Delia Smith: Sugar addiction is the cause of obesity

Delia Smith ponders the best word to describe her return to the kitchen fray, a comeback that has provoked hostile headlines over her championing of frozen and nonorganic food. “Is it a mission? I think it is a mission,” she says. “Mission is a good word.” Delia, dubbed the Volvo of British cookery by Antony Worrall Thompson, is biting back at celebrity-chef elitism – and getting mauled in return. But she seems to revel in her feisty new reincarnation, emerging more spattered than battered.

Indeed, the famously primsy, mumsy image seems markedly absent as we speak in the wake of the media backlash. At 66, she comes across as giggly, engaged and keen – and I’m sure there’s more of her native southeast London accent than we’ve ever heard before. Delia’s here to update her cooking message, straight, unfussy and pragmatic.

So it’s a shame that the BBC’s blurb for her new TV series, the first after a five-year break, is rather disingenuous: “The doyenne of British cookery breaks a few of the rules she herself created to explore a new way of cooking that tackles head-on one of the realities of 21st-century cooking: ready-made ingredients,” it gushes. Indeed, the recipes feature snippy short-cuts such as using frozen mash for shepherd’s pie, and oven-ready potato wedges for patatas arequipo. But Delia is not busting her own rules.

She’s returning to the sneaky-cheeky tack of her first book, How to Cheat at Cooking (1971), which promised to help people to convince their friends they were better cooks than they really were. Packet sauce mixes and instant mash featured heavily, as did dishes such as baked fish fingers with tinned tomatoes and tinned mushrooms, followed by shop-bought sponge topped by canned cherry pie filling. She even suggested filling your kitchen with faux ingredients such as bottled spices (handy Seventies hint: “They’ll look phoney if they’re chock-full, so never quite fill them up.”)

Updated deviousness

Delia is updating her old deviousness to meet a need she considers marginalised by the celebrity-chef culture she helped to spawn. Watching much of this wonder-cook wizardry “is like pressing your nose up against the window and seeing something that’s exclusive to others”, she says. “People are now afraid of cooking.”

In the 1980s, she explains, if you went to eat in a restaurant, the food was usually produced by gifted amateurs. “With the advent of nouvelle cuisine we came into the chef era. It used to be that you went to a fine restaurant with a fine chef and had something that you would never think of trying to produce at home. It’s chefs telling people what to do at home that causes problems. Home cooking has always been, and always will be, different.”

Delia’s ideas have not simply shifted from tinned to oven-ready and from instant to frozen, she says. “Being away from recipes and TV for the past five years was important for me. You step back and see clearly that there’s something wrong. We are evolving without realising that we are evolving. Years ago, women were at home and the fathers were at work. He would come home to a lovely meal on the table. We have evolved into a completely different life-style. Somehow in the kitchen we are still stuck in this idea of having the same homely cooked meals. And we do not have time to do it.

“In the 21st century, both parents are at work, but there still has to be a meal on the table of some sort at the end of the day. Because many people are afraid to cook or their lifestyles are busy, they are resorting to ready meals, takeaways and junk food. We have got to provide something different, cooking for the busy age we are living in. It’s a new way of cooking for a new way of living. On nonbusy days, I would still expect people to cook from scratch.”

The message seems to chime with her huge middle-Britain fan base: the newly published, completely rewritten 2008 version of How To Cheat At Cooking is No 2 in Amazon’s bestseller list. Pundits, meanwhile, have launched vitriolic attacks on her refusal on Radio 4’s Today programme to condemn the cruelty of battery-hen farming – she maintains that it provides cheap protein for poor people.

“The criticism does not dent me,” she says. “I am used to being in the headlines and people misunderstanding me. It is quite extraordinary that it can be so. How can some headlines so misrepresent what I said on Radio 4? It’s unbelievable. But I have been through it so many times. It’s kind of par for the course.”

Whether the headlines were inaccurate is moot. But while she may feel misunderstood, and may wish not to argue for organic, fresh or ethical food, she has her own firm opinions on healthy eating (indeed, she has a reputation for being as pushily forthright as as the most obstreporous of celeb chefs): “The problem with obesity stems from people not eating square meals,” she maintains. “There are too many junk foods. And people get addicted to sugar. If you have not had a square meal, it is much more tempting to have a chocolate bar. That’s what causes obesity. It’s addiction. To cure yourself, you need to have six weeks without either sugar or sweetener. You should only have natural sugars, such as in fruit and wine. After six weeks, everything will taste sweet, things like milk, because you will have got your palate back to what nature created. We could cure the nation if we cut down sugar addiction.”

Weight is a problem Delia knows well. “I suffer middle-age spread,” she laments. She admits to it in her recipes. “I’m sorry if you have to diet,” she wrote in her Book of Cakes. “I do too. But every now and then we all need cheering up with something gooey and squidgy. I have a terrible weakness for anything chocolatey.”

Then she has to work it off. “I’ve had a personal trainer for years,” she says. “He comes in three days a week. It keeps me supple and mobile.” At the end of the garden at her home, near Norwich, there is a wildlife meadow that she and her husband created with a big path. “We go round the track just fast walking; sometimes we do exercises with weights. Forty minutes, three times a week early in the morning. We see wonderful sunrises,” she enthuses.

Food and fitness combine in another Delia passion – her beloved Norwich City. She and her husband, the journalist and publisher Michael Wynn Jones, have invested more than £6 million in the football club and are majority shareholders. Delia has taken charge of changing how her players eat. “We have a full-time chef who looks after the team and travels with them to away matches. He cooks for them there and on the way home,” she says. “The best sports diet is to have a very high percentage of carbohydrates. For 90 minutes’ endurance it helps a lot. The idea of improving players’ nutrition was first introduced into this country by Arsenal’s manager, Arsène Wenger. I read a lot about it and about him and tried to implement it in Norwich.”

The same goes for the Norwich fans. Nine years ago Delia decided to take over the club’s catering, developing a range of restaurants and cafés that promise high-standard food, sourced locally where possible. “We’ve got something like 14 chefs there now,” she says, bursting with pride. “We are always looking for new things to do, such as food-and-wine workshops, where I am always present. People come from all over the country for them. We decided to make the club into a wonderful family community thing. Community is something I’m very keen on. It’s how human beings thrive at their best. Community in football is wonderful. With catering, you can make it a really good day out for families, even if the football isn’t doing well on the day, they can come and have a nice meal.”

The Smiths took on the club at its nadir and have shovelled cash into it ever since. Delia’s dream was to see it return to the Premiership.

In 2002, when the team made the playoff finals, she declared: “Thirty years on TV, being No 1 in the booksellers’ lists . . . those achievements would come nowhere near making the Premiership.”

They lost out to Birmingham City that season. But in 2004 Norwich finally won their precious Premiership promotion. The following year they got relegated. There has not been much to celebrate this season. But in the old footballing cliché, you’ve got to have faith.

Delia is hardly short of that. She is a Roman Catholic convert who attends mass every day and has written three books on Catholicism, including a searching tract on the nature of prayer (and so far, nothing titled How To Cheat At Piety). “I do write the odd article in Catholic publications from time to time. I am still just as enthusiastic as ever about it,” she says. “There is a sense of balancing to belonging to a church – a world community. It’s the same with football; they are both global communities.”

Conversion to Catholicism and cookery

Delia converted at the age of 22, inspired by a long-term boyfriend who also turned her on to cooking. The boyfriend left her to study for the priesthood, but her devotion to Catholicism remains. “My beliefs haven’t changed over the years, but they have grown. They have become more important. In Catholic life, you are encouraged to take time out and to spend a bit of time being still. Being very still and very silent and getting off the treadmill. It’s very therapeutic. Meditation and prayer are very close. Pretty much the same thing. There was an American psychologist who said that if he could get everyone to sit and be silent every day it would cure 70 per cent of all psychiatric illness. I can’t remember his name, though,” she laughs.

As Delia enters the latter half of her sixties, she seems as full of energy and enthusiasm as ever, and says she is committed to supporting Norwich City. As for the cooking, well . . . “I don’t really have any plans for the next move. If my recipes on cutting corners are going to make a difference and people are going to benefit from it, maybe I’ll do more,” she says. “If the cooking project doesn’t feel like it’s working, I might have a go at writing something spiritual, particularly for young people.”

Might we be seeing a more ascetic woman emerging, particularly in the light of her now infamous “let’s be having you” half-time rant, when a rather emotional (some claimed drunk) Delia tried to rouse a torpid Norwich crowd into song? No way: “I always do drink wine and I always will,” she says robustly. “That particular incident was nothing to do with wine. I had heels on and the pitch was damp. Anyway, it’s just a joke now. I was walking up the terrace steps at a game recently and slipped, and everyone was saying, ‘Oh, you’ve been at the cooking sherry again, have you?’ ” She smiles at the recollection. The newly returned Delia doesn’t seem to mind tripping up in public.

Delia starts on Monday, BBC Two, 8.30pm

By John Naish

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