Around the Table

A First Taste of the Food Readers Book Club

Welcome to the first essay for the Food Readers Book Club here on Mastermind for Food Writers. In this post, we, Linda Naylor and Liza Debevec, give you a little background on the book we’ll be reading in our upcoming first meeting and share some of our personal reflections on it.

We will be meeting on June 3rd at 4pm BST, 5pm CET, 11am EDT, 8 am PDT and you can find the registration link here: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/_lEgoI5yShOJHbk_kUaBkw [NB: Registration will close 24h before the meeting and you will receive a personalised link to enter the call- make sure to save that email]

We understand that this time is not convenient for our members in large parts of Asia-Pacific. Because of this we want to invite members to use their newsletters/publications to write their reflections on the book, tag our group and also other readers, so we can make this book club into more of a moveable feast.

And now to our selection for this first meet up:

Diana Henry is an award-winning food writer and the author of almost a dozen cookbooks, including How to Eat a Peach, Roast Figs, Sugar Snow, and Crazy Water, Pickled Lemons. Known for blending recipes with evocative storytelling and a strong sense of place, she has built a loyal readership through her long-running column for The Telegraph in the UK, as well as contributions to several food magazines.

Diana Henry (Photo source: thegannet.co)

Her work often moves between the practical and the poetic: one moment offering precise, usable recipes, the next reflecting on memory, travel, and the emotional life of food. She grew up in Northern Ireland and, as a child, travelled widely in her imagination to places her family could not go—an early habit that continues to shape her writing, where curiosity about the world and a deep attachment to home cooking coexist. Her books frequently invite readers not just to cook, but to think about why we cook, who we cook for, and how food connects us to places, people, and different moments in our lives.

We will be reading her book, Around the Table which came out in 2025 and is a collection of 52 essays about food, some of which were previously published in magazines, cookbooks and elsewhere.

From Liza:

I discovered Diana Henry through her book How to Eat a Peach, probably in late 2018 or early 2019, at my friend Margaret’s house in Nairobi. Margaret has, like me, spent most of her life living in Sub-Saharan Africa, her career dedicated to supporting research and policy in the field of nutrition and agriculture. Unlike me, she is still living there and has, with her husband Peter, built a beautiful home in Nairobi, with a gorgeous kitchen and a library full of books, including amazing cookbooks.

I remember being intrigued by the title of the book, the feel of the cover—which actually feels like peach skin—and the concept of the book, which, unlike many cookbooks, is organised around menus rather than main food groups. When I moved back from Ethiopia to Europe in the spring of 2020, this was one of the first books I purchased. During the pandemic, I started baking her olive oil chocolate cake and delivering it to friends’ doorsteps while we were not allowed to socialise in person. To this day, that is the recipe I have made the most times, and I shared it in a post here in December (and no, I am not a baker nor a food photographer, and my cake doesn’t look as good as it tastes):

Three Useful Secrets - Holiday Edition

Over time, I raved to people about Henry’s recipes, bought another one of her books, Simple, and kept thinking about how to justify buying all the other ones I had come across in Margaret’s cookbook library over subsequent visits. I have made the olive oil chocolate cake and mango cheeks in ginger and lime syrup for the ladies in the Nairobi women’s book club while they discussed James by Percival Everett. I have made pears poached in hibiscus flower syrup for friends in Nairobi on several occasions, and they are always an absolute hit.

Pears poached in hibiscus based on Diana’s recipe (Photo: Liza Debevec)

So, you can say I’ve been a fan of Henry’s recipes for a while. It is no surprise that I lobbied for her book of essays Around the Table to be on the selection for our Food Readers’ Book Club, and I was delighted to see that it was the top selection in our poll.

While many of the essays are not new and have been featured in her cookbooks, they are all an absolute delight to read. I was transported to places I have known and loved, as well as to places I had never heard of, and to dishes I would never have considered making or eating. I love the imaginative and curious tone of the pieces and the pure love for food and cooking that oozes out of every page.

Sometimes I would say, “Oh, I know this place she’s writing about,” and for a moment I feel like I, alone, have an intimate connection with Henry. It is as if the two of us are sharing a special, food-related secret. When I read that she had travelled to a destination in France in a very roundabout way just to spend a night at a hotel in Chinon so she could try their famous jam collection, I yelled out, “Oh, that is Jaime Schler’s hotel!” And I know Jamie because she joins Mastermind calls I convene. You may laugh, but I somehow felt closer to Diana Henry and her writing.

So, for me, reading Diana Henry always feels like an invitation into an intimate space, filled with tea and oranges, with cakes and roasts and soups and so many other things. She is really like Suzanne from Leonard Cohen’s song, which I listened to on repeat as a child because my father loved Cohen.

From Linda:

I first became acquainted with Diana Henry through How to Eat a Peach, as well. Over the past few months, I picked the book up time and again to luxuriate in Diana’s casual, comforting tables, and to imagine the tastes of food cultures I had yet to experience.

Cooking is storytelling. It connotes how we savor the splendid and the everyday, and the celebration of gifting others with our time and our creativity. There is always a story to tell.

For me, Diana’s expression of food abundance – and global ingredients and foodways – converge with Alice Waters’ dedication to the rich simplicity of a single ingredient. Each writer shows us her refined, yet unmistakable enthusiasm for the flavor of a perfect piece of fruit.

Yet, Diana introduces us to warm spices and savory fruit pairings with emphasis on regional, seasonal dishes. She helps us to imagine flavor, to imagine what a dish might become. Her inherent talent, gently guiding us into imagining what our own foodways offer, aligns with one of the commitments I express to my own readers.

The expression of the Food Readers Book Club as a moveable feast shows our intention to include readers everywhere in the world, encouraging their comment and narrative participation as an expected component of the club structure.

Liza and I are thrilled to support the synthesis of international food writers’ perspectives on that which we know to be common to us all.

We also reached out to Diana, by slipping into her Instagram DMs, and she kindly responded with some points of reflection that we want to share with you here:

“Just a few thoughts on what was interesting/challenging in putting the book together.

Did I edit pieces that were years old or did I leave them as they first appeared?

I initially thought it was both honest and ‘pure’ - faithful to the text - to leave them. Then I decided to put a couple of essays together. I had written about pumpkins several times and had also found out things since the essays had appeared. I did truncate a couple of essays and added to them if I thought it gave the reader more. I did this a few times but that was all. I think your ‘honesty’ is an issue, to a certain extent.

There was one piece on spices, which had been written for Crazy Water, that felt overlong and confused. Again, was it honest to change this essay? It was the only piece I had written for any of my books which I thought was just overlong and convoluted. I cut it down and I think that was the right thing to do.

This is much more practical - should I refer to my now ex-husband as ex-husband or husband. That’s to do with the person you are now and the life you now lead. It seemed to be dishonest in a different way. I referred to him as my ex-husband.

There was one more thing that bothered me - most of the early stuff was very enthusiastic, it sounded young. It was by a person who no longer exists. I wanted to play down the Pollyanna-ish voice. I wouldn’t let myself do that. It was written and you can’t go back and erase your voice. I wonder what your readers would think of that.

As a writer it is a very enriching exercise - you learn a lot about how your voice has developed. One of the good things about that is that you are pleased - proud, happy - of your work (not all, but most).

I read some pieces and thought ‘Did I really write that?’ ”

Diana ended her email with these words: “Thrilled that you have chosen my book and I hope that you get a lot out of it.”

We said that we want this book club to be more about presence and dancing in the moment kind of discussion, than elaborate preparation, but we still wanted to share some possible discussion/reflection questions before the meeting. Here they are:

• Was there a particular essay or a passage that stayed with you after reading? If there were many, maybe you can choose a few of your top ones that you can bring to the discussion.

• Diana Henry often writes about food as a way of travelling, across places, memories, and moods. Did any of her essays transport you somewhere familiar or unexpected?

• How does her way of combining recipes with personal stories affect how you experience the food she writes about? Does it make you more or less likely to cook her dishes?

• Was there a dish, ingredient, or place mentioned in the book that you felt particularly curious about?

• Henry’s writing often carries a sense of intimacy, as if you are being let into a private moment. Did you experience that? If so, where did it show up most strongly for you?

• If you were to write a short food essay inspired by your own life, what memory, place, or dish would you begin with?

We invite you to bring some reflections on these questions to the Book Club Meeting on June 3rd. And if you feel like it, do share in notes and posts and you are welcome to tag us in them. We would love to read about your experience reading this book.

Some additional resources for anyone who wants to go down the rabbit hole:

Diana Henry’s Instagram account: https://www.instagram.com/dianahenryfood/
An interview with Diana Henry on a podcast: https://thetraveldiariespodcast.com/episodes/diana-henry-food-writer/ [note: there are about four minutes of ads at the start that you can fast-forward through]

On Substack: for those who have a paid subscription to India Knight’s Home newsletter, there is a post about Diana Henry’s desk here:

Me & My Desk: Diana Henry

Also, Mark Diacono is hosting a food writers’ workshop with Diana Henry herself in October. Check this post on Substack for more information:

Food writing retreat with Diana Henry and Mark Diacono

We hope to see many of you on June 3rd, and until then we look forward to your posts and thoughts about the book popping in our Substack feed. Happy reading, happy cooking and happy eating to you all!

Linda & Liza