Sheridan, Monica (1912–93), cookery expert, broadcaster, and journalist, was born Monica Elizabeth Treanor on 29 January 1912 at Augher Castle, Co. Tyrone, daughter of Hugh Treanor, prosperous cattle- and sheep-farmer at nearby Killaney, and Mary Ann Treanor (née Devine). She had six brothers – Hugh, Gerald, Maurice, William (‘Bill’), George, and Walter – and six sisters – Kathleen, Agnes, Dympna, Eva, Eileen, and Mannix.
Educated locally, Monica was influenced from an early age by the rural domesticity of her centenarian maternal great-grandmother, in whose thatched cottage kitchen she absorbed informal cookery skills and the south Ulster folk traditions which she later recalled in her writing. Although her more affluent grandmother abandoned much of the culinary tradition, Monica's mother and aunts were all expert cooks who baked, preserved fruit, and lived a relatively idyllic lifestyle in the Clogher valley area. Monica and her sisters were convent-educated, but she admitted to being a poor scholar who went on to take an undistinguished BA in English and French at UCD. In May 1939 she married fellow graduate Niall Sheridan (qv), eldest child of William Sheridan and his wife Josephine (née McSorley) of Co. Meath. Niall was international publicity officer with the Irish Tourist Board, as well as a published poet and a man of letters whose UCD cohort of the mid 1930s had been a remarkable literary group which included fellow poet Donagh MacDonagh (qv), actor Cyril Cusack (qv), and writer Brian O'Nolan (qv) (‘Flann O'Brien’), friends whom the Sheridans retained for life.
Niall and Monica Sheridan had one daughter, Catherine (b. 1940). They lived a happy home life, Niall moving to RTÉ (1960) as sales manager, after managing Fógra Fáilte (1952–60) and having his play ‘Seven men and a dog’ performed at the Abbey Theatre (1958). In 1962, however, when Telefís Éireann began broadcasting as Ireland's national television service, Monica quickly became a household name by presenting her own live cookery series, ‘Monica's kitchen’, its set designed by Canadian architect Bill McCrow. Although broadcasting was in black and white, her studio kitchen was decorated in fashionable pink and duck-egg blue. In its streamlined surroundings she demonstrated new kitchen products.
As Monica Sheridan presided over her state-of-the-art studio kitchen, she spoke unselfconsciously in a comfortable, familiar manner that engaged a regular national audience of men, women, and children. She was a natural screen performer with a subversive disregard both for the standard rules of cookery and for how ‘they’ in Telefís Éireann might respond to her unpredictable asides and irreverent sense of humour. A companionable but authoritative voice gave her departures from the received kitchen etiquette a daring seal of approval: by famously licking her fingers she horrified traditionalists and delighted younger audiences. Sheridan also played to the studio technicians and cameramen, for whom, as viewers were informed, she prepared her demonstration meals.
Known familiarly as ‘Monica’, she featured in other programmes, but audiences most appreciated the singular style of her presentation in ‘Monica's kitchen’. Their first encounter with exotic foods such as pasta, pizza, and quiche helped to revolutionise Irish culinary expectations in the 1960s. Winning a Jacob's television award in 1963 for ‘putting personality into cooking’, her career continued unabated until 1965, when she was dropped from ‘Home for tea’, a series that succeeded ‘Monica's kitchen’. Her dismissal followed an unauthorised appearance in a television advertisement promoting Irish bacon products for the Pigs and Bacon Commission. The subsequent controversy, and Sheridan's characteristic outspokenness in endorsing what she had believed was a food campaign of national importance, resulted in her rapid reinstatement on television.
She wrote articles for various publications, including the Irish Times and Creation and Gourmet (New York), but her classic cookery books – Monica's kitchen (1963), The art of Irish cooking (1964), and My Irish cookbook (1965) – were her most important written legacy. They adopted the same informal and irreverently humorous style as her television programmes. Amusingly macabre in her description of recipes and the unpleasantness of dispatching live fish and fowl, her books were nonetheless serious culinary works and effectively formed a three-volume series. In the last of these the author acknowledged the influence of In Ireland long ago (1962), the classic work of folklorist Kevin Danaher (qv), as she recalled her youth in rural Co. Tyrone. Remembering it as a good life, she dismissed sentimentality by remarking how time blurs all but the best memories.
Living with her husband in retirement until the mid 1970s at 7 de Vesci Terrace, Monkstown, Co. Dublin, and latterly at Park House, Ratoath, Co. Meath, Monica Sheridan died 22 April 1993 at Ashcroft nursing home, Navan, Co. Meath, after a long illness. She was buried at Glasnevin cemetery. Niall Sheridan died in 1998.