Last week's announcement that Delia Smith was hanging up her apron to concentrate on turning around the fortunes of her beloved Norwich City football club will have sent shockwaves through many British kitchens. After all, it's one of the first things that people ask you about in the UK when they discover that you earn your living writing about food. "What do you think about Delia, then?" they say, with a half-smile that suggests they already know what you will reply.
So I say: very sound, hugely successful, very clever, you have to admire someone who so clearly understands the mass market and exactly how to write for it, and who has done that for nearly three decades.
And they look at you pityingly, and more than a little angrily, as if to say: you just don't get it, do you? And the truth of the matter is that I probably don't get it, no.
Delia Smith has a status in the UK which it is almost impossible for us to comprehend here in Ireland, where she is somewhat popular. The sheer volume in which her books sell in England and in Northern Ireland is only one part of the story. Her television shows attract huge audiences. Her videos of those programmes sell by the vanload. She dominates the world of cookery writing and production in the UK in a way which I think would be impossible in any other country. Beyond, yet very firmly behind, all that commercial success, there lies the fact that Delia is beloved of domestic cooks, who tell you with decisive firmness that "her recipes work, everytime, and all the time". This is the rock upon which all that commercial success is built: Delia is reliable. Delia can be counted upon. With Delia at your side, there will be no foul-ups, no contretemps with recalcitrant ingredients. It's not just cookery made simple, it's cookery made successful, and therein lies her sainthood.
It is a very cleverly constructed sainthood. In a commercial world which thrives on glamour and stardom, Delia is deliberately not glamorous, and even her great wealth has not made her a star: she is Ordinary Spice.
Of course there is the fine house in Suffolk, tantalisingly glimpsed in several oblique photographs in her newest "How to Cook" books, but above all she is a hard worker, devoted to her work. Even when she was given a special Glenfiddich prize a few year's back to mark her contribution to the culinary arts, she couldn't find time to come and pick up her gong: she was filming, explained her proud and very happy publisher, who then went on to tell all us hacks how many zillions of books she had sold.
Since then, of course, the sales have gone even further into the stratosphere: the second volume of How to Cook is the fastest selling hardback of all time in the UK. Hannibal Lecter, eat your heart out.
So, what exactly is my problem? Simply this: in a world in which we need writers to truly explore and explain the cuisines of the world, and their significance and specialities, Delia is nothing more than a culinary tour guide, leading the masses through the throng of the bazaar, with a quick stop at the spice shops and the vegetable and fish stalls, before taking us safely to the restaurant which looks after the tourists with special, tried and trusted menus. Her work is, really, all about compiling The Tourist Menu.
And she does this, everyone concedes, quite brilliantly. Just look at the way in which her recipes take you, in effect, by the hand, with their beautifully realised structure and understanding of process. "Start by"; "First of all"; "To begin"; and then the reassuring terms: "now", followed by "then", the kindly "at this point". Just look at this style in action in the recipe for buttered leeks, which simply uses leeks, butter and seasonings:
"When the leeks are trimmed and washed, cut them all the way through vertically, then chop them into 1 inch (2.5cm) pieces. Now place a small frying pan over a medium heat, add the butter and let it melt - it needs to lightly coat the surface of the pan. Now add the leeks and some seasoning, stir them around, then turn the heat down to low and let them cook gently for about five minutes without a lid, stirring them two or three times. There will be quite a lot of juice that collects in the pan, so use a draining spoon to serve".
The effect of the constant use of these terms, and the complete absence of any cheffy terms - Delia will never tell you to "cook off" anything - is wonderfully reassuring and involving, as precise and knowing as any novelist driving a plot forward - Mrs Smith is as smart a writer as Maeve Binchy. Sometimes, as in her Christmas book, she takes you through The Entire Day of the big celebration - not just culinary advisor, but personal assistant as well.
And yet, it just leaves me utterly cold. This snapshot cooking fails for me because it is about nothing other than itself. No more is revealed, no more is understood, than the thing itself. There are no bibliographies in her work, no evidence of research from other sources and from other writers. There are few acknowledgements of the provenance of recipes - she takes the classic French dish of Chicken with 40 Cloves of Garlic and turns it into Guinea Fowl with 30 Cloves of Garlic, but doesn't alert the reader about the source of the recipe. Her attributions go no further than nods to the production of the recipe on the television series, or a version of it in an earlier Delia book. Everything is by Delia and done Delia's way, and cooking is reduced to pure mechanics, a beginning, middle and end process that turns out happily every time.
But cooking isn't like that. Cooking is about confidence, and improvisation: once you know how to do something, in effect you should never do it the same way again, because every detail of cookery is always changing, from the temperature of the oven to the freshness of the fish, to the viscosity of the olive oil. Nothing is constant in cooking: that is its glory. That is its culture.
Try telling this to Delia Smith's legion of admirers, and you get passionate disagreement, and they offer the inevitable coup de grace, which is: if Delia isn't the business, then how is she so amazingly successful?
But Delia isn't successful. She is popular, and success and popularity are not inevitable bedfellows. She is extremely good at what she does, of course, but I would doubt the lasting value of what she does. The great culinary bibles of the last century - Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Time-Life's The Good Cook, The Joy of Cooking, to name a few classics - are all about much more than just making individual dishes. They are about understanding the art of cooking, along with the mechanics of cooking, and that is why they endure. Delia's culinary tourism, like any mass market tourism, kills the very thing it allegedly celebrates.