Diana Henry's books are dumbfounding.
She wrote a book on Nordic food that was warm and cosy. She wrote a book on preserving that was accessible and fun. Her book on Mediterranean food brought Africa slap-bang into the equation.
And now she has written a book on healthful eating that is lush, rich and bounteous.
She seems to see the world in a different light from the conventional viewpoint. There is not just a sublime internal editor at work in her brain, but something that reminds us of the great Jorge Luis Borges short story, The Aleph. To make the short story shorter, let's just say that The Aleph is all about a device whereby one can see everything in the world All At The Same Time.
Ms Henry's books are like that. You dove into her debut, “Crazy Water, Pickled Lemons”, and you could see all of the Mediterranean, not just the Med in the present, but the Med in the past. It was as if Fernand Braudel set off to write a cookery book with Elizabeth David, and the two great explorers channeled it through the curiosities – and the wicked, creative pen – of Ms Henry.
It was an explosive debut, and she hasn't taken her food off the throttle ever since.
What has been remarkable is not just the volume of work she produces, but the stratospheric quality levels. She is one of the great cookery writers and her new book, “A Change of Appetite” is another scintillating exploration of food and its cultures, seen from every angle, sampled from every port, understood through the prism of maturity and personal development and intellectual hunger, as much as physical hunger.
On one page there will be “seared tuna with chilli and peanut dressing” and a couple of pages later it's “roast red mullet with tahini dressing and barley tabbouleh”, but every dish is refracted though her very personal medium. And, even though a lot of the text is to do with health and diets, it's neither preachy nor dull. In fact, as ever, the prose skips along like a kid doing hopscotch.
As usual, I anticipate cooking every single dish in the book.
Diana Henry, “A Change of Appetite” (Mitchell Beazley)
