Tasting the good life, and the bad

During her career, 41-year-old food stylist Katharine Tidy has roasted pigeons with their feet intact, served up swan, and even baked the worst pies in London. This is not to say that she doesn’t have some serious culinary credentials, however.

“I had gone to a cooking school, so I knew how to cook,” says Tidy, who enrolled in her first class at age 18 to learn how to make sushi and other Japanese favorites. “But food styling’s a whole different proposition because it doesn’t really matter what it tastes like. It’s more to do with the look of it. And they certainly don’t teach you how to do a medieval banquet or a Tudor banquet or a Victorian ball supper or anything like that.”

Instead, Tidy learned her trade during years at a location catering company (where she penned screenplays on the side) and at the elbow of her boss and mentor, food stylist Debbie Brodie. In the years since, she’s whipped up meals for a wide range of films including “Atonement,” “Elizabeth: The Golden Age,” “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” and “Batman Begins.” Still, baking pies for Tim Burton’s macabre musical “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street,” coming to DVD April 1, presented Tidy with a whole host of challenges quite different than, say, laying a table for a garden-variety Tudor banquet.

Rolling in dough: During preproduction, Tidy taught Helena Bonham Carter, who plays the fiendish Mrs. Lovett, the tricks of the trade. “I went to her house, and we went through pie making and made pastry and rolled it out,” says Tidy. “I rehearsed with her on the set before they even started filming because for ‘The Worst Pies in London,’ that particular song, there’s a lot of action. It’s a lot of pouring things, rolling pastry, giving a pie to Johnny [Depp] and taking a plate -- all of which she’s got to remember to do while she’s singing and acting at the same time. So it’s a vision of multi-tasking.”

From bad to . . . different bad: Given the transformation of Mrs. Lovett’s shop from failing hole in the wall to hot spot for cannibalistic cuisine, Tidy had to design two drastically different pies. “There were the worst pies at the beginning of the film where they’re all moldy and burnt, and she’s putting horrible gristle and not much meat in them,” Tidy says. “Then when the pie shop is doing really well, the shape of the pie got a little bit fancy. They got nicer, which was quite a relief. When you’re doing horrible food, which occasionally I’m asked to do, it’s a bit soul-destroying. You think, ‘Oh, people must think I’m a really bad cook because this looks all horrid.’ They’re meant to be the worst pies in London!”

Upper crust: Tidy replicated the free-standing meat pies that were served in 1860s London, which required her to use a special recipe for the dough. “It’s called hot water crust. It’s a bit more durable, and it gets cooked for a bit longer. What you do is you melt butter and lard and water, and then when it’s hot, you pour it onto the flour and then mix it. Then you have to leave it to rest for about half an hour before you can do anything with it. And every pie on ‘Sweeney Todd’ was handmade, mostly by me. And there were well over a thousand of them. The effort I went to! I’m not making another pie for at least a year.”

Sugar and spice: When preparing feasts for period films such as “The Young Victoria” or episodes of Showtime’s “The Tudors,” Tidy often finds it difficult to discover dishes that won’t befuddle modern taste buds. “If you cook period recipes, like, say, a Tudor recipe, they had a lot more spices and a very different palate to a modern palate,” she says. “I did a Tudor recipe that’s sort of a quiche, only they put currants in it and a bit of sugar, so it’s like a combination between a dessert and a savory quiche. . . . And in period cookery, they did cook chickens and all kind of poultry with their feet on. Extras, particularly, all become vegetarian instantly at the Tudor banquet!”