Fresh sourdough every morning, an abundant herb garden and gushing praise from Nigella - the chef aiming to put Irish food on the map from her beautifully curated farmhouse

Published: 22:30, 16 July 2026 | Updated: 22:30, 16 July 2026 By the time we speak, Cherie Denham has already baked a sourdough loaf. She does this every single morning – has done for years – and right now she is somewhere in the rambling, centuries-old Hampshire farmhouse she shares with her husband Andy and their three grown sons. The kitchen doors are open on to the garden. Beyond them, fields stretch as far as the eye can see. At each corner of the patio, espalier apple trees frame the view, rosemary and lavender and thyme spilling between them. It is, in every sense, a cook’s paradise. Though Cherie would probably just call it home. ‘I’m always thinking about food,’ she laughs. ‘It genuinely never stops.’ My partner is Peruvian, and when I tell him I’m interviewing an Irish food writer he asks, with genuine curiosity, what Irish food actually is. I find myself fumbling. Soda bread, I say, stew. Walk down any high street in Britain and you’ll find Thai, Japanese, Peruvian restaurants. An Irish restaurant is another matter entirely – a rare thing, almost an anomaly. The food exists, and it is magnificent. The story has just never quite made it out of the kitchen. Until now, perhaps. Cherie Denham’s second cookbook, The Irish Kitchen, published last autumn, has been doing quietly remarkable things since it arrived. Nigella Lawson – not a woman who gives her enthusiasm cheaply – has been one of its most vocal admirers. Writing on her website, she described both of Cherie’s books as things that ‘calm the soul with their exquisite, atmospheric photographs, warm words and simple, on-point recipes’, and called The Irish Kitchen ‘a love letter to Ireland, respectful of tradition but not hidebound by it’. Most tellingly of all, she wrote that there was not a recipe in it she didn’t long to ‘scuttle off into the kitchen to make’. When Nigella Lawson wants to scuttle, you pay attention. The book is the follow-up to The Irish Bakery, which won Cookbook of the Year at the Irish Food Writers’ Awards and The Irish Kitchen was shortlisted for the Fortnum & Mason prize from a field of 800 titles. Making the sequel felt daunting from the outset. ‘To say it was a challenge to follow what we did in the first book is an understatement,’ Cherie says. ‘Thousands of miles travelled, storms endured, recipes tested until my oven actually broke,’ she laughs. ‘But we did it.’ Cherie Denham is a champion of Irish cuisine. Photograph: Andrew Montgomery Her collaborator on both books is the photographer and publisher Andrew Montgomery, whose images have been stopping people mid-scroll since the book landed. He is a man she describes without hesitation as an absolute genius. Together they have made two books that feel less like recipe collections and more like acts of documentation. Here is what Irish food is, here is where it comes from, here is why it has always mattered. Here, finally, is the story told properly. Ninety-odd meticulously-tested recipes move between time-honoured classics – Irish stew, treacle farls, soda bread, colcannon, boiled bacon with parsley sauce – and more contemporary dishes that make the most of Ireland’s fields, woods, coasts and hedgerows. Shot entirely on location across the island, with essays on turfcutting, oyster farming, basket weavers and folklorists keeping old knowledge alive, it is as much a portrait of a country as it is a cookbook. ‘The kitchen has always been the heart of an Irish home,’ Cherie says. ‘The place where yarns are told, where the best local ingredients become something to share with the people you love. That’s what we wanted to capture.’ What she captured, it turns out, begins somewhere very specific. Not in a restaurant or a professional kitchen or a food writer’s carefully-curated larder, but in the farmhouse kitchens of Co Tyrone and Co Armagh, where the women who formed her cooked without fuss and without recipes, and where you learned not by being taught but by watching carefully and saying nothing as you did so. Her Granny Neill in Co Armagh kept her press stocked year-round with strawberry, raspberry and damson jam, and baked soda farls, apple tarts and lemon meringue pies as a matter of daily course. Bread came off the griddle and went straight into old white pillowcases to keep it soft. Her other grandmother, Granny Marshall, up the lane in the farmhouse above them in Co Tyrone, worked with whatever the garden and hedgerows gave her – rhubarb, gooseberries, things pulled from the ground or picked from the hedge. At Christmas the turkey arrived from a neighbour whole – feet, legs, neck, head, everything intact. Every single part of it went into something such as a stock or a soup, with nothing wasted, nothing even considered for wasting. That was simply how it was done. Bacon and cabbage is among the huge number of recipes in her book. Photograph: Andrew Montgomery ‘Those smells were just so evocative,’ Cherie says. ‘I remember thinking, she’s only put in a few ingredients, and suddenly there’s this incredible thing coming out. How has she done that?’ But it was her Auntie Evelyn who first cracked the world open. ‘She would travel to the Holy Land, years ago, when we were maybe six or seven, and she’d come back with dates and pomegranates and light cheese, things nobody in our part of Co Tyrone had ever laid eyes on,’ she recalls. ‘She’d just hand them round and say, here, try this.’ Cherie pauses. ‘She inspired me enormously. I think she was the one who made me understand that food could take you somewhere.’ The Irish Kitchen, published last autumn, has been doing quietly remarkable things since it arrived. Nigella Lawson – not a woman who gives her enthusiasm cheaply – has been one of its most vocal admirers Her mother Esther is a woman who deserves her own chapter. A farmer’s wife and a nursing sister throughout the Troubles, she simply didn’t have the time to stand at a stove with her daughters. But she gave them something far more durable than recipes. ‘The things that she saw in that hospital were horrendous,’ Cherie says quietly. This was a woman who had witnessed things most of us can barely imagine, who came home from those shifts and still found the clarity to raise four daughters with an iron sense of purpose. ‘She told all four of us – no matter what you do with your lives, you’re going to do something that means if anything ever happened to your husband, you can feed yourselves and your families,’ Cherie says. Esther is 86 now, still remarkable, still the person people call when they need steadying. Her granddad put it another way, with the same Northern Irish economy – ‘you’re as good as everyone else, but no better’. Between the two of them, they formed Cherie entirely. The love of food that took root in those kitchens carried Cherie, at 18, across the water with very little but with a plan. She worked first as a medical secretary – a job she freely admits she found wretched – saving every penny for cookery school fees. Then she landed a position in a French delicatessen on a London high street and felt, perhaps for the first time, that she was somewhere close to where she was supposed to be. The Irish Kitchen is a beautiful book dedicated to our national cuisine She put herself through Leith’s School of Food and Wine, and when her favourite teacher, Fee Birl, looked at her at the end of the course and said, ‘Cherie, I can see you’ve got a really strong work ethic, would you like to stay on as demonstration assistant?’ she said yes without hesitating. Two years teaching at Leith’s followed, then private cheffing, her own catering company, four summers in Tuscany cooking for Rumpole creator John Mortimer and his family – a household that handed her a blank budget and complete creative freedom, a luxury she still sounds faintly amazed by – and writing for food magazines. She formed a reputation built piece by piece, the only way she knew how. ‘I never fell with my backside in the butter,’ she says, with the quiet certainty of someone who has thought about this and means every word. ‘I struggled and worked hard for everything. My husband too. Nothing was given to us.’ The Hampshire kitchen she had extended specifically for teaching and demonstrations was flourishing until Covid closed it overnight. That period also brought the loss of her father – a pig and beef farmer who had spent his life close to the land and understood instinctively where food comes from and what it costs. The family watched his funeral on a WhatsApp video, none of them able to travel, scattered across counties and countries and closed borders. She mentions it briefly and moves forward. Some losses don’t have the right words yet. Around that time, she met Andrew Montgomery, and the books began. Her days now are shaped entirely by food, in a way that suggests less a job than a calling. The sourdough first thing, always. Then the cup of tea Andy brings to bed without fail. Then recipe testing, development, the constant work of events in London, demonstrations, research, the momentum of having a book in the world that people are actually cooking from. ‘I’m always thinking about new ideas,’ she says. ‘Always thinking about food. And then cooking for the family on top of everything else.’ She pauses, and you can hear the warmth in it. ‘My husband and my boys never take me for granted, not ever. Which makes me want to do even more for them.’ Cherie's Instagram has become its own community of people rediscovering the quiet pleasure of making things properly. Photograph: Andrew Montgomery Ask her what cooking means to her at its deepest, and she goes somewhere more lyrical than you might expect. On her Instagram – which has become its own community of people rediscovering the quiet pleasure of making things properly – she wrote something recently that her readers have been sharing ever since. That there is something quietly sacred about cooking with friends. The Aga humming, the kitchen warm, two sets of hands moving without rush, passing spoons, tasting, adjusting, sharing. Endless cups of tea poured between moments, conversation drifting easily, soft enough to hold, strong enough to drown any sorrow. A love language, she called it. Not loud, not crowded. Just two souls creating something simple, and staying a little longer than they need to. It is the most precise description she has given of what the Irish kitchen has always been – not a room, not a workspace, but the place where life actually happens. Where the old ways survive, if they survive at all. Where a woman who had witnessed horrendous things in a Troubles-era hospital still came home and told her daughters: whatever happens, you will be able to feed yourselves. Where a great-aunt handed a six-year-old a pomegranate and quietly changed the direction of her life. There is something about this particular moment, Cherie thinks, that makes people ready to hear it. We have spent years eating food that is not really food, and our bodies have started to notice. ‘A loaf from the supermarket might have 15 ingredients, a really good one needs four.’ She is clear on this, almost urgent. ‘People want to get back to basics. To keep their families healthy. And it’s not complicated. You don’t need much to start. Flour, buttermilk, salt and bicarbonate of soda. That’s a soda bread. Build everything else from there.’ She makes her own butter, her own bread, every single day. She buys the best ingredients she can afford and uses every last part of them. Stale bread becomes breadcrumbs. Leftover vegetables go into the freezer. ‘Thrift isn’t stinginess,’ she says. ‘It’s a cure for overconsumption.’ Her three sons – Harry, 22, Felix, 20, and 18-year-old Jonty, 18 – have grown up in this kitchen and can find their way around one themselves now. They make their own bread at university. They know how to stock a larder and use what is in it. ‘They’ll say to me, “Mummy, we really appreciate the way you cooked for us”,’ says Cherie. ‘That means everything.’ Ask her which Irish dishes she would most want to introduce to someone encountering the cuisine for the first time, and she does not hesitate: soda farls, potato bread, boiled bacon with parsley sauce and cabbage, colcannon and Guinness wheaten bread. If she were stranded on a desert island, the one thing she absolutely could not do without? She laughs, as if the answer is almost too obvious to say out loud. ‘Bread and butter. Though I’d want lemons too. And olive oil.’ She thinks for a moment. ‘You have to have something to look forward to.’ It is a very Cherie Denham answer. Rooted, practical, with just enough reach toward something more. The simplest things, made well, with care, in a warm kitchen with the door open and someone you love nearby. Which is, when you think about it, the whole point. The Irish Kitchen by Cherie Denham and Andrew Montgomery is published by Montgomery Press and available now, montgomerypress.co.uk/products/the-irish-kitchen Sorry we are not currently accepting comments on this article.