Sorry, Delia, but I still love my gravy-splattered cookery books
Put down that Greggs Nativity Sausage Roll for a minute and listen to this. Delia Smith no longer enjoys eating out.
She also believes the day of the cookery book is over, because everyone now sources their recipes online.
this is a bit like a turkey deciding that Christmas is a good thing after all, but does the Patron Saint Of the Cranberry and Mistress Of All She Deglazes have a point?
Following her elevation to the Order of the Companions of Honour for services to cookery this week, Delia, 76, pulled on her rubber gloves and took out a meat mallet to pound the fancy fillet of fine dining.
‘Cooking has become very poncey, very cheffy,’ she complained. ‘If I get one more plate put in front of me with six dots of sauce on it, I will go mad.’
I’m with her on that one. Ditto zig-zags of sauce, sauce smeared onto plates with a paint brush and anything tainted by balsamic bloody vinegar — often used as a sauce, but is nothing of the sort.
Delia also suggested that as we can get recipes on the internet, there is no need for any more cookery books. And anyway, she decided, there are already ‘far too many’.
She is wrong and she is right; she is right and she is wrong — but she has certainly hit on an ongoing problem about our complicated, often insecure, relationship with food.
there are a lot of wonderful restaurants in Britain, but Delia is correct about too many serving ghastly, over-titivated meals which are all about presentation and profit rather than flavour and enjoyment.
YOuonly have to watch BBC’s MasterChef the Professionals to see what she means. trained chefs compete in a culinary cook-off.
Almost without exception, they produce doubtful dishes garnished with blobs of puree and squirts of sauce, edible flowers, parsley sponge, mushroom custard and blackberry gel, you name it — splashes, swirls and dashes of savoury doom.
It’s not quite kidney of cuckoo garnished with tweezered micro herbs and desperation, but one contestant did serve turbot with a maple syrup and verjus sauce.
What was staggering was that so few of the chefs tasted their dishes as they went along — their focus was entirely on the presentation. they couldn’t even get basic seasoning right. Is this what happens in a world where restaurant customers are more interested in taking photographs of their food than enjoying it? Possibly.
Recently I wrote about a new restaurant by Gordon Ramsay protégé Clare Smyth in London’s Notting Hill. Core offers tasting menus, including one for £95 (plus 15 per cent service).
the menu includes a potato course (half a small spud, with a teaspoon of herring eggs), a carrot course (a bit of carrot dressed with lamb sauce) and a skate course, featuring a thumbsized piece of one of the cheapest and unloveliest of fish.
It is risible, insanity, totally crazy — but each dish looks like a work of art and Miss Smyth has no shortage of fans.
No wonder this is the kind of thing that drives Delia mad. Her critics have said she is going to the wrong restaurants, but not everyone wants to sit in a brickwalled vault in East London and eat Indian pancakes washed down with bubble tea in a jam jar. So what can you do? Stay at home and cook.
Yet Delia sees danger there, too. She may have a point about cookbooks — how many more recipes for macaroni and cheese or Swiss rolls do we need?
When Smith stepped back from the limelight a few years ago, she put her entire back catalogue of recipes online. It was very generous and provided a national archive of culinary excellence, a resource that is free for everyone to use.
In the light of this, one has to wonder what the latest batch of celebrity television cooks such as the Hairy Bikers, Nadiya Hussain, Pippa Middleton and Kirstie Allsopp and the gang can bring to the table — except their own egos and a dash of vaunting financial ambition.
Yet despite all this, cookbook sales are on the rise. And far from sounding the death-knell, the internet is encouraging sales. Exponents of healthy or clean-eating trends such as Joe Wicks and Ella Mills were big hits on blogs and Instagram before launching into print.
And according to the Bookseller, more food and drink books were sold in 2016 than ever before — 8.7 million copies, at a retail value of £90 million, which is staggering.
LIKEmany home cooks, I love my own gravy-spattered cookbooks, those dear friends nestling on their shelves in the kitchen.
People have special relationships with their recipe books and they want authors they can trust — even if I do check online with Delia more often than not. Just to make sure. Far too many cookbooks, like far too many restaurants, are over-rated and, yes Delia, far too poncey.
But if I hadn’t bought new cookbooks recently, I would have missed out on the best ever recipe for chicken pie ( Diana Henry), pickled pigeon ( Jose Pizarro) and how to do a Danish-style Christmas (trine Hahnemann).
So it’s not over, not quite, not yet. But please — spare us the sauce dots.