Tonight:
4°c
Sometimes I wonder how anyone finds the time to cook. There are days when it's difficult to grab a cup of soup at lunchtime, never mind rustle up a balanced meal at night. Yet for me cooking remains one of life's great grounding experiences - at the end of a hectic day a piece of grilled fish and a freshly boiled potato is always better than a soulless ready meal.
It's my time-starved generation Delia Smith seeks to address with her new book, How to Cheat at Cooking. But she has taken the old Shirley Conran adage - that life's too short to stuff a mushroom - rather too seriously. A glance at her recipes gives the impression not of women rushing between board meetings and cocktail parties, fitting the family catering into the odd spare half-hour - the reality of life for many. Instead you think they've lost the use of their limbs.
Among the labour-saving ingredients she advocates are Eazy tinned fried onions and tubs of Tesco ciabatta crumbs. It's true we're all busy, but life is not too short to fry an onion or crumble a stale slice of bread over the top of your macaroni cheese. Use a carton of Sainsbury's Three-Cheese Sauce if you're in a hurry, but surely we don't need to sprinkle it with ready grated cheese. Does Delia have to advertise this needlessly overprocessed, overpackaged food? Five varieties of it? That's not cooking, it's shopping.
Where is the Delia who taught my mother how to make shepherd's pie and explained to the nation, with patience and precision, the secret of boiling an egg? Delia's strength has always been her reliability, her backtobasics assuredness. But there isn't a crisis I can imagine that would see me preparing lasagne with a can of minced beef, or adding frozen mashed potato to chocolate cake. These are simply not the sort of tips we need.
Delia is hugely influential. When she recommends a product it translates directly into supermarket sales. Truckloads of them. Aunt Bessie's ready-roast potatoes were on special offer at the door of my Sainsbury's Local even before How to Cheat hit the shelves. It's just one of the seven different types of frozen ready-cooked potatoes she namechecks in her book. And one of the many convenience foods she's mistaken for solutions to our toobusyto-cook lives.
Delia's book may well tempt a generation back into the kitchen. But she has missed an opportunity. There is a crisis in our kitchens - people don't know how to cook, or they don't have time to. But encouraging the purchase of grated cheese in a plastic bag won't solve a thing.
We don't need a cookbook to tell us to use ready-cooked bacon. As for Tesco toasted pinenuts in a tube - they take two minutes on my hob. Truly fast food is about clever combinations and ingenious short cuts.
Cooking is about more than following a recipe. It's therapeutic and it's nurturing. Doing it properly is important. Delia used to understand that and that's why we used to love her. But we don't any more.
Reader views (2)
Delia has missed the plot - it's about good food cooked well and inventively. It certainly doesn't have to be fancy, or take a great deal of time. If you can devote some of that precious commodity (why commodity? There's never enough!, why not try making your own bread. No, not in one of them machines, but using your very own hands. It doesn't take long, and whilst the dough is rising and filling the flat or house with good odours, you can be reading, writing, shopping, doing the laundry, even making love! And it certainly leaves the hands in good condition (I use olive oil), and finger nails pristine.
Go on - relax with a cool glass of Fairtrade and organic sauvignon blanc, and in a few minutes there'll be freshly baked rolls to savour with a little butter.
Mmm!
- Dominic Pinto, London United Kingdom, 27/02/2008 01:07
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Dear Ms Ross
Well said! Grounding... therapeutic... absolutely. I am 60 but only learnt to cook 3-4 years ago. Not many recipes, not that clever, but today I came back from the market laden with vegetables and tomorrow will cook a dinner for ten. There are not many things in life that are both creative and useful, but cooking sure is one of them.
I look forward to reading more.
- Henry Ruddock, Lincoln, England, 22/02/2008 13:48
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