[attach id=234665 size="large"]Delia Smith wrote her first cookbook in 1971
but made a name for herself with her first
TV show Family Fare in the mid-1970s.
Photo: PA[/attach]
Celebrity chef Delia Smith, who was inspired by the awfulness of British food, has decided to quit television, saying entertainment had overtaken education in modern cookery shows.
Smith, 71, the UK’s bestselling cookery author with more than 21 million copies sold, told fans at a trade show that she was leaving TV after about 40 years to focus on a new venture, the Delia Online Cookery School.
The chef said she is still passionate about teaching people how to cook in a no-nonsense style but she wanted to work online with her followers who have coined the phrase “doing a Delia” to refer to preparing one of her recipes.
“This is the future for me and the population. It’s miles ahead. If you do a TV programme now, it’s got to entertain,” Smith was quoted by the Daily Telegraph newspaper as telling a question and answer session at a trade show in Birmingham to promote her bakeware range.
A spokeswoman for Smith, Melanie Grocott, confirmed that the chef had announced she would not be doing any more TV shows and was concentrating on her online cookery school.
Her show Delia’s How to Cook in 1998 reportedly drove a 10 per cent rise in egg sales in Britain
Smith’s retirement will come as a disappointment to her many fans who opt for her practical, fail-safe recipes as opposed to some of the more flamboyant styles of newer celebrity chefs.
Her cookbooks are a staple in many UK kitchens.
Smith’s departure from TV will also be a blow to some British supermarkets who report the ‘Delia effect’ – a term listed in the Collins English Dictionary in 2001 to describe a rush for a certain ingredient or item used by Smith in a recipe.
Smith wrote her first cookbook in 1971 but she made a name for herself with her first TV show Family Fare in the mid-1970s.
She realised her aim was to educate people, taking them back to basics to cover classic techniques, and this mission has been reflected in her list of more than 20 cookbooks and almost 20 TV series since then.
Her show Delia’s How to Cook in 1998 reportedly drove a 10 per cent rise in egg sales in Britain.
Her latest TV series, Delia Through the Decades, ran for five weeks in 2010 before she signed up to appear in a series of TV commercials for supermarket Waitrose with experimental chef Heston Blumenthal, who is known for snail porridge and bacon ice-cream.