Dining with Delia: Day 1
In my last post I whined about transitioning from culinary school to whatever comes next. Today, the golden opportunity for procrastination on dealing with that situation fell into my lap in the form of a house swap.
Friends from the UK wanted to understand what life is like in middle-America is all about. On Tuesday they moved into our house in Carlisle, and yesterday, we landed in their home here in Norwich, in Norfolk, England.
The house swap will last a month. And while that helps me put off some aspects of the transition (namely taking up my externship position in the kitchen of Trattoria Piatto in Carlisle), I cannot sit professionally idle for an entire month (I suppose I could try, but that runs counter to my Type A personality, I think).
So I plan to use this time to get to know Delia Smith a little bit better than I currently do, which is indeed a short-coming in my culinary experience, especially if I want to write articles and develop recipes targeted toward the home cook.
Delia is a self-taught British cookery mainstay — a cross between Julia Child and Martha Stewart, if you need an American point of reference – who is positively manic about precisely developing and testing her recipes before publishing them. Delia is ubiquitous in British kitchens. She has spent the whole of her 40-year career teaching average English people how to cook everything via her newspaper articles, BBC cookery television shows, dozens of cookery books and, most recently, her web site, www.deliaonline.com.
Delia’s reportedly worth well over 20 million pounds (although she repeatedly denies being rich) and holds, with her husband, a majority share of a professional football team (Norwich City Football Club). There is a common phrase used among my British friends: “Doing a Delia”, which means they are serving a dish resulting from one of her fool-proof recipes. And many times they can quote you the page number from which they’ve pulled it.
There is also the matter of “Delia Cheat” products, ingredients that Delia has deemed to be of very high quality and help cut down on the time to prepare the recipes that include them. Makers of these product proudly where a “Delia Cheat” logo and enjoy increased sales, which leads us to the next Delia phenomenon. It’s called the “Delia Effect” which means almost immediately after she sings the praises of a raw ingredient, a prepared product or a kitchen utensil, sales simply soar. Within days of her BBC Christmas special airing last December sales of ingredients used on the show like soft prunes, tinned chestnuts and Fair Trade cinnamon increased by 106, 71 and 59 percent, respectively.
The mighty egg
One of the rudimentary premises of Delia’s work is that everyone can cook, and her seminal “How to Cook” series first published in 1999 and 2000 and updated in a 700-page bound volume last year, starts with the humble but mighty egg. She gives tidbits about storing and measuring the age of the egg like those I’ve seen in other cookbooks. But she also advises on how variously-aged eggs are best suited for certain culinary usages. If you’re going to poach it or fry it, it’s best to catch it from the hen. If you have to separate the eggs for use, say, in either custard or meringue, they need to be less than a week old. For hard-boiled, scrambled or an omelet a two-week old egg is fine. When making baked dishes like quiche or using eggs in baked goods recipes, eggs as old as three weeks will suit, but Delia feels that no one should keep eggs longer than that.
My procrastinating passage of time with Delia’s recipes begins with the egg. I am homing in two of my favorite things: British egg mayonnaise sandwiches and anything having to do with Spanish chorizo. And one more favorite by proxy: traditional English custard because Andy will simply eat anything covered in it.
I hardly ever eat egg salad sandwiches at home and never buy them out in the US because they have so much mayonnaise in them. But here in the UK, I do because they are simply that good. In fact, I grabbed one at the Marks and Spencer’s in the Manchester train station yesterday as my first meal in England.
Spring onion, chive and egg mayonnaise sandwiches
Delia’s take on the egg mayonnaise is open faced comprising three hardboiled eggs cooked no longer than seven minutes, a hefty tablespoon of chives, four finely chopped spring onions, greens and all, only a tablespoon of mayonnaise (this small amount is what draws me to this recipe) and a small bit of softened butter sitting on half a freshly baked roll. The combination is one that starts with a crunchy onion flavor, followed by a soothing creaminess. It’s a great comfort food when you’re a peckish on a Sunday evening, but know you shouldn’t indulge too heavily because you also know what you ate at the pub lunch earlier in the day.
Tomorrow’s breakfast: chorizo hash with fried eggs.
So weird – I was eating an egg salad sandwich when I read this post. I doubt Price Chopper eggs are Delia-approved, but it was delicious nonetheless. Funny, the only thing I knew about Delia before your post was her halftime on-field, um, urgings of the Canaries (whom I love).
I grew up on Price Chopper eggs. And the yolks are completely different, I must say. They are almost orange here, and really creamy.
We’re taking the kids to a NCFC friendly match the Saturday against Newcastle and maybe next week against Everton. I’ll sing a couple of lines of “On the ball, City….” in your honor. Perhaps I will catch a glimpse of Delia.
Hi,
Just catching up with your blog and enjoying it. We were living in Norwich when Delia’s How to Cook first aired and I became a complete convert. I have never cooked anything from any of her books that wasn’t a success. Her Apple Crumble is wonderful and her Smoked Fish Pie is to die for.
Hope your visit is delightful, it is VERY hot here.
Cheers,
Debbie