Too hot to cook

Diana Henry’s full-flavoured menu is designed for sultry summer nights

Menus are like short stories or movements in music, Diana Henry says. Self-contained but inherently connected, each course of a carefully crafted meal has the power to evoke distinct emotions.

“I’ve always really loved putting (menus) together. I started doing it when I was a teenager,” says the awardwinning author. “I will put menus together on the tube and they’re menus for meals that I won’t cook. I won’t have time to cook all the menus I came up with. It’s just one of my favourite aspects of cooking, really.”

In How to Eat a Peach, her 11th cookbook, Henry explores the interconnectedness of food and place. From “falling in love with France” to a Turkish-inspired feast “for when the temperature soars” (recipes follow), many of the collection’s 100 recipes conjure thoughts of travel. In essays that accompany each of the 24 menus, Henry draws on memories of journeys and times past.

“Food is not ever just food. It’s always about the kind of sense that it gives you of a place. And that might not always be positive,” she says. “Sometimes food and place is complicated. And I think food is one of the (ways) we can become more comfortable, more connected to somewhere.”

One of the U.K.’s bestloved food writers, Henry began to cook at age six while growing up in Northern Ireland. She bought her first cookbook when she was 12 years old and started writing menus in a designated, wrapping-paper-clad notebook when she was 16. A selfdescribed “menu nerd,” she learned as much about crafting menus from reading as she did from eating.

“I think you just pick up this facility of knowing what works together,” she says, citing Sally Clarke’s weekly menus for her London restaurant and Alice Waters’s Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook as early inspirations. “Apart from very obvious rules like not making a meal too rich, I don’t have hard and fast rules in my head about it. I just seem to be able to come up with menus that I think work.”

Practical menu-planning tips – such as restricting the use of cream to one course – are peppered throughout the book. But it’s the spirit of Henry’s approach to food that shines through. Whether laying the table with linens and silver cutlery or pushing piles of books aside to make room for the plates, serving a multi-course meal to friends needn’t be a fussy affair.

“Cooking and eating is about taking pleasure in the things that are quite ordinary in a way, things that we do every day but seeing what’s special about them. So I suppose that’s where the menu comes in as well,” she says. “It’s not about showing off or doing anything fancy or trying to show that you have a wonderful lifestyle… I think a lot of the pleasure of food goes on in your imagination, in your head. And for me, it’s not about lifestyle at all.”