Sally McKenna: ‘women have had a huge influence on food’

For anyone who has even a passing engagement in the Irish food world, Sally McKenna is a familiar name. Whether you’ve come across her through the 35+ years’ worth of guidebooks that she produces with her husband, John; her own seminal Extreme Greens book on seaweed; talking to cheesemakers on a panel at an event; or backstage working at music festivals, she’s a gently encouraging presence.

Sally is good at making sure that nothing falls between the cracks. With her encyclopedic knowledge of who’s who and what’s been done in Irish food, she’s also conscious of the importance of sharing this information. It’s something that she and John have done consistently through their publications, right from the very first Irish Food Guide back in 1989.

Beyond the big, wide-angle Irish food picture, there has also been a focus on home, which is in the countryside outside Durrus in west Cork. It’s where the couple brought up their three children – Connie (31), Samuel (28) and PJ (27).

However, she is also used to life on the road – they’ve been taking frequent research trips for more than 30 years; on the week of our interview, Sally is in Dublin, en route to Cork City for a dinner and an overnight stay before returning to Dublin again.

She has clear memories of the juggle in those early years, setting up their own publishing company, Estragon Press, and editing cookbooks.

“It’s such a hard time when you’re doing it. You do feel that you’re just bad at everything,” she says, “but you’re not. It’s hard but don’t beat yourself up because you’ll get there in the end.”

The McKenna children have been involved in their parents’ work from a young age.

“Connie was a restaurant baby,” Sally remembers, “tucked under the restaurant table in her little Moses basket when she was a month old and stealing the show when we filmed our [1990s McKenna’s Ireland] television programmes.”

Although the three children are now studying and working between Barcelona, Cork and Berlin – Sally doing remote parenting via Whatsapp and Instagram – the family work together on festival events. Samuel manages food stages at a variety of festivals including Electric Picnic, Lattitude Festival in the UK and Kaleidoscope in Co Wicklow.

Family involvement

“We love working with them. [Samuel]’s Mr Festival, it’s him and his team. I’m in the kitchen and I just go and have fun. They treat us like two old folk, putting up our tent for us. They’re all very sweet.”

Like her own children, Sally’s interest in food was sparked from an early age. Born in Nairobi, the first part of her life was spent in Fiji, where she was exposed to different food cultures. With an Irish grandfather, however, Ireland was in her blood.

“I grew up listening to the Abbey Tavern Singers. I have always felt Irish.”

Sally came to live in the north of Ireland in 1970. As a teenager in Belfast, she had a fateful encounter with the young John McKenna, who was born in the city. “We first met about 1977,” she remembers, “I think I was 15 and he was 17. I was walking down the street, we started to have a conversation and that was it. We got married in 1982.”

“We were living in Dublin during the 1980s. I was a typesetter and always wanted to write a cookbook. John was a lawyer and a music journalist and it all came together in 1989 when we wrote our first book together, he from the writing angle, I from the food angle.”

John is the writer – I couldn’t even begin to write the way he writes – and I navigate the direction, like the publisher or the editor

Their professional partnership has weathered many changes in the publishing world. Starting off as a typesetter at Dublin-based music magazine Hotpress, Sally also wrote a food column for the Irish Independent.

“I had one of those old-fashioned editors who would sit behind a desk and tell you what you haven’t done right, a classic newspaper experience,” she says.

“Then we went into books. It’s been crazy navigating every change in publishing because of all these platforms that have come in and the different ways of publishing. We’ve done apps and books and YouTube and social media and it’s been fascinating, going from typesetting to Substack, but I don’t think you’ll ever really replace books.”

One of the hallmarks of the McKennas’ work is their ability to pick up on publishing trends and run with them.

“That’s partly because there’s two of us,” Sally acknowledges. “John is the writer – I couldn’t even begin to write the way he writes – and I navigate the direction, like the publisher or the editor. So we’re lucky. We couldn’t have done it without each other. We’re absolutely a team and we get on pretty well.”

As well as keeping a professional eye on publishing – and encouraging many food writers as they start out, including this one – Sally is well placed to give an overview of the Irish food landscape.

“At every point where there’s been a huge paradigm change, there’s been a woman there in the forefront or as part of the team. Women have had a huge influence on Irish food,” she says.

One shift she particularly noticed in the late 1980s was the advent of a more relaxed dining experience.

“I remember the restaurants were either swanky places where the menu was always in French – and the chef was always male – or they were diners where you went for fried food. And then suddenly Liz Mee opened Elephant & Castle in Dublin and you could get chicken wings and celery and blue cheese. It was affordable and the menu was in English…she was a woman at the forefront of a pivotal regime change.”

Modernising cuisine

Sally’s agents of change are a broad, country-wide list: “Bernadette O’Shea (Truffles Pizza, Sligo), Veronica Steele (Milleens Cheese), Penny Lang (biodynamic grower), Georgina O’Sullivan (an important voice in bureaucracy - Bord Bia, the Irish Livestock and Meat Board etc).

Also, regional chefs who were defining and modernising regional cuisine: Harriet Leander (Nimmos Galway), Pat Moore (The Beginnish, Dingle) and Maura Foley (Kenmare). Lately, Kristin Jensen (Nine Bean Rows, Blasta Books), redefining Irish publishing, and Aishling Moore (Goldie Cork) helping us navigate the fishing industry.

There are more, but those are off the top of my head,” she says.

“When I look back at what I consider to be the great events that have really pushed change, there’s always a woman there. I don’t think that they get enough credit.”

At a time when, as Sally points out, “Dublin was everything” in the media landscape, there were women outside the Pale making “distinctive food that shaped what Irish food became”.

She cites Ireland’s four female Michelin-starred chefs, from Myrtle Allen (who held her star from 1975 to 1980), through Catherine Healy at Dunderry Lodge (1986-1989), west Cork’s Kei Pilz in The Shiro Japanese Dinner House (1996-2002), right up to Danni Barri at Michael Dean’s Epic (2016-2017).

“I have their menus and I feel as if I have a responsibility to talk about them because they’re not really celebrated. They were extraordinary.”

After having eaten in the best restaurants, stayed in luxurious hotels and encountered the most adventurous food throughout Ireland, Sally’s still glad that they’ve made their home in the west.

“It was the right decision for us. We were just drawn to west Cork. We saw the way the cheese makers lived, the quality of the basic food and the shops and we thought this is where we want to be,” she says.

“I have lived all over the place, and I have an Irish passport, but,” she says proudly, “I’m a citizen of west Cork.”