For 40 years, Delia Smith seemed indestructible. She was the cook supreme, the sovereign of the spatula, the queen of hearts who made lots and lots of tarts.
Through her myriad television series and her best-selling cookery books, an entire nation learned how to crimp pastry, how to blend until thick and smooth, how to brown in batches and how to roast a turkey to bronzed perfection.
From pancakes to cottage pie, from mayonnaise to meringues, Saint Delia was always the calm voice in our heads, urging a steady hand with the powdered mustard, suggesting a level tablespoon of common sense, reminding us to stir our puddings once more for luck.
Off the boil: Earlier this year Delia Smith cook announced that she would make no more programmes
In times of crisis and of Christmas, she smoothed our lumpy sauces and sieved away our anxieties about poaching haddock or cooking rice. She was always, always there — and then, all of a sudden, she was not.
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Earlier this year, the veteran television cook announced that she would make no more programmes. Delia was turning her back on the small screen because she was tired of having to ‘entertain’ instead of educate.
She said she was still passionate about teaching people how to cook, but had decided to do it online rather than on television. ‘It is the future,’ she said.
Young pretender: Pippa Middleton replaced Delia as the Face of Waitrose supermarket
So, after presenting her first show in 1973 and what now seems to have been her last in 2010, her telly career is officially over.
Then, more bad news. After three years and 28 recipe-based TV adverts, her relationship with the Waitrose chain of supermarkets also ended.
To add insult to injury, Delia appeared to have been dropped and replaced by Pippa Middleton, the clueless cookie who barely seems to know a chip from a chipolata, but is the sister of the Duchess of Cambridge, so that’s all right then.
Poor Delia! She must have felt like, well, like what? We are all dying to know.
‘Those who are dying to know how I feel about being "replaced by Pippa" should look at the facts,’ says Delia, suddenly a little bit frosty, just like the icing on one of her glazed grapes. ‘I was not replaced by Pippa. She writes a column in the Waitrose magazine. I never wrote a column in the magazine.
‘What I did was a lot of adverts for them over a long period of time. It was quite hard work!
‘I said to them, I am not just going to say “shop at Waitrose”. I can’t do that. We did recipes instead.
‘We got them down to 40 seconds on screen. Incredible. A kind of genius. Quite a separate thing. So really, the Pippa thing, it’s a nothing.’
Just like one of her recipes, Delia in real life is direct and precise. She is rather like a crisp headmistress whom everyone in school is slightly afraid of, although she is often amused and amusing.
True, she doesn’t much like the Pippa comparisons, and reveals she hasn’t read Pippa’s book, Celebrate, about entertaining — nor her debut Waitrose column on preparing party food.
‘I have never even seen a Pippa recipe. I don’t think I really want to talk about it because it is so nothing. I haven’t read the magazine, I’m afraid,’ said Delia.
‘I haven’t been shopping for food for a while. I don’t know how to cook for parties and if I did I would, I would...’ she flounders.
Make some of Pippa’s sushi?
‘Ha ha. No. Ha ha ha. Look, I think it has been great. We all had a good laugh, haven’t we?
‘What was it? I was axed, I was dropped? None of it was true. People got the wrong end of the stick because my leaving was completely mutual. But I must say, it has all been a really good laugh.’
Delia said she was still passionate about teaching people how to cook, but had decided to do it online rather than on television
Today Delia is en route from her Suffolk home to her London flat by the Thames. We meet in a station hotel, where she orders a glass of fizzy mineral water, which she barely touches.
She is 71 years old and looks tremendous in her jeans, chic Annette Gortz jacket and black silk T-shirt.
This cool new look is courtesy of the stylist who sourced her clothes for the Waitrose ads, whom she has retained to look after her wardrobe needs.
‘It’s bliss, because I hate shopping for clothes and now I don’t have to,’ she says.
On Tuesday, Delia is to be honoured with a Special Award by Bafta in recognition of her outstanding contribution to TV cookery and to shaping the perception of cooking in the nation’s consciousness.
She will also be the focus of a special Bafta tribute film celebrating her 40-year television career. ‘I thought you could get a Bafta only if you were in the movies,’ she says. ‘This is such a thrill and a privilege.’
Delia, aged nine, guzzling a bottle of pop
In the meantime, she is a woman on a mission. Smith is utterly driven by her new project; a free, online cookery school, which she hopes will cure many of the nation’s ills.
She feels that rising rates of obesity, increased consumption of junk food and ignorance among young people about cooking methods are all ticking time-bomb problems.
‘If you are young, with no money, you have a bag of crisps and a Kit-Kat for lunch. I feel if they knew how to cook, nutrition would be better, all kinds of things would be better,’ she says.
How did we get here? Unlike her pioneering cookery programmes on the BBC — which include Family Fare, Delia Smith’s Cookery Course, One Is Fun, Delia’s How To Cook and Delia’s Classic
Christmas — she believes food shows today are about showbiz rather than instruction.
And that is one reason why practical knowledge among young people has suffered as a result.
She doesn’t think all these shows are without merit, admiring The Great British Bake-Off, which features her old rival, Mary Berry.
‘That has been the best thing for getting people baking, cooking, back into the kitchen — a tremendous step forward,’ she says.
(Delia and Mary Berry go back a long way, right to the dawn of their respective television careers when Berry was on ITV while Smith was on the Beeb. ‘We used to swap notes,’ says Delia. ‘I haven’t seen her for many years now, but she is a lovely person, she is incredible. And she just looks stunning!’)
Her other preferred viewing is more of a surprise.
‘I just love the Hairy Bikers. They are one of my favourites. I don’t know why. It is so entertaining, you can’t switch it off. I like their recipes — I think they’re very good.’
However, despite these best efforts, what she really despairs of is that cooking is no longer taught in schools.
‘I have been absolutely livid about it for years and years and years. I have been so angry that they took cooking out of school, because one thing I know for absolute sure is that you can’t cook if somebody doesn’t show you how.
‘Young people know about Japanese food and Chinese food and cheffing — but good old home cooking doesn’t get a look-in. It has been eclipsed by the razzmatazz; all the towers, drizzles and sprinkles.
Fan: Delia said she loves the Hairy Bikers both for the entertainment factor and their recipies
‘People do not know how to make a real mayonnaise, or what it tastes like. Imagine being able every week to taste a real home-made mayonnaise? You see, it’s so simple!’
Who would watch Delia’s potted internet masterclasses?
‘Anyone from nine to 109 who feels afraid. Everywhere I go, people are afraid. People are scared of meringues, of kitchens,’ she says.
‘So I am on a mission. I do understand it might not work and if it doesn’t work I don’t mind, but I have got to do it. I have got to have a go.’
Initially, Delia tried to get television stations to screen her five- and ten-minute instructive cookery films, but no one was interested.
‘Various controllers at the BBC said no. Channel 4 said no, but they wanted me to fill in the Paul O’Grady slot with a cookery chat show. I said: “Absolutely no way!”
After presenting her first show in 1973 and what now seems to have been her last in 2010, Delia's telly career is officially over
‘They were very disappointed, but there was no way I was going to do a cookery chat show. It is not me, that is not what I do.’
After that, she washed her hands of television. ‘So that is the end, finished. I am not going to do any more TV and I don’t really want to do any more books,’ she says, although she is reluctant to let her good work over the years go entirely to waste. Retirement is clearly not an option.
‘I don’t want to spend 40 years doing something and then watch it go down the plug-hole. I don’t think I am a great cook, but I do know how to communicate, to tell other people how to cook.’
Delia Smith is a remarkable woman in so many ways, not just because of her culinary indefatigability, but also her hard-boiled certainty, her unshakeable belief that her way is the right way.
She has never been swayed by food fads. She was one of the few to be unconvinced by organic zealots and remains unmoved by sundry pressure groups, pomegranate molasses and tofu.
In her mind, she imagines her journey through the food world like this: ‘I see a room full of people all talking and I am sort of creeping through them on the floor, just going through it and not falling for anything.
‘From day one, the publisher said to me: “If you won’t put freezing in your book, we can’t publish it because it is the future,” and I said I am not going to.
‘The next thing was TVP [textured vegetable protein — a soy-based meat substitute]. I wouldn’t do that either. Microwaving recipes? No. I just duck down in the crowd and go through it all.
‘Cooking for me is all about what it tastes like. If you give me a lovely fresh Scottish raspberry and a blueberry, I would prefer the raspberry because it has more flavour. That is my whole philosophy.
‘We cook so that we can have taste sensations — and a bit of tofu, I am afraid, does not do that.’
The last thing she prepared was slow-cooked lamb at home on Sunday, which she put in the oven at 8.30 in the morning and ate with her husband, Michael Wynn-Jones, at one o’clock. ‘It was wonderful,’ she says.
The couple are famous for their roles as joint majority shareholders at Norwich City Football Club, a mutual passion they have shared for years. ‘Football is heartbreaking and exhilarating and full of joy. It is what life is; one minute full of pain, the next minute it is wonderful.’
Yet the most important thing in her life — above cookery and football — is her Catholic faith. Delia is a deeply devout woman who goes to Mass every day and also sets time aside to pray — ‘I don’t like the word “pray”, it is more like being still and silent’ — at least twice a day.
Football fan: Delia is a majority shareholder at Norwich City Football Club
She was 22 when she became a Roman Catholic, and although she did not contemplate joining an order, she has lived in convents for long periods of instruction.
As regards current controversies in the Church, she does not want to go on the record as someone who is for or against gay marriage, but she does say: ‘It is a difficult one, but I can answer it only in one way.
'Everything I have been taught, everything I know and understand about belief is that the highest thing on Earth is love between two people, and the rest doesn’t even get near it.
‘So, yes, you have the arguments, you can say what it should be, but if two people love one another then they are in God and God is in them, and there is no way anyone can say other.’
For one whose professional life has revolved around food, Delia eats very frugally. While weekend match-days involve big lunches and wine, other meals are the essence of simplicity.
This morning, it was oat bran and tea for breakfast, it will be fruit for lunch and an omelette or a boiled egg for dinner.
Despite inflammatory arthritis, she is in good health and spirits. ‘I think that we, every single one of us, is 19 years old inside,’ she says.
She hates her goody-goody image — ‘just not me’ — and gets annoyed when people call her Saint Delia.
‘You are [called] a saint only because someone has been able to make an omelette for the first time,’ she says. ‘I am no saint. I have great weaknesses, like everybody else. I get grumpy. Michael always says I speak before the brain is engaged.’
For Delia, it is the cooker-hood, not sainthood, that still beckons.
‘I want to take away the fear,’ she says.