KEY POINTS:
Delia Smith is back after five years. The reassuring, neat, polite, comforting, eminently practical and no-fuss cook is just the antidote we needed, I thought.
Until I read that her book is called Delia's How to Cheat at Cooking and is a collection of gut-wrenching recipes using tinned mincemeat, soups and sauces. I am not a purist, nor do I go along with the current hysteria about food miles and sourcing and organic stuff - too pricey for ordinary people and yet another way of demeaning them. Good enough is good enough and people should not be not made to chase after perfection.
Canned chickpeas and ready fried crisp onions are in my larder and often used, because the quality is actually better than when I try to make them at home. But a whole book teaching innocents how to assemble a shepherd's pie with expensive, supermarket readies?
Delia only adds more toxins to adulterate the already abysmal British diet. It is unethical and a blow to her fans who have grown to trust her over the years.
I am one. At 23 I went to Oxford, a post-graduate student, married, penniless and clueless in the kitchen. (My mother believed girls should be educated first and then taught domestic skills.) I remember making horrible grub - frozen hamburgers with slices of tinned pineapple enclosed in bought pastry, then baked. And fish finger curry, even worse. Delia's books and my mum's patient telephone instructions made me into an excellent cook. Now Delia advocates revolting recipes of her own. The good fairy turns bad.
In her absence people have been made ever more fearful and paranoid about food.
Cavalier alpha-male Gordon Ramsay throws up verbal profanities and whiplashes us daily, perhaps because he thinks we girls all like a bit of rough in the kitchen. Trust me, we don't. It is scary and ugly and turns people off cooking.
Jamie started off well enough - a young man who was easy in the kitchen. He became the richly paid face of a large supermarket and lost his common touch.
Nigella's coquetry intimidates. In awe of her big sensuality, people feel unworthy and don't dare to try her recipes.
A survey in a supermarket's in-house magazine found only 5 per cent of viewers ever cook the stuff made by TV chefs. Siren voices ring in our ears to stop us enjoying these pleasures - diet gurus, medical scientists, green warriors - warning us off that meat, fish, pasta, rice, potatoes, sweet things, wheat, eggs, dairy produce, even fruit. Advice is so contradictory that almost every meal you make can be condemned for some reason.
Yesterday, we had salmon roasted with a crust of coriander and cashew nuts, Kenyan green beans sauteed in chilli oil, sweet potato mash and fruit salad. The fish was farmed and therefore sinful. The cashews and beans were flown in - well, think of the air miles (although I did help third-world farmers). Fruit salad had fair-trade bananas but breaks the no carbs rule, very nice though it was.
This was the kind of meal we should be encouraged to make and eat with pleasure, but our society has found reasons to disapprove of it. Little wonder then that Britain has developed the most frightful, damaging relationship to food.
Most Britons don't eat together at home; millions consume terrible junk food fast - as if that way they can avoid thinking about what they imbibe, a form of self-loathing and punishment. People get fat and sick because they are alienated from the kitchen and real fare.
Young Harry came over last Friday. Only 11, he lost his mum not that long ago. He wanted me to teach him some fancy dishes. In an hour and a half we made rice with chicken, chilli con carne and an apple dessert. We used canned beans and tomatoes but everything else was fresh. It can be done, and fast. Delia taught me just that, long ago. Now she has gone defeatist and accepted the wretched status quo. What a damn shame.
* Delia's How to Cheat at Cooking is published by ebury press and will be available from April 4 for $64.99.
- INDEPENDENT
