Erken was born Schønberg in Christiania (now Oslo). Her father Edvard Schønberg who was a professor in medicine put great emphasis on the importance of food and her mother was an accomplished cook from whom Henritte first learnt to prepare food.
One Norwegian newspaper included her in their list of the most important 100 Norwegians in the last 200 years. To obtain better qualifications, she took courses in home economics in Norway and later she learned cookery in Berlin and Edinburgh. Starting in 1897, she wrote a regular column for the women"s magazine Urd which mostly had readers of upperclass or upper middleclass background.
After living from 1904 to 1904 in Levanger, Central Norway where Henriette organised some courses in home economics, they settled at a farm in Vang in Eastern Norway.
There Henriette started organising education in home economics. She offered courses for future housewives (Norwegian: husmorskole) and a school for aspiring teachers of home economics.
She also held lectures and demonstrations all over the country. Something she continued after she closed her educational programs in 1927.
Her presentations often focused on making foods from cheap Norwegian products like milk and fish.
Erken was awarded the King"s Medal of Merit in gold in 1916. The biography Henriette Schønberg Erken. En norgeshistorie sett fra kjøkkenbenken (English: Henriette Schønberg Erken A history of Norway seen from the kitchen table) written by Maria Berg Reinertsen was published in 2013. While her big cookbook was promoted as being based on recipes developed at Erken"s kitchen, food columnist and chef Andreas Viestad has speculated that part of her books were copied from foreign cookbooks. He uses as an example her comprehensive writings on how to kill and prepare a turtle for soup, and questions whether there were any live turtles in Norway at that time. In connection with the bicentenary of the Norwegian Constitution in 2014, a group of professionals put together by the newspaper VG named Erken the 99th most important person in Norwegian history in the period 1814–2014.
