Must-Make Meals: 13 Budget-Friendly Recipes I Swear By

Delia And The Great Rice Pud Flop, By Her Mum

by TARA CONLAN, Daily Mail

A CHILD'S first attempts at cooking usually stick firmly in a parent's memory.

But Delia Smith's mother says her daughter's earliest culinary creations unfortunately stuck in the throat as well.

In an interview which will hearten aspiring chefs everywhere, Etty Smith insists that her daughter served up her share of disasters before establishing herself as Britain's best-known cookery expert.

Mrs Smith, 81, said the family started to dread the dishes the young Delia would bring home from school cookery lessons in Bexleyheath, South-East London.

The Great Rice Pudding Disaster is one of the memories she shares in an ITV documentary on her daughter to be shown next month.

As Delia proudly served the pudding out around the dinner table, the family obligingly tucked in. But an essential ingredient was missing.

'We all had to pretend that we liked it but she'd forgotten the sugar,' said Mrs Smith. 'Of course we had to say how lovely it was.'

In the documentary, Ooh Aah Delia, Mrs Smith tells of her fears that her daughter would not make anything of herself.

'I was very worried she wasn't going to get anywhere,' she said. 'Then she

told me she was going to write a book. 'I thought "Good Godî. She couldn't spell, how is she going to write a book if she can't spell?'

Her daughter, of course, managed perfectly and her books went on to sell millions of copies, becoming a staple ingredient in kitchens across the country.

Michael Wynn- Jones, Delia's husband, said his mother-in-law had always been an inspiration to her daughter.

'Her mother's priority was always good cooking. She was the one who set the standards for Delia,' he said.

Delia left school at 16 with no qualifications. She took up cooking seriously after a boyfriend spoke of a former girlfriend's talents in the kitchen.

'I was always hearing about her great pigeon en croute and so on, and I was rather peeved,' she said. That's how my career started - out of pique.'

Delia tells the programme that she likes nothing better than putting her feet up and letting her husband take over in the kitchen.

'I've got I don't know how many recipes and I can't remember any of them,' she said.

'I still enjoy cooking when there's time. What I don't enjoy is cooking under pressure and coming home from a hard day's work and having to think about cooking. Michael loves doing the cooking.'

Her husband, however, said Delia found it almost impossible not to get involved in some way, turning the cooker down or checking on the meat.

'She says to me, "Have you read my books?î,' he said.

Her mother, who lives near the couple in Suffolk, also helps out with the cooking. She often drops round with home-made cakes and tarts - just to make sure that Delia is eating properly.

The documentary followed Delia as she took a year off from writing and presenting her cooking series to concentrate on turning around the fortunes of her beloved Norwich City football club.

In that time she established a successful restaurant at Norwich's home ground, Carrow Road, and lived through the threat of relegation.

'I don't think I've worked so hard or had so much stress ever in my life,' Delia said. 'Sometimes the burden of being responsible for something you care so deeply about is great, sometimes you have moments when you wish it to Kingdom Come.'

Her legions of fans will be delighted to hear she has decided she has been out of the kitchen long enough.

She is planning a new book and cookery programme for the BBC, and is also busy with her cookery website, Delia Online.

Much of the money earned will be ploughed back into Norwich City. 'Maybe I can earn enough to buy a striker,' she said.

Her wealth, however, she insisted, had been greatly exaggerated. 'I'm just a poor millionaire.'

Delia, a committed Catholic, said she attended Mass every day to give her a different perspective on life.

'I'm not devout but what I say is: People who work with me, you know how grumpy I am. If I didn't go to Mass I might be ten times worse.'

t.Conlan@dailymail.Co.Uk

{"status":"error","code":"499","payload":"Asset id not found: readcomments comments with assetId=40712, assetTypeId=1"}

Glenys Roasts Delia In Speech

The astonishing success of her books and TV series proves just how popular Delia Smith is with cooks of all ages and backgrounds.

But one notable exception has emerged - in the person of Glenys Kinnock.

The wife of the former Labour leader accused Delia of being out of touch with 'real women'.

And without spelling out her own credentials in the kitchen, the 58-year-old MEP went on to mock the best-selling author with a series of jibes.

Mrs Kinnock went on the offensive when addressing 350 female dinner guests at University of Wales college in Newport, to mark International Women's Day.

Cherie Blair was guest of honour at the event but she had left before the criticism of 60-year-old Delia, herself a Labour supporter.

'Delia says, "To keep potatoes from budding, place an apple in the bag with the potatoes",' said

Mrs Kinnock. 'Real women say, "Buy Smash and keep it in the cupboard for a year". 'Delia says, "Brush some beaten egg white over pie crust to yield a beautiful, glossy finish".

'Real women say, "The Fray Bentos pie directions do not include brushing egg whites over the crust and so I don't do it".

'Delia says, "When catering for an evening buffet, calculate food portions and timings a week in advance, so that you're not rushing on the night".

'Real women nip into Marks and Sparks on the way home that evening and buy everything in packets.'

And she wasn't finished yet. Grinning broadly, Mrs Kinnock added: 'I really love this one - you'll love it too.

Delia says, "Don't throw out all that left-over wine. Freeze into ice cubes for future use in casseroles and sauces". Real women say, "What left-over wine?"

Delia says, "When you have finished the preparations for your buffet, wash up and treat yourself to a glass of wine". Real women hide the packets and drain the last of that pre-dinner wine bottle.'

Mrs Kinnock was hosting the £25-a-head dinner to raise awareness of the plight of women across the world.

She praised Mrs Blair for raising a family, being a wife and reaching the top of her legal career.

But it appeared there was little love lost between her and Delia, who recently had the honour of having her Christian name made a dictionary entry in its own right.

One dinner guest said: 'Glenys's speech was very funny and had the whole hall in stitches. But I was a little surprised Delia got such a bashing.

'It turns out that Glenys got most of the jokes from e-mails that are doing the rounds in Labour Party circles. She certainly enjoyed being a comedienne for a day.'

A spokesman at Mrs Kinnock's constituency office in Cardiff yesterday said that she was travelling to her Euro office in Strasbourg.

He said: 'This was not an attack on Delia, whom Mrs Kinnock admires. She is more interested in talking about the real issues affecting women around the world.'

Delia Smith today dismissed the row as a storm in a mixing bowl.

Interviewed on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, Delia said: "The funniest thing about the whole thing is what she was quoting was actually a spoof that has been going around the web sites taking the mickey out of me, so all those instructions weren't ever given by me."

She went on to insist that she was mindful of the practicality of her recommendations.

"I now have a web site and we get hundreds of thousands of people coming into the website looking for a cheap recipe, because we specialise in that ..."

Nevertheless, there was a time for more elaborate cooking.

"There's a time to cook and there's a time not to cook. And we all make use of ready meals and packet foods when we have to. But if you are going to spend Saturday afternoon making a nice apple pie then maybe you would want to put a glaze on it," she said.

{"status":"error","code":"499","payload":"Asset id not found: readcomments comments with assetId=104524, assetTypeId=1"}

Delia Smith: 'Life Is Not A Bowl Of Cherries'

Long before we meet, the Lunch with the FT recipe has been heavily tweaked. Instead, I'm joining Delia Smith — groundbreaking TV cook, bestselling author, football club owner — for dinner. We are booked in at Delia's, the restaurant inside Carrow Road stadium, home of Norwich City Football Club. It only opens on Friday and Saturday evenings, hence the non-regulation kick-off time of 7pm. 

A US investor has recently bought into the club, and I'm keen to find out if a chapter of English football is about to close: one where teams are owned by wealthy local fans instead of international capital. I'm also curious to meet one of the most influential people in postwar British cuisine, someone who has masterminded tens of millions of Christmas dinners. 

The airy dining room is a blank-canvas space geared towards upscale prematch events. The only picture on the white walls is a large, colourful photograph of the grande dame herself looking bashful in a crowd of uniformed chefs. Soothing hotel lounge jazz is pumped in. 

I'm shown to our spot — a round corner table set apart from all the others. An immaculate chestnut bob appears, a smile, a handshake, and we sit.

Before we really get going, Smith gives me a direction. She's happy to talk about "whatever", with one proviso: "Just don't ask me how I got into cooking, please. It's been written about a million times." 

Smith, now 82, has sold more than 21mn cookbooks and transformed the way people in the UK interact with food. She has been a cultural icon since the 1970s, a British amalgamation of Julia Child and Martha Stewart. At the peak of her powers, her TV shows caused nationwide shortages as viewers rushed to follow her lead. Her name was even included in the Collins English Dictionary. But that's ancient history, and apparently not worth revisiting. I begin mentally shredding my opening set of questions. 

Michelle, our sommelier for the evening, arrives at our side. I suggest a glass of white wine. Smith immediately interjects, "Great, we'll have a bottle." We're off to a promising start. Michelle makes a pre-emptive strike and a bottle of Picpoul is en route.

The menus are handed over and Smith reaches for her spectacles. She scans the list, but of course she likes it all: the food consists entirely of her own recipes, even the Thai green curry. "We tell the chefs when they come here that if they have ideas that are better, we're happy. But they actually quite like not having to deal with the bother of that."

I ask for a recommendation, which leads to us both ordering the potted Cromer crab to start. She's having monkfish for main, I've opted for duck with cherries — a Delia classic and the restaurant's signature dish. Here it's aged in Himalayan salt by a clever man in Cumbria, I'm told. "We never take it off the menu because we sell so many."

We're given bread and some canapés — little slivers of toast, two topped with tapenade and goat's cheese, two with finely chopped tomatoes. The number of people waiting on us has reached five or six. It will climb higher. 

Now East Anglian royalty, Delia Ann Smith was born in Surrey in 1941 and raised in Bexleyheath — her accent still places her on the border of London and Kent. Her father Harold was an RAF radio operator during the war and went into business with a partner in a tool shop after; her mother Etty stayed at home to look after their children.

Smith describes herself as "rotten" at school, leaving at 16 with no qualifications. "I didn't know how to spell, I didn't know how to punctuate. But I had a lot to say."

I ask what she can tell me about her childhood in suburbia. She takes in the question, the silence slowly drifting into awkwardness. "That's it, really," she responds, taking a sip of wine to emphasise the full stop. The metaphorical shredder is back in action. We move on.

We are backsliding as a society in every respect, and it's very distressing. We're in a very dangerous situation

After school, Smith pitched up in central London at the height of the swinging '60s, working days as a hairdresser and nights washing dishes at The Singing Chef in Paddington. There she fell in love with food, and began to learn more about it from the archives of the British Museum, sowing the seeds of what would become her trademark method of culinary education: simple, straightforward, rigid. She went on to teach a generation how to cook, first as a newspaper food writer, then on TV and via bestselling books.

"People didn't know how to cook and they needed somebody to tell them," she says. "And I'm one of these people that when they see something wrong they want to do something about it. So I did."

My effort to squeeze a bit of the back-story has led us to the culinary desert of postwar Britain that Smith sought to irrigate. "There was an interruption of handing down cooking from mother to daughter, because there wasn't any food. In the '50s and '60s we had women's magazines not knowing much, doing things with baked beans and cornflakes."

Delia's Restaurant & BarNorwich City Football Club, Carrow Rd, Norwich NR1 1JE

Three-course meal x2 £94.90Potted Cromer crab x2Roast duck with confit cherriesMonkfishDelia's chocolate nut sundaeBerry pavlova

Black coffeeMacchiatoBottle of Picpoul de Pinet £34Glass of Pinot Noir £6

Estimated total (incl service) £152 (bill paid by Michael Wynn-Jones)

Smith doesn't cook much herself these days. "When you're 82, the standing is quite hard." Her husband of 52 years, Michael Wynn-Jones, takes charge instead, although he sticks mostly to her back catalogue. She still loves food and cooking, but lost interest in foodie culture long ago. She quit TV in 2013, saying she had exhausted her supply of ideas. "When you've been through 20 seasons of asparagus, there's not an awful lot left you can do with it. Know what I mean?"

The split was likely mutual — viewers had switched over to watch Jamie Oliver race against the kitchen clock, or Nigella Lawson melt chocolate in a bathrobe. 

There is no hint of bitterness or regret at departing the stage when she did. Celebrity was never part of the appeal. She despises MasterChef, and never watches The Great British Bake Off. I ask if seeing Prue Leith and Mary Berry, contemporaries of hers, back on primetime TV makes her think about a comeback? "No! I think thank God they're doing it." 

She also finds the "poncy" approach that dominates the modern restaurant trade utterly grating. "It's what [cookery writer] Elizabeth David called theatre on a plate. It's not about real cooking. It's not what I want to eat." 

Smith's recipes — including how to boil eggs and how to make toast — at times drew criticism for being patronising. But the public lapped it all up. Delia's Complete Cookery Course is still in print more than 40 years since its first publication. "Everybody did rubbish it," she says. "But I was doing it for the people, and that's where I get appreciation now, every day of my life."

The Delia approach feels curiously modern in an age where we are constantly learning how to do things at the press of a thumb. She chuckles when I tell her about a YouTube video explaining how to boil eggs that has 38mn views. Her own website offers plenty of similar videos as part of her free online "cookery school", but nobody knows it's there, she laments. 

The starters have arrived, two triangles of buttered brown bread and a neat little ramekin of crab buried under a haystack of cress, which Smith promptly relocates so that she can sprinkle it over each mouthful.

We switch to modern food trends — does she keep on top of them? Is she experimenting with kimchi, chipotle or sriracha? "I see recipes in magazines and I don't know what the ingredients are. Food has always been faddish, and I've always tried to lie low and let it go."

Of greater concern is the way younger generations are once again losing the art of cooking, she says, instead relying on takeaways and ready meals. The vilification of meat means that many people no longer appreciate great ingredients, such as a good pork chop. 

It brings us neatly to veganism, the current culinary macro-trend and something she feels strongly about. "Everything within me tells me that it's wrong. If people just want to eat vegetables — and some people do — that's fine. But don't say you're helping the planet, because you're not. Full stop."

We think we're not important, we're just ordinary people. I think we all can do something. It's big, big, big stuff

The topic of climate change and the future of the human race provokes a change in her demeanour. She begins to open up, becoming impassioned, even mournful about the direction we are heading in. It's not just global warming that worries her, it's everything. The march of autocracy, rising poverty, creaking political systems. She reels off lists of podcasts and documentaries that have informed her increasingly gloomy world view. 

"We are backsliding as a society in every respect, and it's very distressing. We're in a very dangerous situation. There is so much horrendous stuff going on in the world. We're heading for extinction. I just wish someone would wake up to the seriousness of the situation." 

So what's the solution? "We need young people like you to get rid of all this old rubbish and do something new, do something different."

Delia Smith, champion of the kitchen's rules-based order, now an eco-warrior, an iconoclast, a would-be revolutionary. "I've got to be careful what I say because what you write will be in the Daily Mail the next day." 

Such feelings are what prompted her most recent book You Matter, a meditation on the power of the individual. 

"We're waiting for something to come along — another leader, another prime minister, somebody to come and do something. But really each of us has a responsibility. What I think is sad is that we've had that responsibility dampened — we think we're not important, we're just ordinary people. I think we all can do something. It's big, big, big stuff." 

The heaviness lifts as we get to work on our mains. I yield quickly when offered a glass of Pinot Noir to go with the hunk of duck laid in front of me, the slick purple sauce dotted with sour cherries. Whatever the salt man in Cumbria did has worked a treat — the skin is delicate and crisp, the meat rich and tender. It's delicious, although the portion size is a little daunting. 

Smith's monkfish looks minuscule by comparison. Our sides of potatoes and green beans will make occasional cameos. "Come on then, let's do football," she declares, giving the fourth wall a glancing blow. 

Smith and Wynn-Jones have been coming to Norwich as fans for decades. In the 1990s, with the club struggling financially, they bought shares, became directors, and ultimately took control, putting around £12mn into the club over the years. Since then it has enjoyed high and lows, including numerous fleeting spells in the Premier League, football's richest competition. 

Beneath it all there's this human connection. I don't think there's anything else like it

She rejects the term "owner", preferring to call herself a "caretaker" looking after a community asset. Many in football talk like this, but I suspect few mean it like she does. 

It's clear that football, not food, is her true passion. She's getting itchy about the summer break, and is desperate for the new season to get going.

"When I open the newspaper, I want to know what Palace are doing, I want to know what Man City are doing. I can't wait to read who's going where," she says. "I don't want to read about golf."

Smith is part of a vanishing breed in football, an avid fan who made good and picked up the pieces of her beloved, broken club. Now English football is dominated by US billionaires, private equity firms and sovereign wealth funds. Can the game she loves survive?

"One thing that fascinates me about football is that it's one of the last bastions of community. It's something incredibly precious. Somehow I believe in it. Somehow we'll get through. All this money, money, money, one day it's got to pop." she says. "Beneath it all there's this human connection. I don't think there's anything else like it."

She goes on: "If you take a child to football, the one lovely thing they are going to learn is that life is not a bowl of cherries. It's good and it's wonderful and it's thrilling. But it's also painful and horrible."

You don't want something sprinkled in dust and covered in foam. It's laughable, except you're paying a fortune for it

And what of her own stewardship? In September last year, Norwich broke the taboo and brought in overseas investment. Mark Attanasio, an American fund manager and owner of the Milwaukee Brewers baseball team, took a stake in the club and now sits on the board. Is he the heir apparent? 

"At the moment we don't know. He seems like a really good guy. We have no idea what the future will bring. We just have to wait and see. What we have to do now is hand over to people we think will be good caretakers. Football is full of terrible disasters. We won't have a disaster. We'll do it properly."

Does this signal retirement is looming? "No, I won't ever retire. I can't not do anything. I can't just sit down and wait for the six o'clock news. I believe bodies age but souls don't. Everyone is 19 inside. I really believe that." 

The menu has committed us to three courses, so when asked we take the plunge. Tongue in cheek, she asks for "Delia's chocolate nut sundae". I'm having berry pavlova, something my Northern Irish grandma made for us as kids. "They have a thing in France called cuisine grand-mère — that's what I like," says Smith. "You don't want something sprinkled in dust and covered in foam. It's laughable, except you're paying a fortune for it."

I reassure her that I've enjoyed a meal with a starter, main and dessert, rather than London's increasingly ubiquitous "small plates". Just the mention of those two words — "small plates" — causes her to shudder. "Rubbish!" she blurts out between spoonfuls of slippery chocolate.

We round off with a large black coffee for her, a macchiato for me. Chocolates come too. We're offered brandies but it feels like a stretch. 

Recommended

As we begin to wrap up, Smith says, "We're going to make a deal . . . When we're back in the Premier League, we're inviting you up — you and the wife and the kids." Then she adds with a wicked laugh: "I can't promise when it'll be. I might not be alive."

The bill is supposed to be on its way, but Michelle returns empty-handed. It's been taken care of. The FT rule book has been set alight like a crêpe Suzette. "It's nothing to do with me," my dinner companion insists. 

It transpires that Wynn-Jones has been tucked away somewhere in the restaurant having his own night out and has forced the issue. The power of the individual feels all too distant now. 

After three hours together, we part ways with a warm handshake. "I enjoyed that. I like talking to young people," she says. "I'm glad we didn't have to do the whole cookery thing."

Then she glides off in search of her doting husband, and her ride home.

Josh Noble is the FT's sports editor

Find out about our latest stories first — follow @ftweekend on Twitter

---