Diana Henry
Diana Henry wrote the culinary script for the 21st century. And she wrote it in 2002.
Her debut cookbook, Crazy Water, Pickled Lemons, was a powerhouse. It was her Astral Weeks, her Unknown Pleasures, her Catch-22.
The book was unusual in that it didn’t suggest where Diana Henry had been. Instead, it suggested where she was going. Crazy Water didn’t collect her past, but instead projected her future.
The book was omnivorous, the work of someone dying for the hunger of experience, dying to live her life on high, dying to turn the prose of cooking into the poetry of eating.
All of those things we hungry people have been living with for more than 2 decades – zhug; kushary; black rice; skordalia; chicken with migas; Georgian plum sauce – were unearthed by Henry in 2002, and offered up in prose that was drunk on the rampant sensuality of the dishes she curated.
Best of all, she inhabited these dishes. This wasn’t some well-bred woman back from the Grand Tour with a sheaf of recipes and a book proposal. This was a woman eating fistfuls of herbs in Persian dishes in a Portakabin in a car park in West London.
Alongside the enchanting dishes, Henry sprinkled individual sentences that exploded in your mind like land mines: “Of all the smells in the world – wild strawberries, bacon sarnies, the sweet bready scent of a baby’s head – this is my favourite” is how she describes the early-morning scent of Provence, a mix of “savory, lavender, wild thyme and rosemary.”
Wild strawberries. Bacon sarnies. The bready scent of a baby’s head. What a triumvirate!
Henry could also be blushingly direct: “Figs are the sexiest of the lot. Purple figs are the colour and texture of teenage love-bites, making you think of hungry kisses.” That’s not actually the sort of sentence well educated girls born in Northern Ireland usually write.
But sensuality rampages through Crazy Water, a book that is hectic and enraptured. Living in a basement flat in North London, with a kitchenette and one tall cupboard and with Claudia Roden’s magisterial A New Book of Middle Eastern Food for company, Henry found her voice, and found that in cooking she “could travel while standing still.”
Crazy Water, Pickled Lemons is not just one of the greatest cookery books, it is one of the best books of yearning and discovery. Like all precious things, it is ageless. Every time you open its pages, a door opens into a better world.
She is one of the finest food writers there is. Up there with Darina Allen and Paul Flynn as far as Irish food writers are concerned and I agree she is one of the best in the world . I love all her books.
Her Unknown Pleasures indeed!