Diana Henry, Derry woman and food writer, is on a mission to make cooking enjoyable for everyone, and her new book features recipes for winter, her favourite time of year to cook, she tells Louise East.
Diana Henry is aware she is not like other people. Growing up in Derry, she read her mother's cordon bleu part-work for kicks. At the age of 10, she volunteered to make supper every Sunday for her family of six. After buying her first cookbook at 12 (a tome on entertaining by Prue Leith) she had her first dinner party at 15: "My friends all thought it was dead weird." When she left Coleraine to study English literature at Oxford University, she spent study periods in the library poring over cookbooks. "The other girls treated me as though I was some odd Celtic naif who hadn't had her consciousness raised yet."
Later, as a television producer, she almost turned down a new series with an up-and-coming young cook called Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall because she had planned to take three months off to cook puddings for Christmas.
"I honestly can't sleep some nights for thinking about dishes. I sit on the bus dreaming up menus. The work I'm doing now is actually the culmination of something I've been doing for years. For me, it's the equivalent of doodling."
Henry began to write about food seven years ago, after the birth of her son, Ted. Her first cookbook, Crazy Water, Pickled Lemons, became an instant cult classic. Praised lavishly by her own foodie hero, Claudia Roden, it was shortlisted for two Glenfiddich awards and became a word-of-mouth bestseller.
Behind the intriguing title (crazy water refers to a way of poaching fish), lay an inspiring and user-friendly collection of dishes from the Middle East and North Africa, alongside lyrical essays on cardamom and quince, snippets of writing on food by Homer, Ted Hughes and Katherine Mansfield and saliva-inducing photographs by Jason Lowe. "Chefs talk so much about taste, but I think food is as much about where it takes you."
Now, just in time to save us from the winter blues, Henry has a new book out. Roast Figs, Sugar Snow is a tantalising compendium of warming food from cold countries. Whether it's lamb with juniper, damson and gin sorbet, or chestnut and artichoke soup, Henry has ferreted out unexpected combinations of flavours from Scandinavia, northern Italy, Russia, Poland and North America.
"The food from these countries is ideal for cooks in Britain and Ireland, because the ingredients are all in season now," she says enthusiastically. "Instead of looking to the Mediterranean all the time, we should look at some of these places and think, what can I do with cabbage? In the same way that pomegranates and figs transport you to the Arabian Nights, root veg can take you somewhere that's cosy and autumnal and frosty." She readily admits that winter is her favourite time for cooking. "I just like what happens, the way you cosy up in the kitchen and the windows fog up with steam."
The recipes in Roast Figs, Sugar Snow are the result of five years of family holidays cum research trips to snowbound countries. Luckily, her advertising-director husband, Iain, is also a fan of cold weather, although a run-in with a snow plough in northern Italy followed by a five-day snow-in tested their resolve. "When I go abroad, I'm dying to see what people are doing in their own homes. I hate cheffy stuff. I'm more interested in home cooking."
The real work starts when Henry returns home to test, adapt and improve the recipes in her own kitchen. In the heat of August, she was test-driving a recipe for roast goose (while pregnant with her second son), and she'll regularly cook six different dishes a day. "Cooking without measuring anything is my idea of pleasure now."
Three years ago, while researching her second book, The Gastropub Cookbook, the family visited more than 750 pubs in Britain and Ireland, taking out a bank loan to complete the research. "I remember we were driving out of Belfast and Ted, who was only four or five at the time, peered out the window and said, 'Oh look Mummy, I think I see a lovely little gastropub'." she says, looking amused and appalled in equal measure.
Currently, she has several projects on the go: a story book for children, a book of recipes from seaside places and a book of food that can be cooked, as she puts it, "with one hand".
"I despaired of ever cooking again when I had Ted. It wasn't that I didn't have time to cook, because I was at home all day. I just didn't want to chop or do anything fussy. I wanted no-hassle dishes I could just bung in the oven and forget about."
Truth be told, Diana Henry is on something of a mission. "I want everyone to be able to cook and like cooking," she says passionately. "Not because it's good for you, but because if you don't do it, you're so missing out. I don't mean health-wise, I mean in how it contributes to the richness of your life." u
Roast Figs, Sugar Snow, by Diana Henry, is published by Mitchell Beazley, £20