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When did she start thinking about these ideas? “Well, they were always bubbling around, and I did write some religious books at one stage [a Catholic convert, she used to go to mass every day; the books in question were published in the 1980s]. But I found they just went to religious people, and I wanted to write for those who don’t have any religion. The main thrust of it is that there is a whole part of our lives that is left unexplored, and this is the crucial time in our history to get into that. Things are very bad. How could we not want to look at the world and say: we’ve got to change?” A pause. “Have you seen Don’t Look Up?” she asks. I shake my head. (In case you don’t know, it’s a Netflix film starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence, about a comet that’s heading towards Earth, a calamity that is an allegory for the climate emergency]. “Well, it’s brilliant, and it’s also saying what I’m saying, which is that we don’t realise the power we have when we work together.” Smith's first television appearances came in the early 1970s, as resident cook on BBC East's regional magazine programme Look East, shown on BBC One across East Anglia. Following this, she was offered her own cookery television show, Family Fare which ran between 1973 and 1975. What has the response to the book been like so far? Michael scrutinised each section as she completed it. “He would say: ‘OK’. Or: ‘I don’t think you’ve got that quite right.’” But You Matter was turned down by no fewer than six publishers, in spite of the fact that Delia has sold more than 21m copies of her cookbooks. “It was tough. At one point we were looking at self-publishing.” Finally, it went to a small press: Mensch. “And thank God those six did turn it down. I couldn’t have done better.” I’ve no idea how her latest editor feels about self-actualisation. But he or she will surely have relished the glimpses its author gives of herself on the path to enlightenment. How surprising (and cheering) to find that she loves Pharrell Williams; that she marched against Brexit; that she idolises Greta Thunberg; that it is her great pleasure to take the Norwich apprentices to the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts at the University of East Anglia to look at paintings by Bacon and Picasso. (“In the cafeteria, these guys of 16 were collecting up the cups; they’ve been trained to think of others because you can’t become a team if you’re only interested in yourself,” she says, when I bring this up.)
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In 2010 she appeared in a five-episode series, Delia through the Decades, with each episode exploring a new decade of her cooking. [11]Smith was baptised in the Church of England, and attended a Methodist Sunday School, a Congregationalist Brownie group and later a Church of England youth group. At the age of twenty-two, she converted to Catholicism. Her first two short religious books, A Feast for Lent (1983) and A Feast for Advent (1983), are readings and reflections for these seasons. In 1988, she wrote a longer book on prayer, A Journey into God. Born to Harold Bartlett Smith (1920–1999), an English RAF radio operator, and Welsh mother Etty Jones Lewis (1919–2020), [4] in Woking, Surrey, Smith attended Bexleyheath School, leaving at the age of 16 without a single O-level. [5] [6] Her first job was as a hairdresser; she also worked as a shop assistant and in a travel agency. [7] [8] Cookery career Smith and her husband, Michael Wynn-Jones, presenting Norwich City player Emiliano Buendía with the club’s player of the season trophy, 2021. Photograph: Stephen Pond/Getty Images
Delia Smith Cookbooks, Recipes and Biography | Eat Your Books Delia Smith Cookbooks, Recipes and Biography | Eat Your Books
Delia Smith: 'The world is in chaos… but together we have such power' ". TheGuardian.com. 6 March 2022. Davies, Caroline (2 April 2016). "New faces on Sgt Pepper album cover for artist Peter Blake's 80th birthday". The Guardian. In its exuberance and sincerity, You Matter is emphatically the work of an autodidact, and perhaps this is one way in which it connects, as unlikely as this sounds, to the rest of her career. She left her school in Bexleyheath at 16, and went to work first as a hairdresser. But having grown interested in cooking, at 21 she started again, this time as a dishwasher in a small restaurant in Paddington, a role that gave her the opportunity to learn on the job (eventually, she graduated to waitressing, and thence to the kitchen). Meanwhile, she spent her free time devouring cookbooks in the reading room at the British Museum, trying out the recipes she found on the family from whom she rented a room. In 1969, she was taken on by the Daily Mirror’s magazine, which is where she met Michael; the first thing she wrote was a recipe for kipper paté. From there, she moved to the Evening Standard and into television (her first appearances were on the BBC’s Look East). Again, she learned as she went along. “That was the best job,” she says, of the Standard. “I used to get a lot of letters, and I learned how to write recipes from those. Someone once asked: ‘You say the tomatoes must be peeled, but how?’ From that moment, I never wrote a recipe without explaining every part of the process.” It has been some time in the writing, but this year I actually finished it and it was published. And so I was introduced to the world of Literary Festivals. I had no idea how many of them there were, in every corner of the country. Before I read You Matter, I hadn’t heard of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a man she describes as “a colossus” (he died in 1955). But she’s not surprised. De Chardin was a Darwinist who fell out with the church over the doctrine of original sin: “All his books were banned by the church for a time,” she says. She got into him in the 1960s. “They’re quite difficult to read. But the more mature I got, the more I realised that humanity is a phenomenon, which is what he says.” The title of her book, however, was not inspired by him, but by a piece torn from a magazine many years ago: the work of a young woman, Dorothea Lynch, who was dying of cancer (Lynch would go on to write a book, Exploding Into Life). It doesn’t always, Delia believes, take a philosopher to spell out the essence of complicated ideas. Lynch was suffering terribly, but in her pain she was able to grasp the beauty of life as never before. “Each of us is very special, very singular, carrying weight,” she wrote. “I matter. I would like to open the window tonight and yell that outside. I matter.”
May I wish you, then, a slightly merrier Christmas and, as ever, thank you for your marvellous support of Deliaonline throughout the year. Travelling to many of them (this was the era before train strikes!) was often rewarding: there were some fine speakers and it was wonderful to meet all those who - believe it or not - turned up to listen to me. How much the message got through I don’t know but it is essentially an optimistic book showing (to quote the publisher’s blurb) ‘how in unity with one another we can build a future in these uncertain times’. Smith became a recognisable figure amongst young people in the 1970s and early 1980s when she was an occasional guest on the BBC's Saturday morning children's programme Multicoloured Swap Shop, giving basic cooking demonstrations. At 21, she started work in a small restaurant in Paddington, initially washing dishes before moving on to waitressing and eventually being allowed to help with the cooking. She started reading English cookery books in the Reading Room at the British Museum, trying out the recipes on a Harley Street family with whom she was living. In 2012 Smith was among the British cultural icons selected by artist Sir Peter Blake to appear in a new version of his most famous artwork – the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover – to celebrate the British cultural figures of the last six decades. [21]
Delia Smith: ‘The world is in chaos… but together we have Delia Smith: ‘The world is in chaos… but together we have
In August 2011, Smith announced that, anticipating her 70th birthday, she was stepping down from her catering role at Norwich City's Carrow Road football ground: "It is now time for a fresh approach and a younger team who, I am confident, will take the business even further." [19] Honours and awards From 1993 to 1998 Smith worked as a consultant for Sainsbury's. In May 1993 she and her husband Michael Wynn-Jones launched New Crane Publishing to publish Sainsbury's Magazine; the company also published several of Smith's books for BBC Worldwide. Although Smith and Wynn-Jones sold New Crane Publishing in 2005, Smith continues to be a consultant for Seven Publishing which now publishes the magazine. In February 2013 she announced that she had retired from television cookery programmes, and would concentrate on offering her recipes online. [13] The "Delia effect" In 1996, Smith was awarded an honorary degree by the University of Nottingham, a fellowship from St Mary's University College (a college of the University of Surrey) and a Fellowship from the Royal Television Society. In 1999 she received an honorary degree from the University of East Anglia and in 2000, a fellowship from Liverpool John Moores University.Every home cook needs a set of kitchen knives that won't let them down which is why we've teamed up with Opinel for your chance to win a knife set for every culinary job. Usborne, Simon (5 February 2013). "Delia Smith goes digital – but who else is on the menu?". The Independent.
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Lezard, Nicholas (11 December 1999). "Profile Delia Smith: Simmer gently, do not boil". The Independent . Retrieved 13 November 2016. In February 2005, Smith attracted attention during the half-time break of a home match against Manchester City. At the time Norwich were fighting an ultimately unsuccessful battle against relegation from the Premier League, and to rally the crowd, Smith grabbed the microphone from the club announcer on the pitch and said: "A message for the best football supporters in the world: we need a 12th man here. Where are you? Where are you? Let's be 'avin' you! Come on!" Norwich lost the match 3–2. [16] Smith denied suggestions in the media that she had been drunk while delivering the speech though she did concede that "maybe in the heat of the moment I didn't choose the best words". [17] [18]
Has Delia gone barmy? This is surely what some people are going to say when they hear about this book, and perhaps you’re thinking it even as you read this. But she doesn’t care if they do. “I’ve had a good apprenticeship when it comes to criticism,” she says. “Because I was very criticised when I was a cook. When people tell me I’m going to get a lot of flak, I think, well, no one wants to take a risk; no one wants to put their head above the parapet. This book could just sink without trace. But if it does, I won’t mind. I had to do it. I want people to know this stuff.” One of the practices she extols in You Matter is silent meditation – though she doesn’t use the m-word, on the grounds it might put people off – and the hour she spends each day sitting completely still as her mind roams where it will has brought her a kind of freedom. “Silence and stillness have taken my fear away,” she says, her voice as calm and as soothing as a bowl of custard. Grimmer, Dan (11 August 2011). "Delia Smith steps down from Norwich City catering role". Eastern Daily Press . Retrieved 15 December 2017. In March 2010, Smith and Heston Blumenthal were signed up to appear in a series of 40 commercials on British television for the supermarket chain Waitrose. [12] Smith in 1975, when she was presenting her first solo TV cookery show, Family Fare. Photograph: Fred Mott/Getty Images
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