The delights of dotcom Delia

10 April 2012

I see Delia as some kind of saint in disguise, and not a very good disguise, at that. Life seems like a safer place with Deels around - malignity can't thrive in a world where statements of love can be baked in a nine-inch pie tin, and little fluffy lambs are only turned into tasty shoulder joints after a happy and disease-free life.

Yea, you spectre of modernity, you can assault our sense of community all you like, with your mighty shopping malls and your, er, pretty tasty but fundamentally evil fast-food chains, but as long as there are people swapping recipes for a malt loaf, everything's going to be all right. She also contrives to be magically successful in all she says and does, assuring not just her own fortunes but those of every company she's ever mentioned.

Against this adoration, you have to set three things - first, "revelations" last weekend that she's not successful at all, but has lost£60 million on her doomed internet venture. Since the cash issue is the one least related to her saintliness, and also the easiest to dispatch, fact-wise, let us deal with it first. Rumour has it that the site lost £11,000 in June 1999, which makes it an unusual failure even by internet standards, given that it didn't even launch until March this year - the figure was actually taken from Delia's former publishing company, New Crane Publishing, which lost the (relatively small amount of) money in the old-fashioned way.

Then it's claimed that the site was valued at £60 million last June when, again, the site didn't yet exist - Delia's clan can't disclose the true valuation due to confidentiality stuff, but her husband, Michael Wynn Jones, will say the figure was "much more realistic". He is infuriated by the claims: "It's outrageous! They say we wanted to be voguish and new wave, but if that were the case, why would we have left it till March 2001 to setone up?"

But on to the more important aspects of detractors of the cult of Delia - Delia herself, for one, who said last year that people always thought of her as very nice but actually she was a bit of a bitch. Second, the fact that all other chefs call her boring, apart from Jamie Oliver. Third, the rumours that, when she was filming her second series, she made the crew bring their own Portaloo, in case they made a mess of her lavatory facilities. Which is it to be? Gentle custodian of all that's ever been worthwhile about the past two centuries? Or cruel denier of toilet privileges?

Well, I always thought I was right and now I've met her I know I am. What a nice lady, if also a huge star. "But I'm not the star. The food is the star. The whole thing is not about me, it's about saying: 'This is beautiful food, this is how it looks, this is how to make it, and it doesn't have to go wrong.'" See? Nice.

Delia Smith's not-doomed internet site, www.deliaonline.com, contains within it a chatroom (or talking point as they rather quaintly know it), visited by Delia from noon every Monday. You would expect the odd banal question from an undiluted section of would-be kitchen devils. But would you ever expect this - "Dear Delia, I love the cats in the background of your photographs and programmes. How many do you have, and how old are they? Do they have very different personalities?"

Let us remember, this is Delia Smith, amasser of a vast personal fortune, brave fighter of the good fight against powdered garlic, the most effective marketing tool the world has seen since the giving away of free Ripples on Victoria station. But did she ignore the question? Did she even make a face? She did not. She sent back a very sweet reply (They are both dead. But there are two new ones who, yes, do have verydistinctive personalities indeed).

There follows a non-cookery question, viz: "Am I right in thinking you are a convert to Catholicism? As a cradle Catholic I have always found the converted to be the most devout." Is that a bit rude?

She answered it anyway ("None of us feels devout but, deep down, we all love our faith"), and what do you know, two-and-a-half-hours of e-chatting had passed and there were rumblings from a husband to have some lunch.

She turned round and made the legendary impish face that alerts you to the fact that an awful lot of cream is about to go into something. "I love this. I could do this all day. If it was a pile of mouldy old letters, I'd be desperate for a break."

Cha, new internet converts. They're always the most devout. And sorry to harp on about the active non-failure of this site, but she really could have carried on all day - all England, and half of the Netherlands, seemed quite keen on talking to her.

The aim is to turn deliaonline into the biggest and most authoritative website in the world, keeper of all recipes, video grabs of what sugar looks like as it segues into caramel, shopping links, useful charts, the works. This is the aim of all websites, natch, but this time it's personal. As with the telly show, so with the site - she just wants to talk to as many people as possible, so that no one need ever use the wrong pan again.

"I make boring old teaching programmes," she insists, "and what's great about television now is that there's room for Jamie, who never weighs anything, and there's room for me."

She's being diplomatic, here, following last year's monstrous chef debacle in which Antony Worrall Thompson called her a Volvo, and she called him disgusting (then Gordon Ramsay weighed in, calling her boring but adding that Worrall Thompson couldn't cook, in a marvellous double-whammy of offence). But the diplomacy masks the fact that, while all the Nigellaish programmes have their place in entertainment land, none have Delia's sense of purpose.

"We have a very, very fine tradition of cooking in this country, and I do worry about it. The last government took cooking out of schools. Chefs are all very well, but I worry about people at home and the tradition of real cooking disappearing." The extraordinary thing is that anyone should have the determination to keep on with the medium that holds trendiness at such a premium - Delia's never been trendy. She was even binned for a while for not being sexy enough.

"In my first series, they couldn't do any close-ups, because my hands were shaking so much." "So, you were very nervous?" "Incredibly nervous. I still am incredibly nervous. It's very hard, having to talk and cook at the same time." "Why do you do it?" She looks at me as if I were completely barking. "Well, I felt that it was a wonderful way to communicate. Until the internet, what other way was there of showing people how to do things?"

Catch her off guard with a mild ingredient query like: "I was very surprised to see you using coconut powder in your ice cream the other day" and she sits up, like a whippet. Quite a lovingly fed whippet, mind. "Why?" "I don't know. I thought it was a white trash ingredient, like Angel Delight or something." "No, no, It's a wonderful ingredient. It's terribly useful. It's actually quite hard to get nowadays, you can only get it ... hang on, I'll look up the address for you ..." She really minds. She's honestly worried about the fact that I might never experience coconut powder. She's a natural didact, she must have been born like it. And in ancient-Roman-fashion it's turned her into an icon. I didn't ask about the Portaloo though. Too scared.

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