MKG wrote:
Generally speaking, though, I'm heartened by the overall increase of interested and forward-looking attitudes to food in this country. It's just that Delia's is not amongst them.
There being more interest in food is not the same as people actually cooking it! "Lifestyle" cookbooks sell in their millions and yet every year the proportion of cook-chill and take-away food in people's diets rises.
And this is largely because the celebrity chefs are doing little or nothing to teach people how to cook and are interested mostly in showing how clever they are. Anyone out there ever cooked Heston Blumenthal's hamburger recipe? I cook to make part of my living and I wouldn't attempt it, or anything else in the book of his that my dear MIL bought me for Christmas.
And yet no-one knocks these guys for writing about the unacheivable, but they do just as much damage as Delia is being blamed for simply by convincing people that since they cannot make the same sorts of things themselves they might as well not bother cooking at all.
Yes I am disappointed that St Delia is throwing around frozen mash and tinned mince and calling it cooking, but that is simply an indication of how bad things have got at the simplest level of cuisine. And I don't believe that teaching cookery at school again will make any difference at all. Cooking has to be learned at home, which is precisely where French, Spanish and Italian children do it.
Hopefully now that Ms Smith has shown that there is a market for books pitched a bit lower on the skills scale we might get "Jamie's Back to Pukka Basics" or "Heston's How to Make Spag Bog." Lord knows we need something.
They can hardly learn how to do the washing up in that time!
Why bother?