“I’m thoroughly fed up of hearing about ‘healthy’ foods,” Delia writes. “There’s no such thing. All food, if it is pure and natural, is good for you.”
Which is comforting, but doesn’t change the fact that while Delia has changed me in a number of ways, many of which are for the good, she has also made me wider. Not exactly fat as such, but not slender either.
What I suspect it comes down to, in my case, is the other side of Delia’s advice on staying trim: “What is unhealthy is too much of something.” Well, Delia, if you didn’t want me to have zabaglione for pudding every evening you shouldn’t have taught me how to make it.
I’ve developed that particularly insidious habit for a chef – that is, eating up other people’s leftovers, trying food mid-meal, and other such terrible habits. Delia advises treating “Sundays or dinner with friends as a feast day” and restricting the use of butter and so on to the weekends.
So I was relieved to reach chapter 25: waist watchers – a series of recipes that, Delia promises, taste good “but are not fattening”. There are lot of good ideas in here, but the life-altering – or at least, waist-altering – ones are the dressings: four low-fat ways to dress up your salad. The most useful of these is the ‘Almost Mayonnaise’, which you can use and adapt very easily for any mayonnaise-based or mayonnaise-like condiment – aioli, remoulade, tartare sauce …
All you need is cayenne pepper, fromage frais, white wine vinegar, ¼ tsp salt and three large eggs. I start from the strong view that salt can be left out of most recipes, though on this occasion I’d say leave it in, on balance.
Delia recommends boiling the eggs for exactly nine minutes, then cooling them in cold water and peeling the shells. Perhaps this is intended as another way to get your weight down, because there is no reason at all to go to the bother of peeling the eggs, since you are going to cut them in half and use only the yolks. So I plough ahead, eggs unpeeled. Chop them in half, poke out the yolks with a spoon, add a tablespoon of water to them and pound into a soft paste with a wooden spoon. You then season with pepper and salt, stir in the fromage frais and the vinegar, mix and season again to taste, cover the bowl and leave it in the fridge for a couple of hours to thicken. It will look worryingly runny to begin with, but when you are done, you will have something that tastes almost, but not exactly, like mayonnaise.
But is it a waist-saver? I only ever really eat mayonnaise when I’m having it with fancy fast food: fried chicken or burgers, say. After experimentation, I’ve discovered that you can happily substitute Almost Mayonnaise into these meals, although you get odd looks from the waiters if you bring your own little Tupperware pot in with you. But without also substituting it for Almost Fried Chicken or Almost Burgers, Almost Mayonnaise feels like something of a dead end. You can turn it into a good and pleasingly fluffy aioli with just a little garlic – but again, as I tend to have aioli with tapas, I’m not certain that the health benefits of reducing the fat in the aioli alone are all that great. Still, I feel a little more virtuous and a little less rotund by the end of chapter 25. Which is just as well, because in the next chapter, I’m going to learn how to make paté.
- Stephen Bush is cooking his way through Delia’s Complete How To Cook (BBC Books, £40) in a year. You can watch Delia Smith’s free Online Cookery School videos at deliaonline.com; @deliaonline.
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Stephen Bush is a writer and columnist for the New Statesman; @stephenkb
