Diana Henry: ‘I feel like I cheated death twice’
Do you have a food query for Diana? Leave a comment at the end of the article and Diana will be here on Monday, 12pm-2pm, to answer your questions
I don’t have a specific person in mind when I’m writing recipes. Actually, no,’ Diana Henry corrects herself, taking a sip of coffee, ‘I think they are 35.’
Thirty-five was the age at which Henry first started writing about food. It was also – and the two are not unrelated – the year she had her first son, Ted. She fell suddenly out of love with her job as a television producer: ‘I was working on a series about gardening for Channel 4, and I found myself in Peterborough, listening to a woman talk about the stuff she grew with her husband. All I could think about was how long it would take me to get home and get back to Ted – and I knew then that it was the end of my career in television. You can’t do that job if you’re not interested. I had to find something I could do from home.’
So she wrote three recipes – pear recipes, to be precise – and sent them off to House & Garden magazine. ‘The editor said they couldn’t do a whole feature on pears, but could I do something with grains?’ That was that. Fast-forward four years, and she’d written her first cookbook, Crazy Water, Pickled Lemons. Three more years, and she’d published Roast Figs, Sugar Snow, a book of winter dishes from northern climes. Fast-forward to today, and that book is being reprinted to engage with all the readers her columns in The Telegraph Magazine and Waitrose & Partners Weekend, and her many subsequent, award-winning cookbooks, have since acquired.
She has become the Delia of my generation – and at this point, I should say that I am 35. Her recipes are so deftly woven into my life, I forget they are hers, and when I ask friends for their favourites my phone comes alive with replies. Vietnamese lemongrass and chilli chicken thighs; ginger-miso roast pumpkin and mushrooms; cumin-roast aubergine with dates and chickpeas – these are the dishes they make for themselves, their partners and their children.
My brother raves about her pork chop with mustard and capers. My mum loves her salmon with roast tomatoes and pea and basil purée. Her arroz al horno (a baked rice dish) was the go-to recipe for my boyfriend and his former housemates. Roast salmon and green beans with mustard crumbs was the first dish I made for him, while Henry’s linguine all’Amalfitana is the dish I enjoy making most when I’m on my own.
Those recipes give an idea of her range, which transcends trends and spans countries, continents and seasons. Even Roast Figs, Sugar Snow, a book confined to cold climates, takes in Italy, Austria, Hungary, Scandinavia, New England and Georgia, as well as the island of Ireland, where she was born.
‘I read and I travel. The two are equal in importance. When I travel, I keep a notebook of what I eat, and I always come home with ideas. It’s impossible not to,’ she says. ‘But I think you can learn as much reading about food as you can cooking and eating it. You see a recipe with a combination of flavours you’ve not seen before, then you take that one step further, and before you know it you have influences from all over,’ she adds, as if anyone could do what she does.
This is what Henry thinks, that anyone should be able to cook, and that’s why she writes recipes. ‘It’s wonderful to be connected to all those people in those kitchens, and it’s wonderful to go to different countries, picking up dishes. But I think my mission has been to empower people to cook; to make it as clear and practical as possible, even if they aren’t confident cooks at all.’
Her books are born out of life experiences: ‘Cook Simple came about because Ted wasn’t well when he was young, so he cried all the time and I could only cook with one hand because I was holding him. The chicken book [A Bird in the Hand] was because my dad was a poultry farmer, so we had chicken all the time.’ She smiles. ‘I can really clear those bones.’ Henry has been a Telegraph columnist for two decades now, but she is ‘certainly a better writer than I was 20 years ago – I think because I have all those experiences to bring to my work’.
She’s got divorced; she’s raised two children – Ted and his brother, Gillies – both now leaving home. She’s lost her father and best friend, and a couple of years ago almost died herself, of an autoimmune disease that followed on the heels of a double mastectomy to treat breast cancer. ‘When I was leaving hospital the consultant said, “You were so, so ill.” And I said, “Yeah – but I am alive!” I feel like I cheated death twice.’
All this, and she is only 59, hungry to know and to write more: ‘Food never stops fascinating me. I have an insatiable desire to know about food in its context, and I’m always interested in the next place.’ Yet at the same time, food has been ‘a way of surviving; of getting through life’. If she wrote a memoir, it wouldn’t be ‘a sweet thing and full of lovely recipes. It would be Irish and bleak. Cooking and writing have been my survival mechanisms.’ This creative tension, between food as enjoyment and food as survival, is what makes her writing so compelling.
Henry’s recipes are imaginative yet uncomplicated, aspirational yet achievable. They travel, in the case of Roast Figs, Sugar Snow, through mountains and snow-clad forests, yet make one feel right at home. ‘Nigella once said my writing is poetic, but very earthed,’ she recalls. ‘I do the reading and the research and I get to the point where I think, enough of that! Then I get cooking. Practical and cerebral – that is the kind of person I am.’
When she was at Oxford, she couldn’t bear not having a hands-on element to her English literature degree. When it came to her illnesses, what bothered her most was not losing her breasts, but the neuropathy that affected her movement. ‘My hands wouldn’t stop trembling. I was trying to cut the skin off a fish, and I couldn’t hold the fish, because my left hand was shaking so much.’ The effects were short-lived, but for a few fraught days Henry was stricken by the thought of losing something so fundamental not just to her career, but to her sense of self.
‘I think, “This is who I am,” whenever I am writing at my computer or chopping an onion,’ she says. The two are how she centres herself and makes sense of the world. But while Henry writes as she speaks – with feeling – she is never sentimental about cooking, which she knows can feel like a chore. When I pick up one of her books, I pore over the poetry of the introductions. My mum cuts straight to the what, how much, for how long – not because she doesn’t like cooking and reading, but because she still cooks like a mother of two who works full-time.
Henry’s genius is in catering for both the harried mum and the greedy bibliophile – because she has been both. ‘I completely understand what mothers – and fathers, if they are the ones cooking – have to deal with. Being the provider of food every day has been the hardest thing. Ask me what I’ve cooked most in the last 25 years, and it’ll be tuna and sweetcorn pasta.’ She laughs. ‘Before Ted was born, I imagined making homely things like pies and braises. Was I mad? I remember crying into takeaway pizza boxes, thinking I’d never cook again. I was exhausted. Ted ate terribly as a baby and took ages to put on weight, and all I could think about was how I could feed him to keep him alive.’
Even when her children were older, Henry found it a challenge to pull an evening meal together after a long day of writing and recipe testing. ‘I would always finish work too late, and the kids would say, “When is supper?” and I wouldn’t have given it a second thought. Some nights we don’t get dinner until 9.30pm.’
Her north London kitchen is homely, with a long wooden table and a wall bursting with cookbooks. But it is a workspace as much as it is the heart of the household, and Henry is a writer as well as a mother. Open her fridge-freezer and you’ll find M&S pizzas and fish fingers among miso, homemade sorbets and herbs. ‘I am not snobbish, and I’m a lazy cook; I don’t want to be standing here braising in the afternoon, I want to stick something in the oven.’
What drives her to help people cook, then, is not dogma, but the desire for connection, and for them to connect with each other in turn. ‘It’s tragic that some people can’t cook,’ she says. For their health and wallets, but also because ‘life is more enjoyable when you can. Food is so bound up with culture, history, geography and love.’
She cites an example she found when researching Roast Figs, Sugar Snow – a goulash spiced with Hungarian paprika that she ate in Friuli, Italy. ‘Spices are a big thing there, because the men [from the area] who travelled to sell spices would have stock left at the end of the season, which they couldn’t sell the following year, so their wives would find ways to use them. There’s a pasta dish flavoured with 13 different spices, which you won’t find anywhere else.’
Every time she makes that goulash, she thinks of the woman who made it for her, at the inn where Henry was snowed in. ‘She was heavily pregnant, and padded around. Her husband was lovely; he made his own blackcurrant grappa,’ she remembers.
‘I’ve found mountainous regions kept their dishes intact for longer than other places that are less cut off. You’re more likely to find a poppy-seed roll filled with ham and horseradish in Friuli than a tomato and mozzarella panino, for example. In the Savoie [in the French Alps], they wouldn’t have known what they were cooking in Provence.’
At least, that’s how it used to be, before globalised supply chains, industrial production and the fetishisation of Mediterranean food crept into these cuisines, rendering them increasingly homogenous. ‘I would be in these countries – in Scandinavia, northern Europe, New England – and I would ask people what they had at home, and many would say pizza and pasta, rather than the food of their heritage,’ Henry explains. ‘I was there gathering recipes, but at the same time felt the need to protect this food and value it more.’
One of her major concerns around food – ‘apart from health and sustainability, and how we are going to feed everyone’ – is that in our hunger for new ingredients and ideas, we risk forgetting our own culinary inheritance, whatever that may be. ‘I make stuff from all over the world – so many people do now,’ she says. ‘I think it’s so good we have other cuisines, and the cooking of the diaspora. I love how it’s blended. But I have always made sure the boys have shepherd’s pie and Irish stew and things they can attach to their childhood. I think we should have a repertoire of food to call home.’
It’s an interesting point, and one rarely made by cookery writers, whose careers rely on people trying new dishes. It’s also complicated, for the protean nature of food and emotion is such that the taste of home rarely remains static. It evolves. After Henry and her husband divorced, her children refused to eat roast chicken at her house. The meal that had been the hallmark of their family’s togetherness became the opposite when their dad served it each Sunday at his home, prior to Henry arriving to take them back to hers. ‘They called it divorce chicken,’ she explains. ‘They went off it completely. So I started to do a Sami Tamimi chicken recipe, with spice and sumac, from his book Falastin.’ It wasn’t from her children’s past; it was from Tamimi’s, from his childhood in Palestine. But it became part of the new version of their family.
Similarly, Henry’s grandmother’s Irish stew, the recipe for which is in Roast Figs, Sugar Snow, will become part of other families’ lives. ‘It’s lovely to absorb someone else’s childhood into your home kitchen,’ she says. She recalls watching her dad and grandad eating Irish stew, and feeling ‘almost sad, because they were so hungry for it. It seemed to me they were getting more out of that plate than just delicious food; they were getting love.’
To know that a dish that carries such emotional resonance for her will make its way into more homes and hearts must feel extraordinary. ‘It’s a wonderful thing,’ she says, citing the sense of connection again. ‘I was out for dinner last night, and the guy at the next table paid for our drinks because they cook from my books twice a week,’ she adds. ‘That was fantastic. To be honest, I’m still surprised people know who I am.’
Such is Henry’s modesty. Twelve books and 25 years on, she doesn’t expect much more acclaim than she did writing those pear recipes. She will be 60 in October (‘I am October. I love those misty afternoons, I love cold-weather food, I even love the way “October” looks on the page – the “O”, you just want to crawl in and curl up inside it’).
Yet for all that she brings her more recent decades to the page, she writes with her 35-year-old self in mind. ‘I am talking to her at her age, which is also my age, I think. I think of the things she might find hard, and the things she might find interesting.’ I tell Henry that I am 35 and find it bewildering, and she laughs. ‘It’s a very specific age. You are young, but not really young, and you are not yet old. It’s transitional.’
I imagine Henry at 35, first child on her hip, starting a new career, and I consider her now, preparing for her grown-up sons to move out and excited for a new phase. I think that might be the secret to her success. She is 35 and 60; firmly rooted yet happy to roam; a proud child of October, a month of changing leaves, produce and seasons. Roast Figs, Sugar Snow is two decades old, but Henry’s power to span ages, phases and places means it is as relevant now as ever.
Do you have a food query for Diana? Leave yours in the comment section below and Diana will be here on Monday, 12pm-2pm, to answer your questions