Last year I fulfilled a long ambition: I made an authentic lobster bisque. I dusted off Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, II, and embarked on a marathon requiring strength, endurance, persistent attention to detail, not to mention dropping a wad on ingredients. Didn’t matter. The bisque was bliss. Only problem, I was exhausted and almost fell asleep before I served it.

This year I turned to the lobster bisque in Delia’s How To Cheat At Cooking. A can of lobster bisque, coconut milk, lemongrass, ginger, Thai fish sauce, a few coriander leaves, and I was done in twenty minutes. And it was delish.

So why I wonder is Cheat a cause celebre in Britain? Why are cries of betrayal and treachery filling the air?

The history of Delia mirrors the glorious food revolution on both sides of the pond. In 1970 Julia Child published Mastering the Art of French Cooking which translated classic cooking for the home cook. Next year, Delia published her first version of How To Cheat At Cooking and released the inner Escoffier in millions of ordinary Britons. Cooking in Britain was defined by class, like everything else, but Delia cut through the snobbery and showed that anyone can cook well and simply. Chefs said she was dull. But she helped to change the nation’s diet, promoting fresh, local food sourced from farmers’ markets, signature meats, organic food and the result was that more people were making better dinners and enjoying them more. Her commonsense books flew off the shelves (19 million sold) and so did any food or frypan she mentioned. She was crowned as an icon and included in the Oxford English Dictionary with the entry “Delia does it”

Now she’s really done it: she’s recommending fast food! What cheek. In this breezy book – its airy design as light as puff pastry - she gives short friendly recipes sourced mostly from the supermarket –omg – recommending processed food such as frozen potatoes, canned fried onions, canned minced beef…

It’s as if Moses revoked the ten commandments as too yesterday.

But Delia is simply following the zeitgeist. She knows that the party’s almost over for home cooking. Despite the fact that there are some 56,000 cookbooks now in circulation, women, their main target, are hanging up their aprons. They no longer want to spend time over a hot stove when they are now able to do other interesting things. Kitchens have never been more magnificent but the back story is that they’re mostly used for collage cuisine, cut and paste imported from the nearest takeaway.

Once cookbooks were a window on the domestic life of an age. Browse Mrs. Beaton to find out how the aspiring middle class Victorians lived from the menus they planned. Such books as Elizabeth Luard’s The Old World Kitchen: The Rich Tradition of European Peasant Cooking and Claudia Roden’s A Book of Middle Eastern Food were revelatory. But today’s books are mostly cannibal feasts, recipes recycled as ego trips or cobbled up by TV chefs -  or the coy kid genre, how little Joshua made his first cupcake.

Books for snobs include arcane doorstoppers by star chefs some of whom make food you would never want to eat. None of them are as user-friendly as Simply French, Patricia Wells/Joel Rebuchon, published in 1991 when the jus-stained cookbook was still a fixture in the kitchen. Today, people read cookbooks in bed – particularly those with Nigella on the cover. Face it, there’s nothing new to say about cooking and if there were, it’s too late to say it.

The decline in home cooking and cookbooks also derives from the politicization of food.  100 years ago, most people were driven by hunger for food. Now they’re driven by fear of food. A large foodfear lobby, comprising organicheads, locavores, animal activists, ecowarriers, food/health police, has hijacked the media which runs a scare a month about everything we like to  eat – it’s either bad for us, bad for animals or bad for the planet.

Foodfear’s target is ostensibly our diet but it is really criticizing the industrial society which created the processed food that takes 90% of our food dollar. In doing so it arouses the latent distrust of sensuality in countries ( Britain, North America)with puritan roots. Food isn’t there to make us joyful but simply to fuel us for greater tasks than eating.

When Delia said recently that all she cared about was the taste of food, Foodfear was  outraged. How could she ignore the dire implications of eating today? Doesn’t she know that the food industry has plotted to make kids obese? Why can’t she join people like us, the morally superior who eat only to save the world, weep over battery hens, won’t touch a lettuce leaf unless it’s certified organic.

Well maybe because she sides with the public health nutritionists who want us all to eat more veg but worry that if organic food is falsely hyped as superior, those who can’t afford the higher priced organic veg will simply not buy any.
How can she source supermarkets which are destroying diversity? Listen up.  Supermarkets liberated women to diversify their lives and they all diversified the popular diet. Once only the few could find coconut milk,vanilla beans, ingredients for Mexican feasts - now the supermarkets’ economy of scale has brought the world to the masses.
Two decades of brilliant FF propaganda has created the impression that processed food has no nutritional value. One of Delia’s cheats is canned minced meat which one critic described as looking like dog food and surely, she told her friend, the London Times nutritionist Amanda Ursell, it couldn’t be nutritious.

Wrong, said Ursell, canned meat - however it may look and regardless how animal activists may protest its provenance - is full of valuable protein and iron. She went on to say that no nutrition is lost in frozen food, some frozen foods actually increasing their nutritional value. A 100g serving of canned sardines eaten with their bones provides 500mg of the 700mg of calcium that we need daily. And a bonus: the French canned sardine is a gourmet treat.
Canned meat may taste inferior to fresh meat but surely that’s what a good cook is for? To miraculously transform lowly ingredients. As MFK Fisher wrote: “Maybe it was boiled shoe…but by the time Madame got through with it, it was nourishing and full of heavenly flavor and so were all the other courses she wrung daily…from the third-rate shops of Dijon and her own ingenuity.”

Some Delia detractors whinge she’s environmentally unfriendly.
Huh? They ain’t seen nothing yet. All food is environmentally unfriendly and it is going to become downright hostile because we have 6 billion plus hungry mouths to feed globally.
Food Fear is shortly going to be overwhelmed by something much more frightening – Starvation.
Last year food prices rose 60% worldwide – wheat, the essential cog in the food chain, rose 220% in the US due to poor harvests, rising demand and also because some farmers are replacing wheat with corn for lucrative biofuels.  Critics of processed food like to say we should pay MORE for food so we’d eat less. Or perhaps we’ll riot. That’s the traditional protest to rising food prices. The poor are already rioting in third world countries, bakers marched on Washington last month, the Italians had a pasta strike to protest a 20% price hike, and in Edmonton bread rose 30% in a month.
Will foodies be next? Even fashionable restaurants like San Francisco’s Slanted Door and New York’s Momofuku Noodle Bar are having to economize on food.
Delia’s cheats couldn’t be more timely.
Posh noshers now snacking on sixty buck Kobe sandwiches may have to learn to love processed shortcuts.
Welcome to Delia’s Democracy of eating.

Delia’s How To Cheat At Cooking by Delia Smith
$39.95. Ebury Press. 240 pages.