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4 Questions 4 Tamasin Day-Lewis

At the beginning of February I wrote about Tamasin Day-Lewis’s wonderful book, “Where Shall We Go for Dinner?” And now I’m eagerly awaiting an even newer work: a big fat compendium of her recipes — 1,000 of them — titled “All You Can Eat,” due in May. To complete my personal Tamasin triathlon, she recently agreed to answer four questions. I could have asked her a thousand.

1. Last year, I had a wonderful biking trip in Puglia including a delicious multi-course meal at the home of a man active in the Slow Food movement. I know from “Where Shall We Go for Dinner?” that most of your culinary experiences in the region weren’t nearly as happy. Was that one of your worst food trips?

No, the trip to Puglia was hellishly badly organised but the food was a source of wonder and delight; it just took longer to winkle out than usual. I love la cucina povera and all the bitter weeds and greens and tassle hyacinths and pasta tostata, the toasted chaff left behind after harvesting the crop. Anticha Sapora was one of the best lunches ever and so was the breakfast with the burrata maker in his shop.

2. I can’t wait to get my hands on “All You Can Eat.” Of the hundred new recipes you included, which ones are you particularly excited about sharing?

That is in the greedy eye of the beholder. It should suit all tastes and palates, and all levels of culinary ability, or disability.

3. I share your curiosity about other people’s cooking spaces and treasure my decades-old copy of “The Englishwoman’s Kitchen.” How does your kitchen in Somerset differ from the one in County Mayo?

My Somerset kitchen is the synthesis of all I have learned over my 30 years of cooking and works for the room, the place, the way of life. It also has the all-singing, all-dancing 6-oven Ferrari Aga complete with wok burner and the sunken marble pastry slab and circular, removable chopping board to get to the Aga easily, like the ones I saw in the snake shops in Hong Kong.
Ireland is perfect for holidays, more basic but can cook anything and has a great grill for the mackerel straight from the sea we’ve caught; the skin crisps and bubbles under it and all the oily juices collect so that you can pour them back over.

4. You once said in an interview that you are good at “having fun and getting people together. There’s no event too big, no event too sudden. I can always cook a bloody good dinner, as well as breakfast the next morning.” What would be your dream guest list for one of these dinner + breakfast gatherings? Since we’re talking dreams here, you can list from both the quick and the dead, people you know/knew well and those you’ve never met face-to-face.

Dinner, chez moi, a wild Irish salmon or sea trout, peas from the garden, Jersey new potatoes. With: Loved ones and my brother and his family, and the 12 Pins Club who come and stay in Ireland every year to climb and eat, as in “Where Shall We Go For Dinner?” If there were to be any unknowns and highly desirables, Lucien Freud who could immortalise us in paint, Clint Eastwood who could play jazz to us with my son Harry playing guitar and singing, perhaps Mozart to provide the obvious, Yeats to tell stories, Shakespeare to recite sonnets once the turf embers are dying in the early hours, my father who died in 1972, some of my children’s friends, the young always make it a party, Richard Corrigan, the greatest Irish chef and friend to help me cook!
Breakfast with the one I love, or all my children, a late, lazy, full Irish fry including black and white puddings, Middle White pig organic sausages, tomatoes baked in the oven with Sicilian olive oil, duck eggs fried in Italian butter, rashers of crisp, smoked back bacon, then home made whole wheat bread toasted, more butter, home made marmalade which is also great slathered on the sausages. Freshly squozen Tarocco blood orange juice, Sicilian variety from the volcanic slopes under Mt Etna, and good coffee. A Thai mango to start with. Shall I go on?

Oh, how I wish she would. On and on and on. But since her life involves interests and obligations other than typing endlessly for Margin Notes, I shall comfort myself by re-reading my favorite chapters of “What Shall We Have for Dinner” and haunting the mailbox for my copy of “All You Can Eat.” Is it May yet?

Tags: Cecil Day-Lewis, Daniel Day-Lewis, Puglia, Richard Corrigan, Slow Food, Tamasin Day-Lewis

Monday, April 14th, 2008 at 7:35 pmand is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.