Delia Smith Back on Television at 68
40 Years of Delia Reprises Best-Selling Author’s Popular Recipes
Jun 6, 2009
Delia Smith’s new show will reinvigorate her most popular recipes with modern ingredients and a modern budget. The 5-part a series of half-hour shows on BBC2 has a working title “40 Years of Delia”.
The show would "combine cookery with social history" BBC2’s Janice Hadlow said.
Delia B.C. (Before Cooking)
Delia Smith was born 18 June 1941 in Bexleyheath, southeast London, UK. She left school at 16 with no qualifications to work as a trainee hairdresser. From there she worked as a shop assistant and later at a travel agency. At 21, she started work in a tiny restaurant in Paddington, The Singing Chef. Washing up and waitressing finally led to her being allowed to help with the cooking. She says it was when a boyfriend kept praising his former girlfriend's talents in the kitchen that she got fed up and started cooking seriously. She began to wonder, if French food was so good, why is English food so awful.
Food Writer First
In 1969, Delia became cookery writer on The Mirror and later wrote for London's Evening Standard. When she presented her first series for BBC One, cooking at home was declining as people were turning to takeaways, supermarkets and the novelty of ready-meals. Delia wanted to run basic TV cookery courses to revive enthusiasm for cooking at home, placing importance on simple ingredients and teaching basic techniques.
Smith shuns celebrity, preferring to focus on making good food accessible to anyone who likes to eat. Not always the darling of food critics, sales of Delia’s 26 cookery books nevertheless have surpassed 21 million. Delia's simple style of teaching has been credited with changing attitudes to cookery in the UK.
2008’s How to Cheat in Cooking aimed to teach people how to make quick, healthy dishes using ready-made ingredients. She caught some flack from foodies for including frozen mashed potato and tinned mince lamb. "This new way of cooking is not for every day, but it's for busy days," Smith said.
Whenever a new book is published or a new show airs, Sainsbury’s stores throughout the UK now brace for the anticipated “Delia Effect”: selling out of key ingredients, like Aunt Bessie’s frozen mash when How to Cheat… hit the stands.
Neither Organic Fanatic nor Locavore
“I don’t do organic because I’m a cook,” Smith says. “I can’t get into the politics of food because I don’t have the knowledge and I don’t have the background – but if I go into a shop and I want to buy some beautiful fresh beetroot, I go for whatever looks best. If that happens to be organic, then I might buy it, but if it isn’t, then I’ll buy that.”
“I do love fresh shelled peas that you can buy in the winter from Kenya. I’m sorry about the planet and the problems with emissions but I’m also conscious that there are people in Kenya who are getting employment and enough money to bring up their children from that produce,” she said.
Delia on Celebrity Chefs
She disdains recipes that are too “cheffy”. What cooks does she admire? She has praised Jamie Oliver and, despite the fact that she dislikes watching people eat on television, Nigella Lawson. But of Gordon Ramsay she said, "I like him when he does his recipes, but I'm not keen on his swearing."
Delia received an OBE in 1995. She is also well known as an ardent fan of and, with her husband Michael Wynn-Jones, majority shareholder of Norwich City F.C.
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