All hail St Delia of the Cranberry: As she rejects the frivolous world of TV to teach the young to cook, a sumptuous tribute to a woman whose recipes actually work (2024)

By Jan Moir for the Daily Mail

Published: 00:49, 6 February 2013 | Updated: 10:20, 6 February 2013

Come in Delia Smith, your time is up. According to your own oven thermometer, you are done to a crisp.

You have flipped your final cheese omelette, iced your last tray-bake. No more will television viewers turn on to see your capable, freckled hands making light work of your all-in-one sponge recipe or deftly knocking up the quick flaky pastry for your special sausage rolls.

For this week, Delia has claimed that she will never make another television programme again because she is fed up with having to ‘entertain’ rather than teach people to cook.

Slightly odd, considering that the only remotely frivolous thing she ever did on telly was to wear a haddock-shaped oven glove back in 1985 (‘you put your thumb in the gill!’). However, we all know what she means.

She means that she is bored to sobs with the tendency to present cooking shows as fizzy entertainments; as something between soft p*rn, a chimps’ tea party and a noodle-strewn, celebrity-studded travelogue.

She means she is not minded to compete with finger-lickin’ Nigella, waltzing between the saucepans in a wiggle dress while suggestively stroking a parsnip en route to committing frottage with a helpless cream eclair.

She means that she is fed up with the likes of Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall trying to raise their own profiles and become foodie heroes by embarking on crusades instead of just . . . cooking.

So, after 40 years teaching the nation how to cook everything from Christmas lunch to a soft boiled egg, St Delia of the Cranberry is finally giving up on television to focus instead on presenting tutorials for her Delia Online website.

The quiches and the casseroles, the instructions for the savoury pies and the bottled chutneys that we all knew and loved? All gone for ever, scrubbed off the menu of British life.

Her declaration, at the age of 71, heralds the end of a television career than has spanned four decades and introduced at least two hopeful, spatula-wielding generations to the delights of home cooking.

I am one of the many, many millions who amazed myself by learning how to whip up successful, nutritious meals by watching her frills-free cookery shows and studying the accompanying recipe books afterwards.

Back in the mists of time, when Le Creuset only came in orange and herbs were always mixed and dried, my parents bought me a copy of Delia’s Complete Cookery Course when I left home.

Now when I look back, it’s impossible to imagine how I could have coped without Delia’s clearcut directions in print, nor her placid ministrations on screen. The book still sits on my kitchen shelf, battered and gravy spattered, but much loved.

Her shows, too, remain classics.

I remember cooking her one pot chicken Basque for my first ever dinner party and being thrilled with the result. Chicken with orange! And black olives! It seemed so madly exotic. And, like all Delia’s recipes, it worked perfectly.

Famously, she is the woman who taught novices how to cook — and others how to cook better. Delia is woven into the fabric and affections of this nation in a way that no other television cook has ever managed.

Her shows plugged the doubting UK into everything from the delights of flaky fish pie to comparing the different fat ratios in assorted dairy products. In 1989, her One Is Fun series on BBC1 (and accompanying book) was a simple guide for solo cooks to encourage them to make tasty meals for themselves when dining alone. An incredible notion at the time! The effect was amazing.

In the weeks following the funeral of his wife, I remember a friend’s father was given seven copies of the book by seven well-meaning friends. He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, but he did learn how to make a damn fine vegetarian moussaka for himself.

The following year, another culinary landmark. Delia Smith’s Christmas show was a step by step, hour by hour guide to placate the terrors of cooking the festive turkey, not to mention all the trimmings.

The accompanying book — much copied by others — is still the bible, the gold standard route map that finds millions of British families sitting down to a delicious Christmas lunch every year.

Right down to the perfect giblet gravy and golden chipolatas (lower shelf of the oven, please).

Since she published her first recipe in 1969 and made her first television programme a few years later, Delia Smith’s steady influence on the culinary landscape of Britain has been pervasive and immense.

Millions have watched her shows and bought her cookery books, while several millions more have gratefully feasted upon her tiger prawn risotto and her chocolate bread-and-butter pudding. Although she has never been fashionable, it is still Delia we still turn to in moments of crisis.

But while her books will always be bestselling classics, television, however, is a more fickle mistress.

Compared to the flamboyant antics of today’s culinary stars, Delia’s ascetic style is out of fashion.

Like her oven-baked risotto, she is a one-off. For a start, in all those decades of television programmes, she never, ever tasted her own food onscreen. She would make it, bake it and then just leave it sitting there on the counter to speak for itself.

Delia never said ‘Mmmm! Mmmm!’ about her own creations. She never slurped or gulped. She never gasped ‘delicious!’ or ‘fantastic!’ through a mouthful of half-digested food.

She never went in for the bish, bash, bosh approach, nor flirted with her audience, nor patronised them, nor sought to be their friend.

She was like the nation’s home economics teacher; rather chilly, rather flinty-eyed, but determined we would all learn.

In her books and on screen, she was never one for fads or fancy talk either; she was and is the kind of cook who would describe duxelles as mushroom paste and scoff at the notion of something called Modern British cooking (‘There is British cooking, and that’s it’).

She was always too wise to fall for the organic produce bandwagon (‘I just buy the best carrots I see’) and cares not that she is dismissed as a suburban dinosaur by some.

Delia has spoken of retirement from television previously, but this time the threats seem real.

The BBC has always managed to tempt her back before, but a leaked report from Auntie a few years ago suggesting that she had ‘limited appeal’ and was in the bottom tier of the television corporation’s presenters could not have helped.

So she leaves the stage to the likes of Gordon Ramsay, who founded an entire television career not on his undoubted culinary skills, but on his ability to swear.

And to the Hairy Bikers, a novelty act with saucepans. The MasterChef goons, the self-styled ‘food creative’ Rachel Khoo whipping up pistou soup in her picturesque Parisian garret? The horrors of cookery reality shows? No wonder Delia hates the way it is all going and is bowing out gracefully.

To the end, she has claimed that much of what is written and said about cooking is deeply snobbish and pretentious.

She has always understood her television audience. ‘Most people,’ she once said, ‘are just grateful that someone like me has bothered to teach them how to do it.’