'Delia's How to Cheat at Cooking' Champions Laziness. Could the 'Delia Effect' be Damaging?

I have never been a fan of Delia Smith. A cookbook should offer you creative alternatives to what you could think of yourself, but there has always seemed to me to be something dull, stale, and uninspiring about Delia's books. When the patronising old crone decided to tell people how to boil an egg, or make toast (which in my opinion she did wrong anyway), the deal was sealed. Delia Smith had souffleed her way right out of my bad book, and onto The List. I did not think I could despise a television cook more.

Until now. Having not polluted bookshops with anything new for over 4 years, Delia Smith returns with her new book, 'Delia's How to Cheat at Cooking'. The book contains over 140 recipes for people 'who love to cook but don’t always have the time; people who don’t like to cook but have to; and simply for people who are afraid to cook', except the recipes featured don't show people how to cook at all. Instead they show you how to combine a wide selection of branded, pre-prepared ingredients, including Marks and Spencer's tinned minced lamb, and Aunt Bessie's frozen, ready-made mashed potato. Waterstones claim that 'Delia's How to Cheat at Cooking' is set to be a 'monster', so the manufacturers of these products must be rubbing their hands together with glee, although reports suggest that Delia is not receiving payment from the leading supermarkets, whose products she features, for the endorsement.

I agree that preparing healthy, fresh food can often be time consuming, but I think that Delia's excessive use of ready made foods in 'Delia's How to Cheat at Cooking', seriously misses the point of cutting corners. As use preservative and salt laden ingredients like the ones she recommends, you are no better off than eating a ready meal. The only difference between Delia's Shepherds Pie and a fully ready made one is that you assemble the ingredients yourself and serve it in a proper dish. That is not home cooking. The recipe is designed for people 'who don't have time to peel, boil and mash potatoes', but is making mash really that much of a time consuming hardship? You could be doing that whilst browning your mince for a fresh and tasty Shepherds Pie, and probably in the same amount of time as it would take to knock up Delia's 'cheats' version.

Instead of championing such laziness, Delia should take a leaf out of Nigella Lawson's (cook)book, and show people how it can actually be very easy and quick to make good, homecooked food from fresh ingredients. Nigella is a champion of lazy cooking, but her recipe for Ragu, from her most recent collection, 'Nigella Express' manages to be quick and fresh. Like Delia's latest offering, 'Nigella Express' is a book designed to show busy people how to create good food in as little time as possible. While Nigella also uses some ready made foods, for example a jar of caramelised onions in her Ragu, the emphasis is still on fresh ingredients and pre-making food yourself when you do have the time. The Ragu recipe is a case in point that a good meat sauce can be made from fresh meat and canned chopped tomatoes, and ingredient with little else added, in less that half an hour, rendering the use of the cooked tinned mince in Delia's recipes useless. It is most likely that Nigella's freshly made version is a whole lot tastier too.

The issue lies deeper than whether the fresh or pre-prepared version tastes better however. Already supermarkets have reported increases of up to 50% in the sale of some of the products Delia features, fully demonstrating the power of the 'Delia effect'. It could be somewhat damaging then, that someone with as much influence as Delia is promoting the use of less healthy, ready made food, when the nation is facing an obesity crisis due to the excessive consumption of such products. Whats more, last week, Delia was slating 'food trendies' such as Hugh Fearnly-Whittingstall and Jamie Oliver, who have recently been campaigning against the mass sale of badly treated battery chickens. Delia claims that while ethics are a nice idea, her decision comes down to taste and cost at the end of the day.

An increased awareness of what goes into our food, and where our food comes from is important in improving our health, and increasing the production of ethically made food, and this shouldn't be slated as yet another fad. Since Hugh and Jamie's chicken campaign aired in Channel 4 at the beginning of January, sales of Organic and Free Range chicken have risen by 36%, an incredibly positive move, but will Delia's stronger influence sway people back towards unethical chicken and ready made food?