By Christine Salins
When I first saw the title of How To Eat A Peach (Hachette Australia, $39.99), I wondered what inspired the title as it doesn’t appear to be a book offering practical advice. The author, Diana Henry, says the book started out as a way of giving practical advice, but ended up being more about menus and place.
“Part of my cooking is about revisiting places, and even expressing feelings about particular places,” she says.
As a child growing up in Northern Ireland, Henry didn’t go abroad until she was 15, but that experience, on an exchange trip to France, was the start of a lifelong interest in food. To date she has written nearly a dozen books, including some of my favourites, like Crazy Water Pickled Lemons and Roast Figs Sugar Snow.
When she was 16, Henry began keeping a book of menus, a school exercise book that she had carefully covered in wrapping paper. (I can relate to this, my own collection of recipe scrapbooks still amongst my most prized possessions.)
Composing a menu is still her favourite part of cooking. “I don’t invite people round and then wonder what I’ll cook, I come up with a menu and then consider who would like to eat it.”
Menus aren’t just groups of dishes that the cook can manage on a practical level, they also have to work as a succession of flavours, says Henry. Menus can set the mood and take you places, from an afternoon at the seaside in Brittany to a sultry evening eating mezze in Istanbul.
How To Eat A Peach contains many of her favourite dishes in menus that take the reader through the seasons in different parts of the world. There’s a Cider and Gitanes menu (“falling in love with France”), Before The Passeggiata (“a southern Italian supper”), My Spanish Cupboard, In My Own Back Yard (“a British-Irish Sunday lunch”), and many other delicious menus.
This Provence-inspired recipe for Tomatoes and Anchovies comes from Henry’s How To Eat A Peach menu of six dishes for an elegant summer dinner. It’s here that the book’s title falls into place.
Henry believes cooking is all about “taking care of the small, seemingly unimportant things” and she tells of an experience in Italy when she first became aware of this.
“The diners at the next table didn’t have a fancy dessert, they just had a bowl of peaches and a bottle of cold Moscato. Everyone sliced their peach and dropped it into the wine. After a while they drank the wine – now imbued with the flavour of the peach – and ate the peach slices, which now tasted of the wine.
“This was not a complicated dish, but it was a lovely way to end a meal – seasonal, straightforward, caring, and even a little magical … Those peaches became a symbol of what good food is all about.”
Tomates Provençales aux Anchois
Serves 6
8–9 large plum tomatoes, halved
50–100g jar or can of anchovies, drained (reserve the oil)
2 fat garlic cloves, very finely sliced
sea salt flakes and freshly ground
black pepper
100g stale coarse white breadcrumbs (about 1 day old is good)
finely grated zest of ½ unwaxed lemon
leaves from 4 thyme sprigs
2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
Preheat the oven to 190°C. Put the tomatoes into a gratin dish (you need a big one) in which
they can lie in a single layer. They need to be quite snug, but not too squashed up otherwise they sweat; you want some of their moisture to evaporate, as it makes them sweeter.
Halve each anchovy and stick some slices of garlic and some anchovy into each tomato half. Spoon 2 tablespoons of the oil from the anchovies over the tomatoes. Season.
Toss the breadcrumbs with the lemon zest, thyme and seasoning. Scatter on top of the tomatoes and sprinkle on the extra virgin olive oil. Bake in the oven for 30–40 minutes, or until the tomatoes have
shrunk and the top is golden brown.
From: How to Eat a Peach, by Diana Henry ($39.99), published by Hachette Australia.
