Colu Henry loves restaurants. She says this plainly and without qualification. She still finds pleasure in sitting at a bar, ordering something cold and bracing to drink, and letting someone else cook. But Better at Home, her third cookbook, due out March 10, grew out of a different impulse: a desire to set the terms of the night herself.
“I spent so many years living in New York and working crazy hours and doing all the things,” Henry says. “And I do love restaurants; I still love restaurants. But as I get older, and my friend group evolved with me, we’re really just wanting to be at home and wanting to be at each other’s houses—on the pace that we want, listening to the music that we want.”
That sensibility runs through the hundred-plus recipes in Better at Home, a book shaped by the meals Henry cooks in Hudson and in Nova Scotia, where she and her husband are restoring an 1866 farmhouse by the sea. The recipes feel celebratory but restrained, polished without fuss. A roast chicken arrives with lemon, fennel, and crispy pecorino potatoes. A lentil stew gains depth from pork, crispy walnuts, and a final hit of lemon. Smashed potatoes become party food with sour cream and caviar. None of it strains for effect.
Henry is careful about what she considers special food. “There’s a difference between making a roast chicken where you just put salt and pepper on it because you want to get dinner on the table,” she says, “and taking the extra step—sliced potatoes, add some fennel, really put thought into it. That just elevates it enough to make it feel a little bit more special.”
The book’s dishes often hinge on those small calibrations. Scallop crudo comes dressed with blood orange and mint. Shrimp toast borrows from Cantonese dim sum but leans Italian with ’nduja, fennel seed, and lemon zest. A simple potato-and-leek soup turns richer with blue cheese toasts floated on top. The gestures are modest, but deliberate.
“The recipes are simple enough for a weeknight,” Henry says, “but they can be translated into having a dinner party should one want to.” A chicken pie capped with buttered toast fits comfortably into either category, as does pasta with spicy crab and toasted lemon crumbs or brothy clams with small pasta and summer corn.
Henry’s cooking philosophy builds on pantry fluency, something she has explored since her first book, Back Pocket Pasta. In Better at Home, ingredients recur with intention. Fennel seeds show up again and again. Dried mint—an ingredient she loves and considers underused—appears in multiple contexts, from vegetable dishes to dips. Anchovies underpin sauces and dressings.
“You don’t need a ton of ingredients to have a well-stocked pantry,” she says. “It’s about becoming comfortable utilizing a certain set of things in a number of different ways.” She structured the book to avoid what she calls the dusty drawer problem. “I don’t want people buying something and then having it sit on a shelf for six months. I try to use things throughout the book so people can keep going back to them and gaining confidence.”
That confidence extends to how strictly the recipes are meant to be followed. Henry resists rigidity. “If you open my book and you’re inspired by a recipe and you don’t follow it exactly, that’s OK,” she says. “It’s really that you’re in the kitchen making it your own, and then whatever happens during the course of the night, it takes on a life of its own.”
The book is deeply social, written for repeat guests and familiar tables. Henry does not cook with an abstract audience in mind. “I don’t have children by choice, and none of my friends up here do either,” she says. “I feel like I’m cooking for my peer set.” Those peers are fed dishes like chickpea-fennel stew with Swiss chard and fried lemon, or date night pork chops with mustard, cream, and cornichons.
The food is straightforward and layered, just like Henry’s writing style. In the intro to the pork chop recipe, she narrates a mini pantry odyssey which led to the dishes creation: “Initially, I though to make this recipe with capers, but it’s one of those ingredients that I always question if I have or not. I go back and forth from having numerous jars to zilch, which was the case this early December evening. Instead, I reached for the cornichons, which I do always have in the fridge and knew would also add the bring punch I was looking for. I was never so pleased to be out of capers!”
Place shapes the cooking in subtle ways. Hudson brings access and variety. Nova Scotia brings limits that sharpen focus. “There’s not as many options,” Henry says of cooking by the sea. “I’m getting very straightforward, beautifully grown vegetables.” That shift leads to dishes that strip back even further: grilled clams with butter, basil, and lemon; roasted fish with punchy sauce; bowls of chowder built from corn, potatoes, and crab.
“Cooking within constraints gives me a lot of joy,” she says. She recalls advice from her husband, an artist, when she felt stuck on a project. “He said, ‘You just need to paint your way out of the corner.’ That sticks with me.”
At the heart of Better at Home is a philosophy of hosting grounded in ease. Henry wants people to feel comfortable inviting others in without overthinking it. “People just want to feel taken care of,” she says of hr entertaining style. “It doesn’t have to be a big production.”
The food supports that aim, then steps aside. Drinks are poured. Plates are passed. Conversation takes over. The recipes anchor the evenings that belong to the people gathered at the table.
