Delia’s How To Cheat At Cooking/10
I’m not a journalist, so I’m not going to start this review with purple prose about St. Delia to bump up my word count. If you don’t know who Delia is, ask a middle-class white person. She’s a tv cook (thanks for asking).
I’m in charge of the cooking at home, and I can follow a basic recipe. We have a few cookbooks at home; the usual stuff. Amongst these seldom-read tomes are a couple of Jamie Oliver books, full of fashionably vague instructions like “chuck a bi’ of awld balthamic vinegrette ovah thith lettith me awld choinah”, and Madhur Jaffrey’s Ultimate Curry Bible – with which one can unlock the secret flavours of the East, providing you have ingredients such as rose water and dragon tears readily available to you and can take three days off work to ‘prep’ your spices.
Suffice it to say, I like food but I couldn’t tell you how to cook fennel or what fricassée means. So when my wife suggested that we buy Delia’s infamous How To Cheat using some book tokens I received in 1992, I was intrigued. If you’ve read any of the reviews of this book you would think it was the culinary equivalent of the Rivers Of Blood speech. You will also notice that 99.9% of the reviews refer to only one recipe.
The shepherd’s pie.
Purely by chance, this was the first recipe we cooked. It tastes fine. Admittedly, the tinned lamb mince that everyone is snivelling about does look a bit like something you might serve to a dog or an enemy, but if you use fresh lamb mince rather than a tin of minuscule gristle picked from the blades of a chainsaw it’s great. And it has cinnamon in it (which I was surprised at, but if you mention this to any food snobs they say “oh yah, one always puts cinnamon in a shepherd’s pie – don’t you know anything, you pathetic little gypsy?”).
I’ll definitely try other stuff out of the book. It’s perfect for when you have guests round and you plan to feed them but have no interest whatsoever in impressing them.
My theory is that people who wail and moan about Delia’s book are showing off, and therefore trying to impress me because they want to sleep with me.
