I adore well-written food essays, and Diana Henry definitely knows how to write them.

These are not new essays: they are collected from the many books that Henry has written over the lat few decades. As she acknowledges in the Introduction, this means that the essays follow changes in her own life – both children now adults – as well as changes in the British food scene, which is the audience she primarily writes for. Much easier now to find preserved lemons and sumac and other such ingredients that were ‘exotic’ some years ago. So it’s an interesting time capsule in that way.

Are there elements of this reflecting a deeply privileged life? Of course. Henry has travelled a lot, and she has visited some amazing restaurants – although she is at pains to point out that most of the places she visits are not the very high-end places, and that when she does get to those, it’s a determined effort. That said, she does still manage to buy a truffle every couple of years; and travel appears to have been straightforward for her over her whole life. Having said all of that, a book like this is aspirational – and it’s also armchair travelling. It fills those niches neatly; I will never get to have the experiences that she did, but I can enjoy hers vicariously.

I have several recipes online that I want to try already – socca, in particular – and I was reminded that you can make vin d’orange and that one might make that with mandarins instead. And if I were reading this in paper, I would have dog-eared pages or dug out the sticky notes to keep track of all of the ideas they inspired (apricot and lavender jam). As it is, I do believe I might need to buy this in paper. That’s a mark of a good book.