Dogged Delia and the ritual tyranny of cooking at Christmas

There falls to me this week that annual rite – making the family Christmas cake. for days, my mother has built a landslide of ingredients on a corner of worktop and dropped heavy hints.

this means baking, not cooking. Cooking is sloshing things in bowls, tasting occasionally, guessing quantities. Baking is a precise and dread science, calling for scales and measures and with heroindealing accuracy. It means, too, I shall spend hours in the spiritual company of a woman once deliciously described as the ‘Volvo of British cooking’.

Delia Smith so transcends mere fame that, for the past couple of decades, she is known universally by her first name, like Prince or Bono. and she has a certain steely quality, putting any reader – and certainly any mere man – at once in uncomfortable mind of his most feared primary teacher.

So I must spend an age greasing a cake tin to her 1990 directions, lining it with baking parchment, tying ‘a band of brown paper round the outside for extra protection’. the oven must be preheated; currants, sultanas, raisins and cherries hauled from overnight soak in three tablespoons of brandy… precisely.

and ‘if you want to give your cake fivestar flavour,’ Delia coos, ‘then go for whole candied peel and, again, look for the bright, glistening signs of the new season’s crop. No matter how good the original quality of the ready-chopped peel, it invariably seems to lose something in the chopping. Cutting it yourself is extra work, I know, but if you have a really sharp knife and something good on the radio, it really is worth the effort.’

IaM too terrified to disobey her. I will, besides, chop up whole almonds, painstakingly pare the zest from an orange and a lemon, do my best to measure out a mere dessertspoon of black treacle – far more difficult than you might think; remember when to beat rather than stir; when to fold rather than beat; and all to the strains of Classic fM.

Last year, though – desperately pushed for time – I did buy ready-made marzipan and icing, rather than whipping these up myself and to Delia’s decree, but for weeks thereafter I nervously expected retribution to follow.

Mrs Smith seems to have untold millions in her thrall. retailers still enthuse of the ‘Delia effect’. an entire factory was saved from imminent closure when the great lady endorsed a particular pan. On another occasion, her broadcast recipe for fondant icing saw, within something like 72 hours, not an ounce of liquid glucose left for sale anywhere in the United Kingdom.

In the weeks ahead – at her behest, and of many other celebrity chefs as well – we will all find ourselves going through the involved and faintly ridiculous, fussy culinary rituals now accepted as obligatory to the hallowed British Christmas.

We will whip up, tin or freeze untold ‘nibbles’ for dreaded ‘unexpected guests’, lay in the necessary for mulled wine, boil an entire ham for a day after soaking it for a week… oh, and if you haven’t already made your own Christmas pudding, you air-headed apology for a domestic goddess, then don’t bother – you are far too late.

few of those supposed time- less rites are as venerable as people think. It’s only because of Delia, for instance, that most of us now try to make cranberry sauce: in the 1970s, no one had ever heard of it.

Some are plain daft. you can buy a very large and far tastier chicken for a fraction of the price of a turkey. It is much easier to cook, everyone will love it and the cold remains of said fowl will stay moist and succulent.

yet it’s odds on that most of us will still shell out something in the order of £70 for an unfortunate, freshly deceased gobbler and end up shoving something the size of a small car into the oven at about quarter to six on Christmas morning, as in another of our ridiculous traditions we’re told on all sides it must be ‘Christmas lunch’, all done and devoured before the Queen’s address to the Commonwealth.

the trouble with Christmas dinner is that there are so many elements folk regard as compulsory – turkey, chipolatas, Brussels sprouts, roast potatoes – and all to be choreographed precisely for serving at the same time, this typically in a household full of otherwise rarely sighted relatives, small children on an entire sugar high, teenagers sneaking sherry and a mother-in-law who keeps tasting out of this or that pan, uninvited, sniffs and declares: ‘I think this needs a little something, dear.’

then there are extraordinary, quasi-theological wars. We can only be days away from the first of those annual handwringing debates in the Saturday edition of posh London papers: how, precisely, should one roast potatoes? after all, as Nigella Lawson insists, they must be ‘perfect’.

BUt should said tatties be King edward, Maris Piper, Golden Wonder? Doused in flour after being parboiled and drained? Or left to cool? Ought flour be used; is semolina better? and what of the fat? Lard, says Delia; goose fat, says Nigella; beef dripping, says my old man.

frankly, I use whatever fat is to hand and do not greatly care whether they are perfect or not; there are never any leftovers anyway – but the sheer slog, snobbery, competitiveness and one-upmanship of all is both diverting and terribly British.

a big part of the problem is cookery is, for us middle-class types, more and more an occasional hobby rather than a daily habit, and we seem determined (when we do cook) to ape the sort of fare served in restaurants, even though lacking either their technology or untold kitchen minions.

after all – sadly – since the 1950s none of us has servants any more, even though that was when we first started to throw little dinner parties, starting with prawn cocktail and closing with desserts in which tinned mandarin segments featured prominently.

there are those who dare to sneer at Delia. Certainly, her most famous and influential tome – Delia Smith’s Complete Cookery Course, which still has honoured if sticky place in my kitchen and, no doubt, yours – is very much of the 1970s and the far greater difficulty, then, of buying such as red peppers.

So her spaghetti carbonara calls for bacon, not pancetta; rocket, coriander and star anise had yet to be invented and your local butcher was a faintly dodgy chap. ‘all sorts of joints,’ wrote Delia darkly, ‘get tied up in string and called “roasting”.’

Some bravely make a stand. ‘We’re trying to save lives,’ wailed a bunch of heart surgeons, ‘and Delia Smith’s going about telling people to slather their chicken in butter.’

But, like a defeated legion, we still seem every winter to end up under her yoke. I may just, on December 24, sneak out and buy a pot of ready-made stock – but I have a creepy feeling she knows where I live.