There are times when I begin to suspect that Delia and I have very different lifestyles. The palatial kitchen in her cookery videos, the half an hour it takes to prepare toast under the Delia method, and the following sentence in her introduction to the art of preparing flour-based sauces: “Don’t, whatever you do, be daunted by the subject of saucemaking.”
I’ll be honest. I am daunted by the subject of saucemaking, but not, as Delia suggests, because I’m frightened of the results. I live in a flat of two, and do most of the cooking. Like most people with a natural monopoly, my customer service is fairly bad, and my response to criticism is almost uniformly hostile. Ever tried to get a refund out of a commuter rail service? That’s basically what happens when my partner attempts to criticise the food at Chez Stephen.
No, it’s not fear but laziness that puts me off saucemaking. Even looking at the pictures in Delia’s book makes me feel tired. I’m not quite sure why this is the case – thanks to Delia I now make my own bread every week, and I’m sure the benefits of my own sauce will be as apparent to taste. But there’s something about sauce – perhaps because it feels redundant. If you leave a meal raving about the sauce, it doesn’t say much for the rest of the dish, if you ask me.
So, when Delia told me that, once I’d got to grips with this chapter, I could “enjoy a lifetime of making and enjoying perfect sauces any time you want to”, I quietly smiled to myself, thinking that the first and last perfect sauce I would make would be to service the needs of this column.
My sauce-induced sense of dread was only heightened when I turned the page to read: “when flour, fat and liquid are combined and heated, they always need extremely vigorous whisking”. I know what the words “extremely vigorous whisking” mean: they mean hard work, and hard work is an activity that could equally go towards making a cake.
The test subject this week is a cauliflower and broccoli gratin with a blue cheese sauce. It’s not the most exciting meal in the world, but it’s ideal if you are cooking something complex for multiple guests and you are suddenly surprised to discover that someone’s new partner is a vegetarian or has an undisclosed allergy to something in the main dish.
As I am making it, something troubling happens: I actively enjoy making the sauce. I am starting to see why people might want to take the time to do this, even though I’m unlikely to start making my own sauces outside of the weekend.
Delia lays out three ways to make a sauce; first, the roux method – the mixture of butter and flour used to make béchamel sauce. You melt the butter in the pan, then mix it with flour to make a thick paste, which you must use if you are making a sauce with hot liquid, as hot liquid can only be combined with flour if it’s first blended with fat. If you are not using hot liquid you can use “the all-in-one method”, which is fairly self-explanatory. If you want to make a less fatty flour-based sauce, you can do the same as the “all-in-one” method, but using flour and cold milk rather than butter.
I have since prepared sauces under all three methods and they are all fairly painless, or, at least, not as painful as admitting you are the kind of person who makes sauces for fun.
- Stephen Bush is cooking his way through Delia’s Complete How To Cook (BBC Books, £40) in a year; @stephenkb. You can watch Delia Smith’s free Online Cookery School videos at deliaonline.com; @deliaonline
