The interview: Diana Henry.
She’s the food writer who’s inspired a generation of cooks and lit an ‘I can do it’ spark for thousands of aspiring writers – young and old. Why? Because Diana Henry has the power to paint pictures with words, to create a mood you want to experience or a setting you want to step into – and, above all, to write recipes that make you want to race into the kitchen and cook. Here, in a rare and intensely personal interview, she talks with Mark Diacono about the experiences that shaped her
A few minutes with Diana Henry are all you need to know her as a woman of strong opinions and deep enthusiasms, freely communicated. Her no-nonsense Northern Irish directness is refreshingly free of fluff. When she’s in the room, you know it. While other food writers may be more famous, Diana occupies that rarified territory of being the food writers’ food writer; the ‘real heir’, as Sheila Dillon put it, to Jane Grigson. She’s unusual in that the quality of her writing makes her as relevant to her peers as her recipes do to the teenager heading to university. A sense that we are all entitled to good food, however simple, underpins every paragraph.
“I definitely got that from my childhood. My mother is a great cook. We ate really good, unfancy dishes and I think that’s where I got my love of simple, delicious food.” She alludes to a tricky upbringing, but that her parents facilitated her childhood love of cooking and making things. “When I was seven or eight, I’d make a scrapbook; sticking things in, writing – always with a picture of the whole book in my mind – and there was never a fuss about making a mess.”
That childhood was spent 50 miles north of Belfast, in County Antrim. “It was a time of fear. It’s hard to grow up in an atmosphere of tension and hatred. I knew from an early age that I wouldn’t spend my whole life there.” That push was matched by a yearning for other places. “I’d dream of other countries, of other cultures, but we didn’t travel. I used to ask my dad if we could go to the airport to watch the planes taking off.”
In her mid-teens, Diana organised a month-long French exchange trip. “My parents thought I was mad and I was wildly nervous, but I did it. It was such an eye-opener. The way the family thought and talked about food: they were in no way rich but they considered everything... Shall we marinate the chops in olive oil? Which herb shall we build this meal around? A salad dressing was made in the bowl, the leaves tossed through it. This was their normal way
