Delia Smith: ‘I was like the Volvo of cooking’

Delia Smith is not at all what I expected, which was someone shy and not especially voluble. Instead, the nation’s favourite cook is vivacious and engaged, bursting with ideas about society and politics. She likes Angela Rayner and Lisa Nandy (who “says the things I’m thinking”) and is pleased that James Timpson is a minister for prisons and rehabilitation. A devoted listener to the podcast The Rest Is Politics, she refers fondly to “Rory and Alastair”. She didn’t vote, she says, on the basis that “I didn’t believe in party politics”, but then the next day, watching MPs walk into Downing Street to get their new jobs, “I felt quite emotional. I thought, you know what, this might actually work out.”
In brief, Delia Smith is a force. “I’m a bit change the worldish,” she says. “Because I really love people. I have faith in them.”
The bestselling author, TV cook and co-owner of Norwich City FC is 83 — although that’s hard to credit as she saunters into the restaurant Watson & Walpole in Framlingham (Smith says it is “the best restaurant near us in Suffolk”) in an orange linen shirt. She remains passionate about helping people to live better lives. This she has already done, of course, by teaching several generations how to cook, via Delia Smith’s Complete Cookery Course, the phenomenon that is the third highest-selling book of the past 50 years in our Top 100 list.
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Smith was Britain’s Julia Child, but more reserved and solemn, at least on screen. In the flesh she is both thoughtful and ebullient, the sort of instantly likeable person you could easily have a four-hour lunch with. When I ask her why she stopped writing cookbooks, she laughs and says: “Because when you’ve done 50 asparagus seasons, there isn’t really a lot more to say about asparagus. We only ever have them two ways at home, with hollandaise or with vinaigrette.”
Whether you want to make a hollandaise or a vinaigrette, or just plain asparagus, you’ll find simply written, comprehensive instructions in the Complete Cookery Course. But the path to her 1982 bestseller wasn’t straight. Born in Woking, Smith went to school in southeast London and left without any qualifications. After a brief spell in a hairdresser’s, she got a job in a Paddington restaurant. She credits the beginning of her culinary interests to this time. “I used to do the washing-up in a restaurant — this was in the 1960s. They did French food every Saturday night,” she says. “A different region every time, with wine to match. I absolutely worshipped French food. But then I thought, hang on, what’s up? Why is everything French? My grandparents were from Yorkshire, my mother was from Wales, I was brought up on good British food. I found an old book called English Food in a library in Camden and it had a bibliography in the back. I got a ticket to the British Library and sat and read them all.”
This research and knowledge was the foundation of Smith’s recipes: on television she may have looked like a reassuringly ordinary housewife, patiently explaining the mysteries of dinner, but there was a fount of painstakingly acquired information behind every perfect, foolproof recipe she wrote. She remains highly knowledgeable about the trajectory of British cookery after the Industrial Revolution.
Smith landed her first cookery writing job in 1969 at the Daily Mirror (where she met her husband), thanks to a chance encounter with the literary agent Deborah Owen, who is now 82 and still her agent. Smith’s first column featured kipper pâté, beef in beer and cheesecake. Her first TV appearance came on BBC’s Family Fare in the early 1970s.
Smith’s recipes are famously precise. “But the information and the timings are the point,” she explains. “That’s why my recipes were always double the length of anybody else’s. Teaching someone how to make an omelette properly takes about 800 words. On TV you can do it in two minutes, so I was grateful when the BBC approached me. They had Julia Child on in the afternoon and they said, ‘Right, we’ve got to find somebody here.’ I just went in and did a pilot. And then I did the series.” She laughs at this rather incredulously. “It wouldn’t be like that now.”
Smith was always interested in catering for the beginner cook. “For me, taking the fear out of cooking so that somebody who didn’t know how could learn — that was everything. I absolutely adored Elizabeth David [whom she knew — Smith’s husband was David’s editor at Nova magazine], but her recipes always left me wondering. My own experience — back in the day I read everything and I used to get all the American and Australian food magazines too — was that people always wanted to know more. I knew it from my postbag when I wrote daily recipes for the Daily Mirror and then the Evening Standard. I got so motivated by all those letters.”
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Her dedication to helping wannabe cooks continues to this day. “Even now when people email in on the website [deliaonline.com], we always check every query,” she tells me. “Lindsey, who works with me, will make the recipe and write back — ‘Did you do this? Did you miss this bit?’”
But now Smith has interests beyond the omelette pan. In 2022 she wrote a very different book, You Matter, about the meaning and purpose of humanity (she is a Catholic convert and in the 1980s wrote four books about faith). I ask her if she thinks people listen less when she’s not talking about food.
“I do, yes. I used to call myself a below-stairs journalist — you know, you’re in the kitchen, don’t come upstairs and start talking politics.” But no one knew you were political in the 1980s and 1990s, I say, to which she replies that she spoke about Margaret Thatcher “getting rid of cookery classes” on one of her shows. “Many years later I went to see the education secretary to ask him about putting them back, and he said the problem was that all the equipment had been ripped out. That was a really sad day, and I said so. But the programme makers took it out.”
Would she get more involved in politics now? “Oh, I wouldn’t like to get into that — I like to be quietly in the background and to have a say. But I am a communicator, and I know how to reach people.”
Food fashion moves fast these days. “When I sit in the back of a taxi in London and see all these new restaurants — hundreds of them — I think, ‘I don’t know anything about that kind of food.’ My favourite food is Italian and then British. I think I’m a bit behind the times. But I feel sorry that a lot of young people don’t know what a good pork chop is like.”
She does, however, like going to Noble Rot and to Quo Vadis, whose chef, Jeremy Lee, she loves. She adores Angela Hartnett. “I cook from her books, which are just her, at home, making wonderful food.” Her No 1 top cook and recipe writer “ever ever” is Simon Hopkinson. “We go and have lunch with him every six weeks or so, and he takes us to Le Colombier in London — it’s completely French, it’s been there for years and it’s just gorgeous.”
She is a majority shareholder in Norwich City, the football team, and also eats at its Carrow Road home, where the food is famously good (“I’ll tell you why it’s nice — they’re all my recipes!”). She says Nigella Lawson and Jamie Oliver — “both absolutely brilliant and both lovely people” — are “the last of the last army” of old-school recipe writers for home cooks.
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Does she watch cookery shows? “I can’t bear to. I have huge respect for Mary Berry. We’d got into a horrible cheffy rut, and she came along and suddenly we had a home cook again. She did the country a real service. But I do also think, thank God I don’t have to do that any more. I don’t want to be chugging away. And Prue Leith is just a lovely person. She used to help me and support me when everybody was slagging me off. She really made a difference.”
I had thought Smith’s national treasure status was never in doubt, but she mentions the flak she got at a certain point of her career. “Oh, I went through the mill. It’s just a thing about the country we live in: you’re not allowed to get too successful. So at the peak, I got knocked down.” Why? She mentions the popularity of chefs like Keith Floyd, a rakish, bibulous contemporary of Smith’s who burst on to TV with cookery-and-travelogue shows.
“I wasn’t entertaining. I was just about teaching you how to cook — this boring lady explaining step by step. I was like a Volvo, reliable but not very exciting.” She says all this smiling serenely, without rancour. “But I thought, I know my own and my own know me. The people who want to cook know where I am.”
She was right. As well the Complete Cookery Course sitting at No 3, Delia’s Summer Collection is No 7 in our chart and the Complete Illustrated Cookery Course is No 15. But nothing beats the rush of her first time in the rankings. “Oh, I still remember the day I became a bestseller. My agent rang up and said, ‘You’ve sold this many books.’ And I said, ‘Is that good?’ I had no idea. She said, ‘Yes, it’s good. It’s a huge number.’ Actually, I did have an inkling it was selling well, because there was a book wholesaler in Norfolk and they would ring me at home to say, ‘You won’t believe how many of your books were sold today.’ But even so — it was just amazing. I still have the cuttings.’
“What’s funny,” she muses, “is that I get more attention now than I used to when I was in the thick of it. Even at football matches the young guys and girls coming up for selfies always say, ‘My mum loves you.’ That’s because if you can give somebody a recipe, and they follow it, and it works, the gratitude is huge. So it isn’t really about meeting me at all — it’s about what I was able to do for that person or that family. It’s about the lock I picked open.”