This week on The Go-To Food Podcast, Freddy and Ben sit down with the extraordinary Diana Henry, whose food writing has shaped how we cook and think for over two decades. With warmth, humour, and striking honesty, Diana shares stories from a life steeped in flavour — from her mother’s soda bread and Sunday puddings in Northern Ireland to her teenage awakening in France, where vinaigrette and apple tarts revealed food as art, culture, and freedom.

She recalls her early dinner parties — prawn cocktails, ratatouille, and Hamlyn cookbooks spread open on the counter — and the thrill of discovering writers like Claudia Roden and Alice Waters, who showed her how recipes could tell human stories. London brought new worlds: barrels of olives, tahini epiphanies, and a stint on TV Dinners, where she helped stage surreal futuristic feasts with silk and sandpaper.

There’s the pivotal Friday phone call that changed everything: being asked to ghostwrite Antonio Carluccio’s Vegetables, which proved she could build a book from scratch. That led to Crazy Water, Pickled Lemons, her breakout success — a deeply personal collection shaped by mood boards, travel dreams, and an instinct for beauty that made her one of the most admired voices in food.

In one of her most moving stories, Diana opens up about her time in hospital — the serious illness that almost ended her career, the long, slow recovery, and how the act of cooking helped her return to herself. Even at her weakest, she found comfort in ingredients and the language of recipes, proof that creativity and appetite can endure when everything else falls away.

This conversation is rich with memory, resilience, and joy — from French tarts to Carluccio’s kitchen, from the ICU to her writing desk. It’s a portrait of a life lived through food, and a reminder, as Diana says, that “there’s always something worth cooking for.”

Around the Table - 52 Essays on Food & Life by Diana Henry, Mitchell Beazley, £20

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