Delia Smith is back from the terraces with a new book and series. But can the trusted TV cook, who has sold 19 million books, still cut the mustard? Daisy Garnettmeets the legend
Last night I did a Delia, just like we used to do in the 1990s, before Jamie and Nigella and Hugh and Gordon - personality chefs all - took over the kitchen. Doing a Delia means following a recipe from one of Delia Smith's great many books - chances are you've got one of them, because she has sold 19 million - or from watching her on television, where, calm and measured and reliable and instructive, she appeared regularly.
Not that Delia disappeared completely after she temporarily retired from her cooking career, five years ago. Far from it. Instead of teaching the nation to cook she ploughed her energy and money - about €10 million, apparently - into Norwich City Football Club, where she and her husband, Michael Wynn-Jones, fans for 25 years, have been majority shareholders and directors since 1996. "I love football . . . You get everything from a match: highs and lows, and joy and kicks, and you're part of an amazing community. It's like a safe drug," she says of her passion. And it does seem a passion, unlike, in an odd way, food, about which, compared with Nigella's slavering or Gordon's swearing, she is so controlled.
Or compared with her own infamous - thanks to YouTube - outburst at a match against Manchester City three years ago, when she rallied the crowd by shouting, somewhat the worse for wear it seemed, into a microphone: "This is a message for the best possible supporters in the world! We need a 12th man here. Where are you? Where are you? Let's be having you. Come on!"
You'd think such who-cares heartiness would have made her more lovable - prim Delia lets rip - but it didn't. "I can't help being a passionate football supporter. If that's my sin, I'm guilty," is her standard line on the incident.
Delia's new book, Delia's How to Cheat at Cooking, is not prim at all. Instead it teaches you how to make shepherd's pie in 15 minutes. The secret? Sixteen discs of Aunt Bessie's Homestyle frozen mashed potato, available from supermarkets, and a tin of Marks & Spencer minced lamb. Tinned mince? Frozen mashed potato? From Delia, who became famous for teaching a generation how to boil an egg, step by precise step? "But Marks & Spencer's minced beef is 75 per cent meat," Delia explains patiently. "It's how you would do it at home, only somebody else has done it for you. I took a tin to the Institute of Food Research, and I asked them if it would be more nutritious if I had cooked the ingredients myself. They said no. I could have hugged them. You're not compromising on quality at all!"
However, Delia says all this without an exclamation mark, because in real life she is just like she is on TV: not reserved or measured exactly, just really, really sure. There is no doubt, no aiming to please, no irony or self-conscious send-up, no pretension in the way she talks. There's no doubting her enthusiasm - she uses words such as "stunning" and "brilliant" often; it's just that she uses them absolutely, completely straight up.
She's often called schoolmarmish, compared with other TV chefs, and that isn't a throwaway comment. She is all school teacher, and we, her audience, are not very brilliant pupils who need a lot of help. No wonder we trust her. Although she happily admits to mistakes - "I wouldn't be human if I didn't" - there is nothing in her at all that suggests even a whiff of ambiguity or doubt.
"I think one of the reasons people trust what I'm saying," Delia explains, putting it more straightforwardly, "is that I've never been paid to plug anything or been in an advert. But, actually, the proof of what I'm saying is in the eating. Everybody I know who has tried the mashed potato can't believe it. They all say, I didn't know it was there."
But if you live in Ireland and have access to the best potatoes in the world, why would you want to pay over three times the price to buy frozen ones from somewhere else? "Because," says Delia, "it takes a hell of a long time to do scratch cooking. I don't want us to abandon it, but, however wonderful it is, and though I love it myself, I like more being free to come home from a long journey or after a day at work and having something really good on the table in 10 minutes. I think it is unrealistic to expect families who are working, and have children coming home from school, to be able to get a meal on the table in the conventional way. It sometimes has to be done in an unconventional way."
It is a good point, of course. But why bother to write the book? Why not, I ask Delia, let someone else do the work and find out which brand of tomato or pesto sauces are the best - "Sainsbury's is good, but Tesco's has the edge" - while you enjoy the money and freedom your long career, hard work and fame have bought you, running the football club, or whatever? "But that's how I get my motivation for everything," Delia says, a bit befuddled by the question. "Because I see a need. I couldn't write a cookery book just for the sake of it. This one has been a lot of work, yes, but that is me. I really felt that there was an enormous gap in the market that wasn't filled adequately, and I had to fill it. Save the world, you know. That just is me."
It is Delia. She began writing about food - her first columns appeared in the Daily Mirrorin 1969 - because, having grown up surrounded by good food (her mother and grandmother were both excellent cooks), then worked and eaten out in restaurants, she couldn't understand why, when French food was so revered and well taught, English food was mostly awful. She wrote her first book in 1971. It was also called How to Cheat at Cooking. I ask her if she is returning to her roots. "Yes," she says, "but that book was very, very different. It was about using things out of packets. So much has changed since then. That's what is so wonderful: now what you can find is things, already prepared, of serious, pure quality."
But isn't that the point? Things have changed. We've abandoned cooking with powdered stuff that comes out of packets for the most part, but do we really want to replace it with unpowdered stuff that comes out of the freezer? Of course there is a need to cook quickly to suit modern, busy lives, but, surely, if you don't have time to make shepherd's pie, you don't make it. You make a bowl of pasta instead.
Delia's How to Cheat at Cookinghas a whole chapter on pasta, too, though. One of Delia's favourite recipes in the book is for seafood linguine, which uses a packet of frozen fruits de mer, as well as a jar of tomato sauce made by a company called Dress Italian (Delia's favourite). The fish has been frozen as soon as it has been caught, and so is a better choice than buying prawns that have been sitting defrosted, ageing, in a supermarket, and the sauce doesn't contain any nasties. What could be wrong with that? "Oh, it's a stunning dish," Delia says. "And so easy and quick. In the time it takes the pasta to cook you've got the most stunning sauce. You think you're sitting on the edge of the Mediterranean it's so wonderful."
She is so reassuring that I begin to feel converted. And so, on my way home from work, I go to the supermarket. My bill, for tomato sauce, a jar of clams, a couple of sprigs of fresh rosemary and a bag of frozen fruit de mers (linguine, olive oil, garlic and vermouth I have at home) is about €12, and I have enough ingredients to feed four. That's not bad for a dish containing a lot of seafood. That wouldn't cover the fresh clams alone for a more traditional pasta-with-clams recipe. And quick is right: exactly 20 minutes after arriving at home I am eating, having even checked my e-mails.
I'm a Delia fan. I'm a fan of her methodical approach to cooking. I like the way she calmly teaches, rather than preaches or shouts or salivates. I like her generous-spirited website, deliaonline.com, which overflows with free advice and recipes, and around which an incredibly loyal community has formed. (It will also contain regular updates on where to get the ingredients recommended in How to Cheatand appropriate substitutes.)
I like many of her recipes. Her sunken chocolate cake with prunes, which you have to start preparing two days before eating it, is one of the best chocolate puddings you'll ever eat. Her sea bass with lentils and coriander and tomato salsa is delicious and takes half an hour to prepare. That's quite quick, isn't it? Not as quick as the seafood linguine I have just eaten, it's true, but the awful thing is that I didn't really like my seafood linguine. I wanted to. I just didn't. It tasted thrown together in the worst way: the rosemary was too strong, the tomato sauce too sweet, the fish tasteless, and the ingredients didn't seem to inform one another, the way fresh clams, sliced shallots and crumbed chilli do. And I found bits of broken clam shell in my food. I know that's not Delia's fault, but that's what happens if you buy a jar of clams.
"It's great," Delia says to me about this new way of cooking. "Once you know how to shop and stock your freezer and cupboards" - the book and the website both give advice on this - "it's like having a prep cook in your kitchen, someone else to do the things that take a long time for you." But someone else doesn't care if the clams aren't properly removed from their shells.
Still, I don't have my own children and I love to cook. I'm not throwing away that shepherd's pie recipe yet.
Delia's How to Cheat at Cooking is published by Ebury Press, £20 in UK. Delia Smith returns to TV screens later this spring, when her new show, Delia, will be shown on BBC2