Elisabeth Lambert Ortiz was a food writer, but she might as well have been called a food historian or a culinary anthropologist. Perhaps the first British author of cookery books to achieve as much recognition in America as in this country, she travelled the world with her husband, meeting local cooks and sharing recipes. In a series of classic works, she related the foods that different peoples live on to the history of their countries and most particularly she was responsible for bringing Latin American food and ingredients to the attention of cooks in Britain, America and Australia.

Elisabeth Lambert was born in Harrow, but moved with her family to Jamaica when she was eight. There, she said, she first became interested in Latin American cuisine. “It was the flavour of hot peppers that beguiled me,” she wrote, “especially one that Jamaicans call a Scotch bonnet — small, lantern-shaped, fiery and full of flavour.” Several years later, her family moved to Australia, where before she had completed her education Elisabeth had three collections of her poetry published.

She began work as a criminal court reporter in Sydney and became known for her quick intellect. She did not need to transcribe her articles, but dictated them straight to the news desk over the telephone, to the envy of colleagues with less verbal facility. Later, she would take over reviewing film and theatre.

Her first husband, a pilot and artist, had been killed in the Battle of Britain. She returned to London in 1949 and took work as a journalist; she also wrote The Sleeping House Party (1951), a murder mystery, and Father Couldn’t Juggle (1954), based on her life in Jamaica with her parents and sisters.

In the mid-1950s, she went to New York to write for the United Nations, producing among other work a scientific book on the sea for the youth market. There she met and married César Ortiz, a Texas-educated Mexican diplomat who shared her love of poetry, literature and food.

When he was posted to Mexico by the UN, she discovered the work of Fray Bernardino de Sagahún, a Spanish priest who had visited Mexico before the Conquest was consolidated. His vivid descriptions of ancient life and food sent her running to the local marketplace, which she realised would be the best place to learn. Over the next few years she followed her husband on UN assignments around the Caribbean, and Central and South America. Everywhere she went she would befriend local cooks and learn their secrets, but also, in her own words, she “sought out the hows and whys of this intriguing cuisine, and found academic answers”.

When the couple returned to New York, Elisabeth began working for Time-Life, becoming friends with James Beard, the noted American cook and writer. He encouraged her to write Mexican Cookery, which was published in 1967, and she folllowed it with The Book of Latin American Cooking in 1969 and The Complete Book of Caribbean Cooking in 1973. In the mid-1970s, while César travelled widely in Asia and the Middle East, she settled in Bangkok, where she worked for an English-language newspaper and wrote on Japanese cooking.

In 1980 her husband retired, and the couple moved to London. He wrote political articles for newspapers; she wrote regularly for Gourmet Magazine over the next 12 years on hotels and restaurants in Britain and France, as well as continuing her culinary investigations in a series of books. These included Cooking with the Young Chefs of France (1981), From the Tables of Britain (1986), and The Encyclopaedia of Herbs, Spices and Flavourings (1992) for which she won book-of-the-year awards in America from the IACP and from Julia Child.

César died that year, but she continued to research, write and publish, and gave telephone interviews to eager radio audiences in Australia, America and Britain. Always willing to share her vast knowledge of food history and botany, she was generous too in her encouragement and praise of new authors. In 2002, she was asked to write the entry on Latin American food for Scribner’s Library.

In 1985 she wrote that the moment of her greatest happiness was when people in Latin America began to pay her the highest compliment a cook can expect: “tiene buena mano”, or “she has a good hand.”

She is survived by one sister.

Elisabeth Lambert Ortiz, food writer, was born on June 17, 1915. She died on October 27, 2003, aged 88.