How to Eat a Peach Book Summary - How to Eat a Peach Book explained in key points

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How to Eat a Peach summary

Name: How to Eat a Peach
Rating: 3.9 (29 reviews)
Author: Diana Henry

Diana Henry

Menus, Stories and Places.

3.9 (29 ratings)

27 mins

What is How to Eat a Peach about?

How to Eat a Peach (2018) is part cookbook, part autobiography and part travelogue. Full of ideas for delicious menus and making a mean cocktail, these blinks tell you everything you need to know about hosting a memorable dinner party. They also give you a glimpse into the mind of a chef who has mastered the art of telling stories through food, and take you on a culinary tour of the places that have inspired her the most.

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How to Eat a Peach
summarized in 12 key ideas

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Key idea 1 of 12

What's in it for me? Travel around the world, one meal at a time.

Have you ever become restless, and wished you could expand your culinary horizons? And do you wish you could host elaborate dinner parties for friends, but feel like you don't have the skills?

If so, the blinks to How to Eat a Peach are required reading for you. You'll learn about how adventurous chef Diana Henry creates delicious menus for every occasion, from a sleepy lunch at home to a festive summer banquet. But even more, you'll learn about how she sees the world through food. Henry has been travelling since she was a teenager, and her cooking is formed by the places she's visited and lived in. Her menus capture the exhilaration of being in Mexico City at night, the pleasures of being on holiday on the Normandy coast, and the sensual shock of arriving in the bustle of Madrid.

The idea of having a dinner party can be intimidating because it sounds so formal, conjuring up images of starched white cloths and polite conversation. In these blinks, you'll learn that the best dinner parties actually happen in messy kitchens with plenty of cocktails. Good food doesn't have to be complicated or fancy; it's just about choosing quality ingredients and preparing them with care.

In these blinks, you will learn

how to make a delicious roast chicken from just two ingredients;
why a peach dessert shaped Henry's entire cooking philosophy; and
how spicy food can help to ease a broken heart.

Travel shaped Henry’s DNA as a chef.

Most 16-year-olds devote their time to scrawling angsty love notes in their diaries. Not Diana Henry. If an inquisitive friend had peeked into her notebooks at the time, they would have found recipe after recipe. Henry was keenly attuned to food from a young age. She carefully observed all the meals her mother prepared, and spent hours poring over Cordon Bleu cooking magazines.

For Henry, food was a way of getting to know the world even before she was able to travel. She grew up in Northern Ireland, which was isolated from the rest of Europe; travel was cumbersome and expensive. By poring over exotic dishes from the rest of the world, Henry wasn't only learning about food. She was learning about other ways of life.

Dinner parties should be all about having fun.

When you think of serving an elaborate three-course menu, you might imagine a group of people solemnly gathered around a white table cloth, sniffing their wine before they drink it and eating dainty morsels off china plates.

But that's not what Henry envisions when she's planning a meal. She grew up in an Irish family that loved food, but never hosted what they called dinner parties. Rather, they had parties that included lots of food, as well as loud chatter and good whiskey and dancing around the living room to Frank Sinatra.

Menus should balance rich, creamy dishes with light, fresh flavors.

One of the first menus that Henry made as a budding young cook consisted of buckwheat blinis swimming in butter, cream and smoked salmon; guinea fowl breasts with a creamy red wine sauce, and a soufflé to end. It was a rich creamy meal from start to finish without a fresh vegetable in sight!

Today, her tastes tend towards the lighter end of the scale. Most of her meals include only one course containing cream, and she makes sure to keep her food fresh with sharp flavors, citrus fruits, and fresh herbs. And almost every meal will feature a fresh green salad.

Eating seasonally is not only more ethical, it also makes for better meals.

The benefits of seasonal eating are now widely accepted. Not only is locally sourced food more ethical in terms of environmental impact, it also tastes better.

Henry has believed in these principles long before they were fashionable, but she also has another reason for eating seasonally. For her, meals are not only about food; they're events. Seasonal factors like the weather and even the fragrances wafting in from the garden will influence these events because they affect what people feel like eating.

The best dishes are daringly simple.

On her first trip to Italy, Henry was eating dinner outside on a summer evening when she noticed a waiter carrying a bowl of peaches over to the diners at a neighboring table. Everybody took a peach and then cut it up, dropping the slices into a glass of chilled Moscato wine. They left the slices to muddle in the wine for a while, then ate them and drank the peach-infused wine.

Henry was enthralled; the dessert had been savored as if it were the most complicated piece of patisserie, but it hadn't required any cooking, or even chopping. At the same time, it had been served with the utmost care and attention to detail. Everything was perfect, from the quality of the peaches to the glasses they were served in.

Henry’s menus reveal how varied French cuisine can be.

When we think of French food we may think of some classics, like snails in garlic or boeuf bourguignon. But there's so much more to it than that. Each region of France has its own delectable specialties, drawing on local produce and cooking traditions. Henry has travelled all over France, intent on discovering the tastes of every region. Her menus are steeped in these specific experiences and have an exacting regional specificity.

For example, a menu inspired by carefree holidays at the seaside in Brittany pays tribute to her memories of eating oysters with sourdough bread from a roadside stall in the wild wind, with the tang of the sea in the air.

Henry’s Spanish menu is intense and rich – just like the country itself.

Henry's first visit to Spain was a sensory overload; smells of leather and garlic, loud conversations, and crowded bars. She'd read the bittersweet descriptions of the country written by Lorca and seen the dark, somber portraits by El Greco, and being there felt just as moodily high-pitched as their art suggests.

Spain has fascinated and intrigued her ever since. The fraught political history under Franco reminds her of the Troubles she grew up in in Northern Ireland. She marvels at the capacity that people seem to have for embracing darkness and melancholy but also for living life so fully. There’s an electric aliveness in Spain that keeps people up dancing and drinking and talking and singing all night!

Spicy food and lots of mezcal can be good for heartbreak.

When her plane touched down in Mexico in the middle of the night, Henry felt exhilarated. The trip had been planned as a distraction from a broken heart; she'd just been dumped by her boyfriend. When she walked into her hotel at one in the morning to find a band playing La Bamba in a raucous bar serving shots of mezcal, she knew it would do the trick.

Mexico entranced her with its bright colors, and its vivid flavors. Mexican food turned out to be about so much more than the guacamole with tacos served in Europe. It was delicate, rich, and complex. Today, when she wants a jolt of the exuberant heat that helped to heal her heart, Henry prepares a menu of the dishes she loved so much while she was there.

Food can provide comfort, and remind us of home.

Food is about adventure, but it's also about comfort. And there's nothing more comforting than home. For Henry, the most nostalgic food will always be the kind of fare she ate when she was growing up in Northern Ireland. Things like Guinness bread, made with molasses and buttermilk, or seafood–like smoked eel, cockles, or mussels. The food makes her think of her father, and childhood holidays, and the exuberance of the place where she was born.

The key message here is: Food can provide comfort, and remind us of home.

You can plan your own menu inspired by Henry’s approach.

By now you've probably become very inspired by Henry's festive menus. But what about if you want to plan your own meal from scratch? Planning the perfect menu is easy, if you just follow some of Henry’s key principles.

The first question you can ask yourself is, what are you trying to say with the meal? Henry has said that her meals are like stories – they express something, be it a festive occasion, a memory of a place, or an ode to a particular season. What is it that you would like your guests to experience through your food?

Try out Henry’s iconic menu.

Want to try out the menu that inspired the title of Henry’s book -- and her entire cooking philosophy?

We’ve included some instructions here so you can make your own version of “How to Eat a Peach”.

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Best quote from How to Eat a Peach

Menus, no matter how simple, are made better by small things: flowers, candles, a pitcher of water.

—Diana Henry

About the Author

Diana Henry is a multiple award-winning food writer. Her book A Change of Appetite was voted Cookbook of the Year by the Guild of Food Writers in 2015, and A Bird in the Hand won a James Beard award in 2016. She also writes for the Sunday Telegraph, BBC Good Food and House and Garden, among many other outlets. Before becoming a food writer she worked as a TV producer for the BBC for ten years.

Who should read How to Eat a Peach?

Restless nomads who want to travel vicariously by reading about Henry’s adventures
Fans of skillful, unpretentious cooking
Home cooks who would love to host a dinner party but don’t know where to start

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