A Very Good Egg

Before I left for university, my mother gave me three things she thought I might find useful: a small non-stick milk pan, one of those wooden spoons with a square corner – ‘for getting right to the edges’, she said – and a huge hardback recipe book, from the dust jacket of which beamed the reassuring face of Delia Smith: the new, single-volume Delia’s Complete Illustrated Cookery Course (1989).

Food looms large in my memories of childhood: simple weekday suppers to accompany our (often heated) table conversation, and extravagant exotic feasts – stir-fries, curries, tagines – long before the ingredients needed to cook them were easy to find in our rural super­markets. During the summer, the highlight of each week was the Saturday barbecue, when friends and family would arrive to enjoy platters of chargrilled meat, fish and vegetables, which would com­pete for space and attention with pesto rice, couscous with chargrilled Mediterranean vegetables, and broad bean and bacon salad. Delia presided – in spirit, at least – at the head of the table. The older, three-volume edition, Delia Smith’s Cookery Course, had been my mother’s own introduction to cooking. Her father, though a chef and a cookery teacher, had done little of the cooking at home, so it was only after she moved out that she took an interest in cook­ing, and it was to Delia that she turned. I was also a culinary late-starter. I had been rather too interested in reading and video games to devote much of my time to the art of cookery. Besides, the kitchen had been a temple which we mere mortals (my father, sister and I) were rarely permitted to enter while food was actually being prepared. As a result, I went to university with only one recipe securely mastered: scrambled eggs. Clearly, my mother thought I too could benefit from a little of Delia’s advice. With chapters on ‘Sauces’, ‘Pâtés and starters’, ‘Offal’ and ‘Scones and biscuits’, I must admit that it was a somewhat daunting intro­duction to cookery for a 19-year-old whose only previous culinary success had been eggs and toast. The photography didn’t immediately inspire either: still lifes of heavy earthenware dishes and fine bone-china serving platters against a background of wine bottles, cut flowers and wicker baskets (though as a child of the ’80s, I admit that the photographs still have a certain nostalgic charm). At first, I decided to take the title of the book literally, determined to approach it in the same way I approached my university studies. I made quick progress with the first chapter – mercifully dedicated to eggs – but by chapter two I was floundering. Bread-making proved to be my Achilles heel and remains so to this day: the less said about my repeated attempts at Delia’s ‘quick and easy’ wholewheat loaves, the better. I began to feel that I was failing already. Returning from a Christmas spent at home, however, and having again enjoyed cookery at its most extravagant, I decided to approach Delia a little differently. Instead of working my way through the book, page by page, chapter by chapter, from beginning to end, I began skipping ahead, looking for the sort of indulgent food I had been craving. Moussaka, braised pork with apples and cider, spiced apple and raisin pie: the childhood recipes that I had never dreamed I could make were, with a little help from Delia, suddenly within my reach. I had found my cookery niche, and I am still never happier than when spending hours in the kitchen or outside at the barbecue, working on something rich, decadent and, usually, very calorific. Soon, while my fellow students were throwing together pasta dishes in which baked beans and cocktail sausages featured as princi­pal ingredients, I was attempting Boeuf en daube, a rather complicated roast that involves soaking a joint of beef rump in red wine for twelve hours before even preheating the oven. Reading the Complete Illustrated Cookery Course, I became familiar with Delia’s voice long before I watched any of her cookery pro­grammes. Her writing offers the same no-nonsense, slightly authoritarian tone that still strikes fear into me when in the kitchen. She is a woman of strong opinions, and she makes it clear that, though cooking may be an art, it is an art that is much easier to grasp if you follow the rules. Delia taught me, for instance, that cooking a roast dinner is littered with pitfalls for the unwary long before you step into the kitchen. When shopping for beef, you must be careful what cut of meat you buy, because ‘all manner of things get tied up with string and labelled “roasting”’, while for pork, ‘our modern preoccupation with leanness has taken its toll on character and flavour’. In another section, ‘Boning chickens’, she flatly refuses to offer any advice at all, explaining that it ‘goes against the grain’ for her to produce ‘something resembling a stuffed rugby ball in the name of chicken’. Her common-sense approach to cooking comes out most clearly on the topic of healthy eating. She feels very strongly about both butter and cream, for instance. In the introduction to her 1976 Frugal Food, she calls cream ‘the one ingredient that makes frugality tolerable’ and worries about the impact dieting is having on flavour. She has in this – as in many other things – been vindicated today: far from being one of the great evils of modern cookery, we now know the importance of natural fats in our food. Healthy eating, according to Delia, isn’t a rigid list of dos and don’ts, but a basic principle: we all know which ingredients are less good for us, so we should limit how much of them we eat. She would ‘rather eat a roast chicken with butter once a month than eat it three times a week with none . . .’ I celebrated the end of my third year at university by hosting a rather lavish three-course dinner for my housemates and friends, using modest student resources stockpiled over the previous months. After a starter of smoked salmon creams, I prepared both a sizeable joint of beef sirloin and a roast duck, alongside all the expected accompaniments, both roasted and boiled. It was a feat only achieved by making use of the ovens in both kitchens in our student house, one of which was on the lowest storey, the other in the loft-conversion annex, separated by three flights of stairs. We finished with a raspberry trifle, that stalwart of the 1980s dinner party. When I had finally ushered everyone out, I promptly fell asleep on a sofa in the living-room, though my exhaustion was mixed with more than a little pride. None of this would have been possible without Delia, not only because all the recipes had been from the Complete Illustrated Cookery Course, but also because the book had allowed me to reconnect with memories of childhood feasts and entertaining. It was through this book that my mother and I developed our love of extravagant cooking, and food is still how we stay in touch: the perennial opening to most of our text messages is ‘What are you cooking tonight?’ and we both know it is thanks to Delia that I don’t have to answer, ‘scrambled eggs on toast’. While on the topic of scrambled eggs, Delia’s own recipe is a simple affair. She borrows her method from Escoffier, though the timings I use are my mother’s: ‘about as long as it takes for the bread to toast’. I notice, with some satisfaction, that Delia’s recipe calls for ‘a wooden spoon – preferably one with a point’, though I doubt she would approve of my milk pan: non-stick pans were something she ‘couldn’t recommend’.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 84 © Samuel Saloway-Cooke 2024