save Mexico's monuments from the predations of the
modern age. Diana's lifelong quest has been to preserve the more intangible
traditions of eating that have nourished its vibrant civilization.

Books by Diana Kennedy

• The Cuisines of Mexico
  
• The Tortilla Book
  
• Mexican Regional Cooking (1985)
  
• The Art of Mexican Cooking (1989)
  
• My Mexico (1998)
  
• The Essential Cuisines of Mexico (compilation from Kennedy's first three
  books, plus 30 new recipes) (2000)
  
• From My Kitchen, Techniques and Ingredients (2003)