Delia's back on TV...without a single F-word

Five years after hanging up

her oven gloves for

positively the last time,

Delia is making a

comeback.

Our all-time favourite TV chef,

who absented herself from the screen to

spend more time with her football club

(Norwich City, of which she’s a

partowner) is going to make a series for the

BBC based on a best-selling book she

wrote 36 years ago, How To Cheat At

Cooking.

The title is a bit misleading. The pert

though proper Delia would never stoop

so low as actually to cheat - unlike some

of her younger rivals, who are periodically

caught out filching each other’s

published recipes.

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Her book was a busy cook’s guide to

making use of readily available prepared

foods to cut the time and effort needed to

produce unfussy but delicious meals for

guests and for the family.

I read the glad news as I was

in the garden munching a salt beef bagel,

bought an hour earlier at Brick Lane in

London’s East End, accompanied by a

fresh green salad from my allotment.

Delia, I thought, would approve of that:

high quality ingredients, with the difficult

stuff - the beef - done by experts.

That I have not yet felt any need to

mention her surname (Smith, for anyone

just back from 40 years in the Amazonian

jungle) shows what a central place she

still holds in the affections of all who

value simple home cooking. Indeed a few

years ago "a Delia" appeared in a

dictionary of modern usage, denoting any

basic British dish or recipe, devoid of

extraneous frills.

She will be a welcome and necessary

antidote to the current crop of

cookery programmes, where the

cookery is incidental to the main

theme.

She served her apprenticeship at

a time when TV chefs were

principally concerned with telling us

how to prepare the food, rather

than earning thousands of air

miles to star in glossy travelogues

with the odd dish thrown in, or

making reality shows where the

master chef hurls obscenities at

his hapless minions.

Gordon Ramsay’s The F-Word is

not so much a food programme as

one of the principal elements in

Channel Four’s determined

campaign to parade before us the

most disgusting aspects of human

behaviour.

The thesis is that if you are gifted,

professional and highly strung you

have the right to act out your

tantrums in public, no matter how

many harmless people you insult

and demean and no matter how

extreme your language.

Delia will not stoop to any of

that, although she rightly resists

the goody-goody image of herself

as all sweetness and light. She’s

said she is fed-up with being seen

as "some prim Brownie pack

leader" and also that she can’t

drink in moderation: "I’m simply

not a one-glass girl. If I’m

drinking, then I’m drinking - and

whatever the contents of the glass

are, it’s very quickly emptied."

She has feistily laid into

some of her other rival TV

chefs, describing Antony

Worrall Thompson as

"dreadful, just repulsive"

and saying that she hated Gary

Rhodes. Worrall Thompson in

turn described her as the Volvo of

British cooking - safe but dull.

Yet although she was once

mocked for her detailed

instructions about how to boil an egg, it is

wrong to characterise her style as

boring and unimaginative, never

aspiring to much more than

straight up-and-down meat and

two veg.

I looked at her website’s

monthly menu for June. It makes

use of seasonal produce:

asparagus for starters, then roast chicken

with peas and new potatoes,

followed by summer pudding, that

delicious melee of red berries.

It is not as plain as it seems,

though. The recipe for the

asparagus, for instance, comes with an

unusual lemon butter crumble to

dip it in, and the chicken with a

refreshing grape and herb stuffing

- uncomplicated accompaniments that lift the dishes out of

the ordinary. That is the essence

of the Delia style. Not for her the

addition of exotic and surprising

ingredients for the sake of it, or

creating dishes with violently

contrasting flavours just to cause

a sensation.

Certainly she has no aspirations

to emulate Heston Blumenthal,

the Michelin-starred chef at the

Fat Duck in Bray, whose patrons

marvel at his mustard-flavoured

ice-cream and his way with the

least mentionable parts of an

animal’s anatomy. While the Fat

Duck provides a self-indulgent

night out for those who can afford

it, Delia knows that her viewers

and readers are looking for

something a lot less pretentious.

One of the most thumbed

volumes on our kitchen bookshelf

is her Evening Standard

Cookbook, which first appeared

in 1974. It remains a useful

resource today just because of

that realistic approach.

In the section on fish, she points

out that while it is better to buy it

fresh if we can, most fish freezes

perfectly well. Thus the list of

ingredients for her recipe for

poached trout with herbs begins

uncompromisingly: "Four frozen

rainbow trout". It is the herbs that

give it the necessary lift.

Another notable aspect of the

book is that it contains no

photographs, just a few

cartoons. Modern cookbooks and

glossy foodie magazines are so

obsessed with seductive images

- the pornography of the dining

table - that the recipes take

second place.

Sometimes the "stylist" who

arranges the food for the camera

gets almost as big a credit as the

author. I begin to wonder if the

photographs were taken first, and

the poor writer left to devise

recipes to go with them.

There is an urgent need for a

return to the basic values that

Delia represents. Last week saw

the well-publicised opening of

the Whole Foods Market in

Kensington, the first of several

planned British branches of an

American chain that takes

gastronomic excess to ridiculous

levels. It sells, for instance,

20 varieties of tomato, all of

them tasting of. . . well, of tomato.

The appetite it feeds is one that

has been created by Blumenthal,

Ramsay, Jamie Oliver, Rick Stein,

Gary Rhodes and their disciples

in the media.

Leafing through a pile of food

sections from the weekend

newspapers, I found a recipe for a salad

that demanded a pomegranate

molasses dressing: Whole Foods

might stock it, but I doubt that

our local Sainsbury’s does. The

writer was just showing off.

In another part of the newsprint

forest a chef was drooling over

some foraged wild herbs she had

been sent, including purslane,

pineapple mayweed and

alexander leaves. She used the latter in

a dish whose photo was printed

at double life size, but still it was

hard to make out the straggly bits

of greenery.

I have never knowingly sampled

alexander leaves but suspect

that, like most wild herbs, they

taste a lot like dandelions.

Delia, whose books

have sold more than

15million, is well placed

to lead a counter-attack

against such

preposterous preciousness. She has already

shown how she can influence what

we eat and buy - one Christmas

her recipe for fresh cranberry

sauce to go with the turkey was so

popular that there was a

nationwide shortage of cranberries.

And there are already signs that

Britain’s cooks may be ready to

abandon their flirtation with the

macho super-chefs and their

flamboyant creations and return

to the appreciation of good,

wholesome food.

The BBC is screening a Sunday

evening programme called the

Great British Village Show,

celebrating that great national

tradition whereby men and

women devote their time to

making jam, baking cakes,

knitting jumpers, arranging

flowers and growing veg,

cheerfully submitting the results to

expert judgment.

The judges in the fruitcake

section excluded anything fancy -

no pomegranate molasses there -

and among the jams they gave

first prize to the pot that tasted

most of strawberries. It was basic,

straightforward and, if their

synchronised lip-smacking was

anything to go by, extremely good.

In a word, it was a Delia.

Welcome back.