Delia disappoints

Last night I finally caught Delia’s new show, inspiringly titled Delia (back to basics, love). The show, based on her new cookery book, How to Cheat at Cooking, offers the viewer recipes that ostensibly will help him or her avoid fresh food.

I have a few problems with her approach:

-The use of the word ‘cheat’. Why stigmatise any cooking at home with such a word? Why call using marinated roasted red peppers and jarred mayonnaise to make red pepper mayonnaise ‘cheating’? I would argue that in the winter that it’s a seasonal approach to cooking. The peppers in that jar were likely grown in the heat of summer and simply preserved. I resent the implication that using preserved goods is cheating.

Furthermore, using tinned dressed crab is not cheating either. Fresh crab is not readily available throughout Britain, and using the tinned version to enhance the flavour of a soup or a dip should not be an undesirable option.

-I do find fault in substituting ingredients for their fresh, readily available, and for the most part inexpensive, counterparts. Tinned meat and frozen mash, this means you. Fresh potatoes and lean mince are surely the better choice. And, until the tins and bags go some way to stating otherwise, we can only assumed that the source of the produce is not particularly appealing.

-Which brings me to my final point. Why distinguish between the source of some ingredients (ie, pesto: “Make sure it’s Italian,” she remonstrates) and not others? She’s not banging on about the tinned mince in the same fashion: “Make sure it’s from Cheshire”)

All in all, I think it’s a flawed approach. I don’t like being told what I’m doing is cheating. I’m all for getting more cooks in the kitchen, but not like this.

We’ll see what next week’s episode is like, if I can stomach it.