Diana Henry on why she cooks 'away from home' food and her travel inspired recipes

It's her 11th cookbook, and arguably her most personal yet. Divided into seasons, each section has a story behind it about her longing to travel after growing up in a Northern Irish seaside town

Despite not going abroad on holiday until her teens, Henry knew from a young age that she would not stay living in Northern Ireland (Chris Terry)

Food writer Diana Henry remembers going to Morelli’s – an ice cream parlour in the Northern Ireland seaside town where she grew up – and seeing a poster on the wall of the Amalfi Coast. The brilliant blue ocean pictured in the poster couldn’t have been more different than the flat, grey Atlantic Ocean she knew. “It was so vivid I wasn’t even sure it existed. I thought somebody might have made it up.” For Henry, Morelli’s was more than ice cream; it fed a longing inside her to travel.

And it is these longings – for people and places and meals – that fill the pages of How to Eat a Peach, Henry’s eleventh cookbook and arguably her most personal. “This is a book that says this is me. This is my style of food and this is what I think about food.”

The recipes such as pink grapefruit and basil ice cream or roast tomatoes, fennel and chickpeas with preserved lemons and honey are both delicious and doable.

The book is divided into seasons and constructed as a series of menus, an idea her publisher rejected three times (“They didn’t think people would buy that”) but eventually agreed.

Each chapter contains a single menu and each menu holds a story. For some, like the chapter Constant’ Cravings, it’s no more than a paragraph about her unquenchable desire for the flavours of south-east Asia, China, Korea and Japan. “Chillies, pickled ginger, fish sauce, limes and palm sugar all temporarily sate a longing that never goes away.” Other chapter essays, such as Take Me Back to Istanbul or If You’re Going to San Francisco, are several pages long – a rarity when many publishers are trimming, or eliminating altogether, narrative from cookbooks.

She wrote the essays last she says, after the recipes were done. She likens the process of writing them, to be being immersed in water. “Your actual current life is just not there. You’re so far into your past and memories.” She wrote intensively at night often until 3am. “And as an experience, I love that kind of writing. It leaves you kind of wrung out, but I do really like it.”

Some chapters, such as ‘Take me back to Istanbul’, are long – a rarity in cookbook publishing (Laura Edwards)

The result is a collection, not only of recipes, but also stories – of her French boyfriend Daniel, his Grandma, oeufs mayo and leeks vinaigrette, or a picture book called Rosa Too Little that fed her desire to visit New York City. She worried that these stories would be too much her and would leave readers and cooks scratching their heads. But the opposite happened. People have written to say how the book resonates with them and feels, in their words ‘familiar’. And it’s true because even if you’ve never met a man named Luis in a bar in Madrid, you’ve probably experienced the heightened sense of visiting a new place where things feel scary and exciting in equal measure.

Henry captures that feeling of sensory overload beautifully and acknowledges that while she loves to travel, it can be overwhelming. “Places get to me and it’s both good and difficult to handle.”

Henry knew from an early age that she wouldn’t stay in Northern Ireland. “I had a really strong sense of the other and far away from early on and maybe it’s because Northern Ireland is so small.” As a child her family would go to the Dublin airport on holidays – not to fly but simply to watch planes taking off. When she started travelling, first to France as a teenager, there was an immediate thrill that was linked inextricably with the food she ate. “Cooks write a lot about cooking the food of home…I was always cooking away from home.

There’s practical wisdom that she imparts in How to Eat a Peach: don’t have two courses that need to be cooked at the last minute, try not to use ingredients more than once, and don’t fill guests up on the first course so that they lose their appetite for the second.

It’s advice designed to make entertaining easier and more pleasurable. The pleasure for her is in the cooking and planning and thinking ‘what would she like to eat?’ or starting with an idea for a pudding and working backwards to the main and starter.

But it’s the words and the food that draw you back to How to Eat a Peach. “We are connected all the time through what we cook and what we come across and what countries we’ve been to,” she says.

“It’s amazing when you think of yourself and this kind of network of things that go from you to all over the world. It is quite incredible really.”

How To Eat A Peach by Diana Herny is published by Mitchell Beazley (£25) and is out now

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