She is a rare star who yearns to live as an earthling rather than shine above us. She lives in the Suffolk sticks and attends mass daily (“God gives you knowledge of your own weakness”). She likes Pizza Express and the odd Big Mac, and declines invitations to party with celebs. She doesn’t like face-to-face interviews (other celebrities listen up): “You can tire of hearing your own voice.” And she curls a lip when asked to pose for portrait shots: “Women of a certain age [66] should not have to do close-ups.” All in all, a refreshing insight into the character of Britain’s most revered cook – yet a slightly disheartening one to hear if you’ve travelled all the way to Norwich City Football Club, where she is a director, with the express purpose of interviewing and photographing her.
"I did Jonathan Ross," she says, “but that was only because the footballers’ wives said they wanted to go to his show. They said, ‘Can you get us tickets?’ And I said, ‘The only way I can get you tickets is if I go on it.’ So that’s what we did."
I say she is regarded as a saint, and she recoils. "That word makes me cringe – it’s so wrong. Perhaps more than anyone on this earth I am aware of my own weaknesses and fragility – to call me a saint could not be further from the truth." However, she accepts that her achievements have been phenomenal. “I see myself as someone who guides people,” she says; she has done so through her books (at the last count, she had sold 19 million) and her TV shows, in which she has stood at the stove in her home, birds tweeting in the garden beyond. Delia’s approach is, quite simply, to do things simply.
She had the sell-out factor: she had only to use an ingredient and her viewers and readers would dash out to raid the supermarket shelves. She was crowned the Cranberry Queen, for example, when she compiled recipes with the berry. “It was lovely when that happened,” she says. “There’s this wonderful fruit that appears in winter and I thought, isn’t it great that everybody can use it now?” Dinner party hosts would greet guests with the words, “We’re doing a Delia tonight.” And she has reached a million men’s hearts through their stomachs. “Women come up to me and say, ‘You saved my marriage. I didn’t know how to cook and you got me on the right rails.’"
Women come up to me and say "You saved my marriage, I didn’t know how to cook – you got me on the rails"
Then, six years ago, she jacked it in. "I thought, I’ve got nothing else to say,” she recalls. “I have been doing this for 35 years, all these recipes, and I have just done the How to Cook books and TV series. I didn’t want to be a recipe machine for the rest of my life."
Yet we are meeting today because she has performed a U-turn. She has a new book, How to Cheat at Cooking, aimed at the food lover who is too busy to spend hours at the stove, and a new TV series due to begin this month. Those who wept into their tea towels when Delia retired can throw their oven-gloved hands into the air. Hallelujah! Rejoice! The Cranberry Queen is back.
In the movie Once Upon a Time in America, Robert de Niro plays Noodles, a gangster who haunts an opium den, where he sucks on the pipe and disappears into a dreamy world. Had the film been set in Norwich rather than in New York, Noodles could have achieved the same disconnection from reality at Delia’s food and wine workshop, in a restaurant overlooking Norwich FC’s pitch.
Enter the room and you are in Deliaworld. You are greeted, not by an Oriental lady with mind-numbing drugs, but by Margaret the waitress, who offers tea and biscuits. Behind her are 47 women (ranging in age from late 20s to late 70s) and three men. They’ve just watched chef Alex Mackay’s cookery demo. The Delia groupies are sucking – no, not on opium pipes, but on straws sticking out of blue cocktails. They weave to tables and have lunch with lots of wine. Topic of conversation: all-time favourite Delia recipes.
At 2.40pm Delia arrives, perfumed and preened. (“If I am doing TV,” she tells me later, “I have the hair and make-up and all that, but normally I’m quite scruffy so people don’t recognise me.”) The groupies are led to a desk where Delia signs copies of her books. One lady comes away, clasps her hands together and groans, “Yes, yes, yes.” It is almost sexual. Another boasts of her chat with Delia – in fact the exchange had been a brief “I love your books”. One groupie is upset because her camera batteries are flat, another because she has no batteries. It’s Deliamania.
“Communication fascinates me,” Delia says. “How to explain and to reach people. When I write I hope I am speaking to someone who is afraid to cook, and they need someone to take them by the hand, through the recipes. I learnt over the years what people want. If you listen to what they want, it is easy to communicate that. They are saying, ‘Don’t leave me wanting.’
“Then I’d get criticised by people who are experts: ‘Oh, I can’t be bothered with Delia. She is going into all this detail – why is she weighing everything?’ Well, fine, they are not the people I am after. I am after the people who are afraid.”
She receives stacks of mail from fans but says, “I had a letter once, from a lady who enclosed a photograph of herself with her arm wrapped in bandages. She had written, ‘I just want you to see what you did to me. You said, to get rid of an avocado stone, hold the avocado in one hand and knock it with a knife. Look what happened.’ She was so angry. But I’d never given that advice. It wasn’t me.”
Delia’s life story, as told by herself, is a heart-warming tale that would be nice to listen to while tucking into her roast ribs of traditional beef with Yorkshire pudding and horseradish, crème fraîche and mustard sauce. But we make do with beige tea served by Margaret. “As a child,” recalls Delia, “we didn’t have holidays abroad, but we always had really good food, though I wasn’t really interested in cooking.” She left school with no qualifications, and landed a job washing up in a restaurant. “I had a pile of dirty plates in front of me, but I always had one eye looking over my shoulder, watching what was going on. I graduated to helping the chef prepare things. I began to get passionate about wanting to cook, but also, the passion was to try and teach people.
“In the Sixties, people who came to restaurants didn’t really know much about the food. They wouldn’t know what to do with an artichoke. Everything was French. There were cookery columns in the colour supplements that were a bit beyond people; too complicated. Then there was the drudgery of women’s weekly magazines – ‘six ways with mince’ and that sort of thing.”
One night she got chatting to one of the restaurant’s regulars, an historian; what he told her was life-shaping. He explained to her that in the 18th century, British food was the best in Europe, if not the world. “He said to me, ‘That all changed with the Industrial Revolution, and then there were two World Wars.
The art of cooking that was traditionally handed down from mother to daughter was interrupted. We ended up at the end of the Second World War with chips and margarine.’”
Delia is not one to waste time. Shortly after that conversation she set about writing a cookery book of 18th-century food, and found an agent to hawk the proposal around the various publishing houses. “Nobody was interested,” says Delia. “But one day the agent got in touch to say that the Daily Mirror was looking for a cookery writer for a new magazine supplement.”
To test her out, the editor asked her to write two punchy articles. “I wrote one and got a friend to do the other for me, because I didn’t know anything about writing. The editor said he didn’t like the one my friend had written. Then he pointed at mine and said, ‘But I do like this one. You’ve got the job.’ It went from there. I was hungry to learn and research.” The story is sweeter still because at the Mirror she met Michael Wynn-Jones, the writer, editor and publisher who became her husband.
She moved to the Evening Standard and, in 1973, was given her first television series, Family Fare. By the mid 1980s she was established as the nation’s favourite cook, reintroducing us to British classics. Delia’s trick is not necessarily to do something new, but to celebrate something that would otherwise be forgotten.
Remember the hullabaloo when she showed us how to boil an egg? Wasn’t it patronising of Delia, asked her critics, to assume we did not know the most basic dish? “Do you know what happened?” she says, “I had a young girl working for me – she was 22 and trained at Leiths, and I said, ‘I want two hard-boiled eggs.’ And she kept giving me these eggs that were like bullets. I said, ‘I don’t know what you’re doing wrong. I’m going to come and watch you.’ The eggs were going in when there were just a few tiny bubbles on the bottom of the pan. Not what you’d call a rolling boil. So, when I did eggs on television I said, ‘You’ve got to get the water right.’ Isn’t it silly, how some people thought that boiling was just a few little bubbles on the bottom?”
Delia sips her drink and says, “I’m not everyone’s cup of tea. There are a lot of people who don’t like what I do; who look down their noses. I remember one journalist saying, ‘British cooking has improved not because of Delia Smith, but in spite of her.’ ” Of such criticism she says, “It is hurtful. You have to be a really peculiar human being not to find criticism hurtful. But I have to say that after all these long years you get a bit used to it. It’s not enduring.”
About two years ago, Delia says, she awoke one morning and “I just suddenly knew that I had to do this book, How to Cheat at Cooking.” By then she was disenchanted by the cookery that was on offer via television shows and magazines (though she “loves” the one you are reading). “I got tired of seeing people humiliated on television,” she says. “The message coming across was that cooking is just a chef’s thing.” She believed that, though she had done her How to Cook series, “it struck me that it still hadn’t sunk in. I had to find a novel way to make cooking even easier. We just don’t have time to cook the correct way any more.
I don’t like poncy food, if dinner hosts serve up one of my recipes I think yes, yum, good
“I could step back and see what was going on; what I saw was startling. Everybody works, and they are still having children who have to be fed. I felt, there has to be another way of getting a meal on the table. People have too many ready-meals and takeaways. Busy people have got to have another way of eating well.
“I began to research ingredients, and I have found so many wonderful ones. In between scouring the supermarkets I was working out how they could be used in recipes for the book.
“In Waitrose I discovered a sauce, Dress Italian. If you look at the tomato sauces on the shelves, they have concentrate and this, that or the other. The producers of this one take their tomatoes from the fields near Naples, put them in a container with onions and basil, reduce it down and then the sauce is sealed in a jar. So I can always have a beautiful homemade-style sauce without having to skin a tomato, or hang around waiting for the sauce to reduce.”
She hopes the book will alter our shopping habits. “We rush to the supermarket, get what we want, then rush out. We don’t track along the shelves, like I’ve been doing for the past two years. Every day there’s something I’ve missed or something new.”
Delia aspires to get more children interested in food. “Young people are too afraid to cook,” she says. “They should all be taught cookery at school and it’s wrong that they aren’t. It was Mrs Thatcher’s government that literally took cookery out of schools by removing all the equipment, like ovens. Now schools can’t afford to put the equipment back in.”
How to Cheat was designed with two kinds of people in mind, she says: “Those who are too busy to cook, and the ones who are afraid to cook. And the people who are afraid to cook are the young people. If I could get them to take one step into doing a cheat’s recipe then maybe they will move on.” She pauses thoughtfully and adds: “This book is ahead of its time.”
Two days after our meeting, I phone Delia. She talks about Michelin-starred restaurants: “I tend to avoid them. I just don’t like poncy food. I like peasant food. I like Le Gavroche though. Does that have a Michelin star?” She talks about those times when she arrives at a dinner party to find that the hosts are doing a Delia: “It’s lovely. If someone serves up one of my recipes I think, yes, yum, good.”
Then Delia explains how she keeps her ego in check. “I believe in God, and that God created the human race,” she says. “And I believe that there is a sort of love that’s there for the human race, and that expresses itself through the gifts of people. I am just an instrument.”
‘How to Cheat at Cooking’ (Ebury Press; £20) is available now.