Jean Hewitt
english-American food writer and home economist

Jean Daphne Hewitt (15 August 1925 – 15 August 1997) was an English-American food writer and home economist known for her advocacy of natural foods.
Biography
Hewitt was born in Ipswich. She studied at the Westminster School for Chefs in London and moved to New York during World War II. She obtained a bachelor's degree in food and nutrition from the University of London and M.Sc from Teachers College, Columbia University. Hewitt joined The New York Times as a food writer and worked as assistant to Craig Claiborne in 1961.
She managed The Times's test kitchen and in 1975 was named food editor of the Family Circle magazine. Hewitt died from pneumonia at Secours-Venice Hospital in Venice, Florida.
Cookbooks
Hewitt wrote a number of popular cookbooks, four of which received the James Beard Food and Beverage Book Award. She was an early advocate of natural foods.
Hewitt was the author of the bestseller New York Times Natural Foods Cookbook, first published in 1971, which gave recipes of natural unprocessed foods. The recipes were dedicated to "the thousands of people across the country who believe in and practice, the natural way of eating for good health."
Hewitt spent five years travelling America and compiled recipes from the cookery of the fifty states for her Heritage Cook Book, first published in 1972.
“Jean Hewitt” enters the record as english-American food writer and home economist. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Jean, Hewitt and english-American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q83689574. The first chronological checks are 1925, 1997, 1961 and 1975.
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This entry incorporates text from “Jean Hewitt” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.