Peaches and Moscato

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It was her first trip to Italy. At a restaurant, next to her, she noticed a table with no fancy desserts, just a bowl of peaches and a bottle of Moscato. Everyone sliced their peach and dropped it into the wine. After a while, they drank the wine, scented with peach, and then ate the peach slices softened by the wine.

It was a seasonal, straightforward and caring way to end a meal. Everything felt natural and easy. Nothing was trying to be more than it needed to be.

One of my recent favourite reads is Around the Table by Diana Henry. The stories she shares around food keep returning to ideas of restraint, attention and appreciation. I found myself thinking about how much of making sits in the same space.

Food is about history, geography, our habits, imagination, and how we related to each other.
- Diana Henry, Around the Table

Think of the restaurants you’ve been to that stay with you. The best menus are often simple. There is nothing fussy, but a few lines, carefully chosen and enough to suggest a place, a mood, a way of eating. As Diana Henry writes, the best meals create a world in a few lines, while still leaving room for imagination. Like short stories, they hold a quiet kind of poetry.

Before anything is cooked, before anyone arrives, your imagination of the experience is slowly being framed. You begin to picture the meal, the table and the evening ahead. Without you realising, much has already been decided for you.

It feels similar in other forms of making. Long before something is used, an impression has already begun to form. These are often from the smallest of things such as a few words, a shape or a feeling.

As Diana Henry writes:

With food, you don’t have to buy an airline ticket or don a backpack; the magic of the unfamiliar is there, right beside the everyday, for you to bring into your kitchen.

We all assume creativity comes from novelty like new places, new ideas but this challenges the idea that something new has to come from somewhere else. Often, it is already there, waiting to be seen differently. Like the simplest ingredients on the table, they can be re-used again and again to create something new each time.

Creativity, whether in food or elsewhere, seems to be less about novelty and more on attention. It is not always a question of having more — more time, more resources, more money. Often, constraint is what gives shape to the work. With less, there is more intention to what is chosen, what is left out, and how much is allowed to remain simple.

A meal is not only about the dishes on the table, but about the pleasure of eating with people. The table is as important as the oven or the hob. At the table, it is no longer about preparation, but about presence and intention. Hosting becomes a kind of care, shaped by attention to others.

In that sense, great creative work is not so different from hosting. It is about how someone else will experience what has been made, not just how it is made.

Abundance can feel generous, especially with food, but generosity is not always about quantity. Great restaurants often balance restraint and abundance because too much can overwhelm. Restraint is not absence, it is clarity. And clarity is often what people experience as generosity.

I remember being in Osaka last month, where I went into one of the larger gachapon centres. As soon as I stepped inside, I was met with rows and rows of machines, each filled with endless small choices, colours, and characters. There were easily over 3,000 machines in the space. The vast number of choices, noise of the machines, and loud music made it difficult to focus on anything at all. I left the place empty handed.

We do not always want more on top of an already crowded world. Sometimes a smaller, more considered set of choices makes everything clearer. A meal is made up of a people, setting, timing and feeling. In the same way, what is created is not only its final form, but the experience around it.

What should always remain after a great experience is simplicity. When something works, it does so without drawing attention to itself.

It’s easy to think that offering more is always more generous. But restraint can make space for things to be properly noticed. Like peaches and moscato in Italy, nothing more is needed. As Jeremy King shares in Without Reservation: the best solutions in life are not always elusive, and are often the most simple.

Books that inspired the thoughts on this page — and are worth a look:

• Around the Table by Diana Henry

• Without Reservation by Jeremy King