I posted earlier this year about my venture into catering and, having read this week that the wonderful Blessed Delia Smith is about to grace our TV screens again some time early in 2008, I began to muse on the part that this lady has played in my culinary life.
My mother has always been an excellent baker of cakes etc and from watching her as a child, I learned the art of creaming butter and sugar together, adding eggs, flour etc and greasing baking tins and up until my mid-twenties was a basic, if uninspired, cook. Then in the 1970's Delia burst upon the scene with her cookery course which appeared on the BBC in three series, each one with the matching book. I followed each programme religiously and to my utter delight, every single thing I tried was successful. I have yet to follow a Delia recipe that did not work.
My children were fed on recipes from the Delia canon: chicken drumsticks in sticky barbecue sauce with rice, meat balls in fresh tomato sauce with spaghetti, shepherd's pie with leeks and cheese on the top, carbonnade of beef with pale ale (which I cook to this day in my slow cooker and the results are sublime); chicken and sausagement pie (brilliant hot or cold); caramelised onion tart to name a few, and then the desserts: apricot crumble cake (great cold, even better hot with custard); gooseberry fool, rich chocolate dessert, apricot and amaretto trifle, steamed treacle pudding...I could go on and on. And I have to say that her chicken liver pate takes some beating as well.
Oddly enough, the only thing I did not care for out of all her recipes was her Christmas pudding, she put stout in it and it made it too dark and rich for my palate, and her Christmas cake was not one of my favourites. However, she did an alternative Golden Christmas cake which I made each year for a long time. No dark fruit was used. Instead of sultanas, raisins and currants we had chopped dried apricots, yellow, red and green cherries, angelica, candied pineapple, orange and lemon and when all cut up in clear bowl and left overnight to soak in sherry, they looked like jewels. The golden caster sugar was used and when the cake was baking the most wonderful fragrant aroma crept through the house. No heavy marzipan needed for this, just simple icing and when it was cut the inside lived up to its name and was a beautiful gold colour.
If Delia recommended an ingredient the supermarkets sold out. One year she had a penchant for cranberries. None to be found anywhere for weeks afterward. Another year it was limes. Same thing happened if she recommended a particular utensil. She actually saved one factory from bankruptcy by recommending their baking tins and they had to take on more staff to deal with the upsurge. All these were marketed with the slogan 'As recommended by Delia Smith'. For a long time, Delia could do no wrong though I remember reading a very sniffy letter in the Times 'I am surprised Delia Smith doesn't put garlic in her scones. She puts it in everything else....'
Of course, then along came the celebrity chefs who always seemed to me to be more interested in getting their faces on the telly and flogging cookery books than the actual cooking. Delia fell out of fashion and decided to retire much to the dismay of all of us aficionados. Still, I could console myself that I had all her books on my shelves and she would always be there for me whenever I needed her and she also has a Delia website full of gorgeous recipes so we knew we could call on her whenever needed.
The long lasting influence she has had on my family and its cooking is illustrated by a time when my elder daughter was at University in Leeds and shared a house one year with four male students who took it in turns to cook. They were all pretty good and Kathryn was put on her mettle to produce a great meal when it was her turn so she decided to use Delia's meatball recipe (I had given her a copy of Delia's one volume cookery course when she left home) and rang me up to say that she had made over 65. 'Oh that 
should do you a couple of days' says I. Wrong. She called me the next day to say that the boys had eaten the lot and actually licked out the bowl to make sure all the sauce was eaten as well. This is a recipe that is now over 30 years old and I am still using it.
So I for one am looking forward to her return next year. During the time of her 'retirement' she become more involved with Norwich City football club, which she now partly owns and supports wholeheartedly. There was one well documented occasion a year or so ago when she walked onto the pitch and exhorted the fans to support their team more. She actually yelled at them all 'let's be 'aving you' much to the surprise of the great British public who had never seen Delia so 'animated' before. There was talk that she had had too much sherry trifle for her lunch....
So Naff off Nigella, Goodbye Gary and Gordon and welcome back Delia. You have been sorely missed.
