MONICA SHERIDAN: Finger-lickin' good

A pioneer of Irish food writing

In 1963, the Irish television audience, still dazzled by the new technology, were treated to a live cookery show presented by Monica Sheridan. Monica's Kitchen was a milestone in Irish television but also, according to those who can remember, a milestone in Irish food.

This sharp-featured, middle-aged woman, a Killiney housewife married to a barrister, was an instant hit. Her natural spontaneous wit and occasionally outrageous comments meant that viewers hung on her every word. And just as Nigella licks her fingers, so too did Monica Sheridan. But not in quite the same way.  This caused a good deal of outrage and there were unconfirmed reports that shocked domestic science teachers considered presenting a mass petition to RTE. Monica's Kitchen did not go into a second series.

However, she published a book to accompany her TV debut and "Monica's Kitchen" published by Castle Publications in 1963 is one of my most treasured possessions. It still crops up secondhand very frequently, a testament to how many copies were originally sold.

Opening it at random, I read "When I was a girl learning school-French I thought that oeufs a la coq were special eggs laid by perverted French roosters. It was a great disappointment to discover that they were just ordinary boiled eggs. Oeufs cocotte didn't sound very respectable either but they are, alas, nothing you couldn't write home about."

She is fascinating about garlic. "Thirty years ago [i.e. in the 1930s], garlic was in daily use in kitchens all over Ireland... In our house in the country, they put it into the food - and into the whiskey. Toothache, tonsils, stomach-ache, and all other internal complaints were doctored with the same medicine - two or three cloves of garlic crushed, and wet with half a glass of whiskey. This was poured down the patient's throat without a by-your-leave. It was a nauseating brew, enough to put anyone off whiskey for life." But not garlic. She goes on...

"To me, the smell of raw garlic is the nicest of all, but, if you come into your house on a cold evening, and smell a stew that has a few cloves of garlic in it, it will remind you of the little bistros in Paris, and Gauloise cigarettes, and strolling down the Champs Elysees."

Despite her affluent life in Killiney with maid and au pair (with whom she once cooked some garden snails, the subject of her funniest writing) Monica Sheridan had grown up as one of fourteen children on a farm in rural Ireland. She loved classic cooking but never lost her down-to- earth common sense. It was something she valued.

"There's nothing to cooking except ordinary common sense," she says in Monica's Kitchen. "You need a keen nose to smell burning, strong hands that can stand heat, and an occasional sense of wild extravagance coupled with a passion for economy...Cooking has little to do with recipes, which are dead things and all read like a doctor's prescription. Unless you are a complete dud, you need never worry about them. But if you've a real interest in food, a love of experiment, and the courage to try anything once - you can forget about caution and calories."

There was a delightful lack of reverence about Monica Sheridan, best exemplified by some of her comments on beef. "Passing through a fair," she says, "in, say Mullingar, you will see four-year-old Irish bullocks in the very pink of condition. They have the roving eyes and debonair looks of first-year medical students. A little gauche, perhaps, but nonetheless proud sons of bovine fathers. Give them a few more years and they could become a danger to the parish; but now is the time to kill them and eat them. when they are in their youthful prime."

It's hard to imagine Nigella Lawson or even Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall writing in these terms.

Oh she was good. Finger-lickin’ good. (ends)