books

Patron saint of British cooking Delia Smith's latest book How To Cheat aims to illustrate how to "create fabulous food without the faff", drawing on an arsenal of time-saving store cupboard ingredients including tinned mince, Aunt Bessie's Frozen Mashed Potato and cans of Tesco Pink Salmon. But this explicit endorsement of a slew of supermarket brands has led some to view Delia's latest masterwork as a rather cynical exercise in marketing and product placement.

A rather mediocre Amazon rating even comes backed with a call to subject Delia to a boycott in light of her recent refusal to condemn battery farming for fear of wading into the murky world of food politics, amusingly counterpointed by the indignation of the outraged Delia disciples proposing their own Amazon boycott for deigning to host such dissent on their messageboards.

Personally, I tend to think that Delia's recipes can make a bit of a meal out of otherwise straightforward culinary tasks, such as this Bruschetta recipe which relays instructions for the simple but classic combination of bread, tomato, garlic, oil and seasoning as if it were a form of rocket science. And herein lies Delia's problem: the deadly precision of her previous bibles which made cooking out to be some kind of sacred, mystical art to be tampered with at your peril is precisely the kind of thing which has alienated the very people who she now hopes to lure back into the kitchen with her dumbed-down recipes for the fast food generation.

But her new book's implication that normal people cannot be expected to learn to cook properly seems patronising to say the least, whilst the calls to use canned ratatouille and instant mashed potato in one particular student cookbook in my collection seemed wholly unappealing even throughout my beans-on-toast days (although similar tomes did manage to convince me of the nutrient-trapping benefits of flash-frozen vegetables). And while I have no doubt that there are numerous copies of Delia's Complete Cookery Course in kitchens across the land that are still referred to on a daily basis, the new emphasis on product endorsements which currently has food flying off the supermarket shelves like Hurricane Delia also inevitably means that this particular cookery book will date like no other.

Instead of continuing the cycle of supermarket dependency inherent in our current ready meal culture, surely it would have been better to use her latest sure-to-be-kitchen-staple to cut to the cookery chase: boil quick and easy recipes down to their most basic constituents, supplemented with suggested variants and deviations to play with as your confidence in the kitchen grows. For it is this experimental spirit and the world of exploration which thereby opens up that truly instills a passion and makes cooking fun, something which Delia's ever-prescriptive approach has long overlooked.

Buy Delia's How To Cheat At Cooking from Amazon.
Delia Online website

gemma sheppard, 22nd Feb 2008 19:38:37
 

see more articles in books or go to main page
 

email this article to a friend by filling out the form below

friend's name
friend's email
your name
your email
your message