Tamasin Day-Lewis: The restless cook

When Eric Treuille and Rosie Kindersley from Notting Hill bookshop Books for Cooks told cookery writer Tamasin Day-Lewis, a frequent visitor to the premises, that what their customers really wanted was a book on the pie as a sister volume to her compendium The Art of the Tart (Weidenfeld, 2001), her initial reaction was ambivalent, to say the least.

"When you've already spent a year making tarts and pastry, and feel that you've said all you want to say about it, you're not entirely convinced," she observes. "You think it will be boring to do all these miles of pastry."

It's a refreshingly direct comment. But then, lean of frame and decisive of manner, Day-Lewis does not come across as a woman who is afraid to speak frankly. Nor is she, clearly, prepared to spend much time being bored.

Born into a very distinguished family--she is the daughter of poet Cecil Day-Lewis, sister of actor Daniel, and granddaughter of the film producer Michael Balcon, not to mention god-daughter to Elizabeth Jane Howard, who was an early cookery mentor--Tamasin Day-Lewis has always had a stimulating career of her own.

Before her life as a cookery writer she spent 15 years as a film-maker, directing TV documentaries on an eclectic range of subjects, each of which she felt a passionate interest in: child protection, alternative medicine, gifted children.

Latterly, she has seized the opportunity of a weekly cookery column in the Telegraph on a Saturday to produce not a series of recipe collections, which she describes as a "mind-numbing" option, but journalism which explores the current issues of food production, with an emphasis on supporting the work of small producers around the country.

"Good cooks have to have good ingredients--I can buy a cheaper cut of meat if I haven't got the money to buy an expensive one, but I always want if possible an organic piece of meat that has come from a traditional breed, properly reared, and properly butchered and hung," she explains, before offering a swift analysis of how the role of the big supermarkets has supplanted the small butchers and grocers who, a generation ago, really knew about and cared for the food they sold.

Good ingredients prepared simply are key to Day-Lewis' approach to cooking, explored variously in West of Ireland Summers, her first book, which combined recipes with memoirs of childhood days in Ireland; Simply the Best, an exploration of seasonal cooking; and her book on slow-cooked recipes, Good Tempered Food.

The new offering, Tarts with Tops On: or How To Make the Perfect Pie (Weidenfeld&Nicolson, 11th September, £16.99, 0297843273), is as ever a finely written and exquisitely produced volume, with photographs once again by David Loftus. "He's the best food photographer--where he's brilliant is making a pie look different on every page for 100 pages."

And once Day-Lewis had got over her initial fears of boredom amid a pastry mountain, it turned out to be a project with plenty of variety. As with The Art of the Tart, the book combines sweet and savoury dishes in the one volume, and Day-Lewis interprets her remit broadly to look at pie equivalents in different cultures. "Having something enclosed in pastry--sometimes just so that you can carry it easily--is a way of eating across the world," she points out.

So while she includes her version of traditionals such as steak and kidney pie and venison pie, there are also American sweet pies, Moroccan pastillas--"stuffed with everything, pigeon, fish, and sweet things too, they put everything in, cinnamon, sugar"--and several Middle Eastern dishes enclosed in filo pastry. An "Other People's Pies" section includes recipes from Claudia Roden and Sally Clark, and home pies cooked by Day-Lewis' friends.

By the time any of the recipes in her books appear in print, however, Day-Lewis says that she will no longer be cooking them--or at least not in the same way.

"You go on refining. As a cook, when you've done it once, you never want to repeat yourself. Even with the cherry pie that's pictured on the back of the book, I'd now be thinking, 'What wasn't quite right about that crust? What would be more interesting to do?'"

This demanding style is, perhaps, one of the qualities which links Day-Lewis to her actor brother, who famously immerses himself in his roles with exceptional intensity. Tamasin Day-Lewis, who says that the two are very close, admits that they have traits in common.

"We do take on assignments in very much the same way. We look at this thing, and first of all say to ourselves how much we don't want to do it, and find every reason why not to do it--but you know when you're bothering to go that deep, you are going to end up doing it. The process is something you hate and you repudiate, and you love and you need, in equal measures.

"When I made films, I wouldn't make one unless I absolutely felt I had to make it. If I didn't have a subject, I waited until I found one. My brother, luckily, can afford to wait for five years [the length of time Daniel Day-Lewis spent without acting before he took his Oscar-nominated role in 'Gangs of New York'], whereas I can afford to do it for five minutes--I have three children and school fees to pay."

Benedicte Page

The Art of the Tart has sold more than 100,000 copies in all editions, home and overseas (source: the publisher).