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Is her controversial book How to Cheat at Cooking professional suicide? Or does Delia know more about our cooking habits than we are ready to confess? Eleanor wonders if she’ll need to bother putting her apron on.

For those like me learning to cook in the 1980s and 90s, Delia was our guiding light. Moving us on from Mrs. Beeton, her Complete Cookery Course could be used to look up any dish and follow simple instructions to obtain a decent result.

‘Doing a Delia’ became a standard no-fuss approach to a dinner party, with the shared and comforting knowledge around a delicious meal that, quite frankly, this success could have been anybody’s.

After a bit of a break from writing and TV, the book How to Cheat at Cooking is a brilliant and beautifully presented comeback for Delia, in a culture where we adore the celebrity chef good food revolution, but often end up eating badly anyway because we’re pushed for time.

Interesting horror

The horror caused by the idea of ‘cheating’ is an interesting one. The desire of these busy times is generally to use less time, less energy and less money to achieve great results. We are expected to look better, perform better, read better, watch better, eat and drink better and gurus are coming up with solutions to help us to do it all.

Most of us covet the time, energy and money that we need in order to improve our lifestyles in response to this. What is wrong with a cookbook that tries to help us save time and energy (if not money) rather than running ourselves ragged over doing everything ‘properly’?

Headmistress at the disco

It must be said that seeing Delia recommend frozen mashed potato disks and opening a can of chicken in white sauce is a bit like watching your headmistress dancing at the school disco. It just seems so wrong. But while there are recipes in the book that slightly insult the intelligence, like making a lobster soup out of a can of lobster soup, there are many that make much more tricky recipes accessible.

The dishes are generally fairly classy. But as Delia says, ‘This book is not for everyday, but it is for busy days’. I’m relieved about that because I still use her Complete Cookery Course for everyday. Her all-in-one cake takes me about eight minutes to get into the oven, her beef stew takes me 15. None use packets and jars and both are relatively cheap.

I read a blog from a mother saying that she had given Cheat to her student daughter to help her to cook properly. But the book will gather dust if it isn’t linked with something more basic. It will also increase the student overdraft. Jars and bottles are actually quite an expensive way to cook. Some of the ingredients aren’t easy to source, either, such as the Belazu preserved lemons, Perard Soupe du Poissons or Jus-Rol pastry rounds. Cheating with Delia relies on getting the stuff into your freezer, fridge and cupboards and then seeing what you fancy on any given day.

Shortcuts can be good

I think that for those with modern morals, the horrified reaction to her mission is an obvious one. We’re told to: Eat organic! Save the planet! Avoid obesity! Cut emissions! Keep food miles down! And the world of food and drink has a fully-fledged morality system too. ‘Make simple dishes with a few quality, locally-grown ingredients. Don’t eat ready meals — think of the artificial / GM / sodium / fat content!’ Delia does not obey the morals of celebrity chef-dom.

She doesn’t ‘do organic’, she loves Kenyan beans when ours are out of season and she criticises the current TV chef tirade against battery farmed chickens. ‘I’m not going to get involved in the politics of food’, she claims. ‘I’m going to stick to teaching people how to cook.’ Everybody has access to good food in supermarkets, she argues, so why price low-income families out of the club by insisting that they go organic? Why alienate busy people away from cooking by using techniques and equipment that they can’t copy? Why can’t we show them the shortcuts?

Secular hypocrisy

Delia is easy to criticise, but we need to avoid getting sucked into the self-righteous hypocrisy of these secular morals. A Christian would be interested in applying Jesus’s charge to ‘love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul and strength and love your neighbour as yourself’ to all of this.

I guess that we won’t be wanting to lie about our Dolmades meze dish coming out of a jar.

I suppose that we won’t pretend to have done fancy stuff with yeast when we present our potato and Roquefort bread made from self-raising flour. I also hope that we won’t feel inadequate when admitting that our lemon meringue pie has shop-bought lemon curd in it. If it tastes nice and doesn’t poison anyone, then who cares? We are free to choose McCain’s Crispy Bites as part of a balanced diet if we feel like it!

Rebellion against God?

‘Cheating’ at cooking may seem wrong to some, but in the Bible guilt is a right response to our rebellion against the God who made us. It is not for the time when we choose to buy our rhubarb frozen rather than fresh.

No dicing with Delia

Interesting horror

Headmistress at the disco

Shortcuts can be good

Secular hypocrisy

Rebellion against God?

Eleanor Margesson

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