Cooking and Delia

I haven’t watched Delia’s show this week, although I will probably have a look at it on the on demand out of horrified fascination!

For those that don’t know, Delia Smith is some kind of British cooking icon, dated and faded now, but apparently she taught a lot of people how to cook and they are all jolly grateful for it and so keep buying her books in droves, and as a by-product supermarkets run out of especially popular recipe items. The she was usurped by people who do “fancy cooking”, Nigella and Jamie and Hugh in the main, plus other popular, pop-up on tv chefs. Okay, she has a point, these people often do recipes the everyday person can only aspire to, but they also do lots of doable recipes, and really, what’s wrong with growing your own, turning your back on supermarkets and buying better quality food from smaller suppliers.

Aha, I hear you say, but we can’t all afford that! And that’s where the supermarkets have got you. They’ve made food about price. All that matters is cheap. Never mind that “fresh” produce from supermarkets tastes like crap in comparison to a locally sourced organic veg box, which don’t actually cost as much as you might think! We gave up our veg box for a while and without realising our vegetable consumption went down because, from a supermarket, vegetables taste pretty crappy. I used to think you see (and taste) things differently when you’re older, but our veg box potatoes taste like potatoes used to taste when I was a kid! Apples taste apple-y, not just like perfectly shaped spheres of texture. The lettuces are amazing! Who knew there was flavour to be had?!

Anyway, back to the point, the snooty and condescending Delia has set herself up as the champion of those who “don’t have time” to cook. Don’t have time to cook? Can’t spare a little time for the very thing which keeps us alive?! We have it wrong in this country, food should be a delight not a chore! But besides this, there are recipes out there that are fast! And she’s selling a lie. Whatever pie it was she made last week with tinned mince, sorry, “meat”… bleugh… the fact is, regular mince would’ve cooked in the time it took her to cook the pre-diced veg! So there are shortcuts and shortcuts. I understand pre-diced veg if you’re going down that route, but tinned “meat”?! I understand stock cubes/bouillon granules, I can understand lots and lots of shortcuts and use them myself. But there’s a difference between cooking and compiling food, and cooked food will always be much nicer. If you’re going to compile food why not just shop at Iceland! It’s the same thing!

Do I sound snooty? Maybe! But I don’t care! There is a whole industry out there that depends on putting the consumer to sleep by persuading them real cooking is too difficult, too time-consuming, too expensive, too… well… middle class! Then they don’t question the money, research and advertising that goes into selling their product. Tweaking chemicals here and there, additives, more salt, fat and sugar, engineering food. It doesn’t have to be that way!

Ahem, okay, bit of a rant! Back to Delia. Did she eat anything she had made? Not in the show I saw! There was no enthusiasm or delicious delight in her own food like Nigella or Jamie or Hugh.

The truth is that with some basics you can cook just about anything. Stock up on herbs and spices (big bags of them from ethnic shops or Julian Graves, not tiny little expensive glass jars from the supermarket) and you’ll soon discover almost every recipe is within your reach!

That’s what I discovered as I taught myself, as an adult, how to cook.