Kitchen Scraps

Cookery books. It all used to be so simple; each publication fell into one of three main categories:

Jamie Oliver – “Shove it in, mix it up, pukka!”
Gary Rhodes – “Spend ten hours and use 97 ingredients to produce a wonderful, yet not-quite-like-the-picture, starter”
Delia – A class of her own. “Cook the basics, like this. It works.” Too right…

In an increasingly desperate attempt to get couch potato food pornographers (forever drooling, never cooking) off their fat bottoms and into the kitchen, chefs have had to dumb down their output somewhat, with “simple” and “easy” the catchphrases du jour. This isn’t always to bad effect – whilst I can state I’ve never even attempted a Gary Rhodes classic, being far too scared by the several pages of close print per recipe, his Great Fast Food is suitably food splattered. But when I heard of this latest Delia offering, my heart couldn’t help but sink. Delia taught me the basics. I’ve never failed with one of her recipes, none of which require 50 ingredients or days of preparation. So why the need to “Cheat”?

This is my real gripe with the book, which purports to be in part for people who have little time to cook. Well, I have little time to cook but even less time to shop, so how on earth will I make time to traipse around each major supermarket to get the branded ingredients she specifies (to say nothing of the air miles involved in this eco-friendly time). Isn’t cheating meant to save time? In some sense her ceaseless quest for cheat products is admirable, but I happen to like mince that’s fresh and not pre-cooked out of a tin (even if it is M&S’s). I also hate hate hate her obsession with Aunt Bessie’s frozen mashed potatoes (found in seven recipes) – dicing potatoes, boiling and mashing with milk and butter can take as little as 10 minutes and can be done at the same time as preparing the other ingredients of whatever you’re making. This isn’t just cheating, it’s nigh on sacrilege to anyone with an interest in knowing what’s going in their mouth.