IT would be easy to assume that Tamasin Day-Lewis's West Of Ireland Summers.
A Cookbook was one for the tourists. Beautifully laid out and layered throughout with Simon Wheeler's stunning photographs of fresh fish and country fairs, baked onions and boats, it could not sum up better what the outsider longs to find on a trip, mental or real, to the West of Ireland.
In reality, nothing could be further from the truth. In West Of Ireland Summers, recipes are spliced with small chunks of fond and vivid memoirs; names of friends and pubs crop up as regularly as flour and spuds. It is a format that is familiar to readers of Alice B. Toklas's cookbooks or Paolo Tullio's North Of Naples. South Of Rome, in which the foods of France and Italy are treated as something to be enhanced and explained with anecdotes. But it is a format unusual to Ireland and Irish food.
There is a sense throughout that this is a cook-book and a cuisine firmly rooted in place, a place well known to Tamasin Day-Lewis and not one that is only visited and half-understood. Both recipes and text reflect this: this is a book that adds a new twist to bacon and cabbage and Irish stew and sits them side-by-side with dolmades and crab souffle, popping in a story alongside of a neighbour mashing the spuds on the floor, or the trip to catch the crabs.
From when she was nine, the Day-Lewises - poet Cecil and his wife Jill, Tamasin and her brother Daniel - spent a good part of every summer in Clew Bay in Co Mayo. Each year Cecil would go through a ritual of asking his children where they wanted to go on holiday and each year the answer was resoundingly the same.
"I think if we'd said North Africa or Australia they'd have taken us there out of sheer amazement that we hadn't said Mayo," says Tamasin, laughing.
Although the family still paid courtesy visits to old aunts in Cecil's birth place, Laois, the Old Head Hotel was their final destination. Under the guidance of the unlikely hotelier, Alec Wallace, - the young Day-Lewises grew up folly participating in the fishing, beach riding, visiting, and local dances, making friends that would last for life.
"Coming from a fairly conventional and quite old-fashioned upbringing, what was amazing was the fact that you could go out there and go wild, and ride, and make friends so easily. Each year we were coming back and feeling part of a place but yet not part of it; there was still always the excitement but there was also a familiarity."
The rather erratic but usually filling results of the Old Head dining room also started Tamasin off on a life-long relationship with the food of the West. The comforting properties of butterscotch tart and braised beef after a day on the beach, the unavailability of any vegetables other than a carrot and, some cabbage, and the importance of food that you could share, were all important factors that informed her own Irish cooking.
For, after some years absence, Tamasin returned to Co Mayo with her own family and bought a cottage where they now live for the summer months each year.
"I came to a point when I thought: why have I not gone back? I've really missed it. I'd been doing all sorts of other things like forging a career, having my kids and so on, but really never felt the same way about a place. I wanted to remember and re-visit it but I also wanted my children to see it.
Tamasin Day-Lewis's career, like her brother Daniel Day Lewis's, is in film but she is on the other side of the camera. She has produced and directed numerous documentaries for BBC, ITV and Channel 4 and when we spoke, she was in a Bristol cutting-room working on a series about young, gifted musicians that will be shown on Channel 4 next year. She is also seeking funding for a film project that would see her father's final book, The Private Wound (written under nom de plume Nicholas Blake), filmed in the West of Ireland locations in which the book was actually set.
Although due to work commitments, Tamasin and her family can only manage to spend three months a year in the cottage they bought six years ago, she feels no sense of exclusion from the local community. Her father was a respected and well-loved figure in the area, who would drink with anyone, and she has known her neighbours as friends since the days of dances and working summers.
"You can go into a community in two ways. You can go in and treat yourself and your children as though you are different, or you can take a part in it and show them that you're not expecting to run it.
always try not to do anything that they would think wouldn't fit in with the place."
Writing the book could be seen as the real acid test of Tamasin's knowledge of the people, as well as the cuisine, of the West. So far, the only local featured in the book to have read it roared with laughter throughout, but particularly at her own depiction.
"There are different ways of doing these things which can be appallingly patronising and treat the community as local curiosities; if I thought there was remotely that feeling to the book I would feel nauseated because it's not like that at all. They all come to my house and eat that food just as I go to theirs, and though they might think some of my cooking is weird and extraordinary, they'll all tell me if they don't like something."
West Of Ireland Summers, which makes for great reading and tempts even the most recalcitrant of cooks to experiment, is a beautifully presented project that must surely suggest a sequel.
"Simon (Wheeler, the photographer) and I were discussing only yesterday where we should go next, but really it's not a question of that because I know that part of Mayo and that's why the book is what it is. It's not about thinking `what country hasn't been done?' Because I wouldn't know the place and I wouldn't be able to write that kind of way again. For the moment I'll just keep making films until something hits me.