The Review - FOOD AND DRINK - THE MARKET PLACE Published: 28 February 2008
Why Delia is cheating her readers
Britain’s trusted food writer may be taking the effort out of cooking, but are supermarkets doing it better?
AFTER four years in retirement, Delia Smith has returned.
Her book, How to Cheat at Cooking (Ebury Press £20), claims to offer a new style of food shopping, making use of tins, jars and prepared ingredients as well as frozen products
These replace the fresh ingredients favoured by Gordon Ramsey and Jamie Oliver and other contemporary chefs and shopping gurus. She also claims to offer a way forward for those who are afraid to cook or are short of time.
Her book is a trip down memory lane. She proposes the return of the big weekly shop and a food cupboard full of tins and packets, allied to a bulging freezer. This is not the blueprint for a brave new future in grocery shopping but rather a tour around the ghostly memories of long-forgotten shopping lists. It is a snapshot of the way many middle-class families in the 1970s and 1980s shopped.
The recipes too are mostly nothing new, but a rehash of the kind that dominated the cookbooks of a bygone era.
Dusting off a few old cookbooks, I quickly found several recipes that were the direct ancestors of Delia’s new shopping and cooking regime.
Her shepherd’s pie was mirrored by one for London Pie in Sainsbury’s Book of Quick Meals, published in 1980. Delia has updated the potato topping – her mash is frozen, the 1980s mash was made from the instant-powder variety, mixed with milk.
Bizarrely, the 1980 instant method of mash- making was recommended in Sunday’s Observer by Michelin-starred chefs Michel Roux and Eric Chavot, two of the many high profile chefs and restaurateurs who have jumped on the Delia bandwagon this week and revealed their favourite culinary cheat.
Much of the book promotes produce manufactured by the food processing industry and stocked by giant supermarkets. Delia has tested all the recipes and is adamant that she has not received any direct rewards from the manufacturers and retailers. Her recommendations are genuine and honest and solely based on her cooking experiences, she says.
On the plus side, she has undoubtedly wrong-footed her fellow celeb chefs, with their unrealistic commitment to authentic and fresh produce and their penchant for commercial tie-ins. She has also brought a huge dollop of common sense back into recipe writing.
Her book may redefine the way we cook and is definitely a welcome return to the simpler recipes of the past. But it is probably not the future of food shopping as she so confidently claims.
Wandering around Morrisons, in Chalk Farm Road (the only major supermarket chain whose products are not given a free plug), I came upon a tub of soup labeled Glorious, Vine ripened tomato and balsamic soup (Marco Pierre White).
White’s soup is not an organic product. Nevertheless, according to the listed ingredients it contains no bulking agents or other cheap commercial additives, making it superior to most of the ready made soups labeled organic – even those sold in “natural food” shops.
At £1.99 for a 600g tub it is definitely a cut above the grossly overpriced, Duchy original soups, 600g tub £2.89 (Waitrose and many independent stores) which contains maltodextris and cheap palm oil.
Supermarket ready-made foods and soups are changing – a new generation of meals have jettisoned the “E” numbers and increasingly contain only traditional ingredients. In fact, they contain the type of ingredients Delia Smith recommends in her book.
Perusing the label on Marco Pierre White’s soup one has to ask: why would any sane shopper traipse the isles searching out Delia’s jars and tins if Marco has already arranged for someone to assemble the ingredients, then mix and in this instance even cook them?
The real future of food shopping is in the revamped chilled aisles of the major supermarkets. DON RYAN
Comment on this article. (You must supply your full name and email address for your comment to be published)
