I'm reciped out

Delia Smith is perched on a stool, sitting at the end of a cooking counter. Norwich City Football Club, of which she is a director, stretches before her out of the brand-new, specially designed panoramic expansive windows of The Carvery function room. "On match days, Louise," she tells me (she insists on calling me Louise all day), "this is packed. We do 350 covers for lunch up here and all those wooden boxes by the windows turn into seats!" Very modern, I say. "Extremely modern," she says excitedly. But this is all later when she talks to me at great length about how many pies they sell here at Carrow Road on match days (4,000) and hamburgers (300) and full grill meals (120) and hot snacks (350) and ...

For now, Delia is looking rapt and full of admiration as New Zealand chef Alex Mackay, his back to the glory of brand new Delia-inspired football stands, chops up a red onion. "Did you see that, Louise?" she says to me. "I've never seen cutting like that. Have you?"

"Oh, you can cut like that, Delia," says the tall, blond and rather glamorous Mackay, who is best known for setting up the cookery school at Le Manoir aux Quat' Saisons. "Ooh, no I can't," says Delia. "I'd chop my fingers right off, wouldn't I girls?" And Delia's right-hand girls - - Lindsay the taster and organiser and Lucy the head chef, who both work closely with Delia - all nod.

The three of them are running Mackay through his paces. On Wednesday he'll be filleting fish and chopping red onions for real in front of 40 people paying £95 a head to spend a day in Delia's centre of Food and Wine Excellence at the football club. "They get a cooking demonstration and a wine talk and lunch and a goody pack," says Delia. "There's a complementary fish slicer." But Delia will not be cooking herself. "Oh, I couldn't," she says. "I wouldn't know how! Look at Alex here with his oil." Mackay pours some oil into a pan. "I always use olive oil, Alex," she says to him as he becomes generous with some "bog-standard" vegetable oil, as he calls it. "That's a waste of money, Delia," he says. "At this high heat, all the taste is burned off."

"But when I use vegetable oil it smells like I'm cooking Wellington boots!" says Delia and everyone's off giggling again. "You have to be an entertainer to hold people's attention you see, Louise," she says to me. "And Alex is such an entertainer and I'm not. I'm a teacher. I have to concentrate. I once did a cooking demonstration and I had to whip egg whites and it took me four minutes and by the time I'd finished everyone was talking and I had to clap my hands to get their attention. I'm no good at it at all."

The truth of the matter is that Delia - and I am going to refer to her just like that since Collins included her mere Christian name in its English dictionary - seems to have rather gone off food. Her idea of hell, she says, is to be Fay Maschler, this paper's restaurant critic. "I don"t know how she does it!" she says. "Imagine eating out three times a week! How awful! By Friday night I'd just want to stay in and eat melon."

In fact, she does stay in three nights a week on her own when her husband, Michael Wynn-Jones, the publisher of Sainsbury's magazine, is in London, and she tends to not cook at all. "Maybe I'll do cheese on toast," she says, "with Branston pickle. But," she says, taking my arm in a conspiratorial fashion, "I've got to write a piece for Sainsbury's magazine tonight on watercress so I'm going to try something fun with that! Can't think what, though."

This means, of course, that Branston pickle and watercress will now fly off the shelves because when Delia recommends something - be it a lemon zester or miniature cherry brandies - the whole lot sells out. "Actually, zesters are very handy," says Mackay, enthusiastically zesting a lime over some sea bream. "Lime on bream?" says Delia, "now I'd never have thought of that!" "Yes you would Delia," says Mackay.

But Delia probably doesn't want to think about that because she is "reciped out".

"I did How To Cook 2," she says, "and I just cannot think of any more recipes right now. I've been doing it for 30 years and I've had enough. I'm 60 and I've decided to do something else with my life and that thing is this!" And she sweeps her hand around the function room we're sitting in and at Lindsay and Lucy and Alex. For a moment I don't believe I've heard her correctly. "That's right, Louise," she says. "No more television or books. This football club and these people are my life and I'm having fun and I'm now devoting myself to Norwich Football Club and that's it!"

That's it? How can it be? Delia is cooking. She may not be as flamboyant as Jamie Oliver - "I love him!î she shouts. "He's coming to do a cookery demonstration here and it's sold out already!î - or have the hype of Giorgio Locatelli or even be anywhere near as charismatic as Gordon Ramsay, but it has always been Delia whom the cooking nation has turned to when they wanted a bit of help. Everything she does, be it mashed potatoes or a more risqué ragout, works. That's the kind of cook, indeed the type of person, she's always been - very exact, very proper, very in control but always reassuring. We have relied on her with her good, strong Catholicism and good, strong marriage and her restrained brand of living. Even though she's a multi-millionaire she still devoted chapters of her cookbooks to how to boil an egg and the key to non-sticky rice. She has, as Mackay points out, shaped the cooking habits of a nation.

"Everything has to change, Alex,î she says. "When I started out, it was all middle-aged women coming to my book signings but now there are so many men! Lots of them are young. They want to be chefs or cook for their girlfriends. You see, everything changes!î There's been a change in her, too. She seems relaxed and jolly. I mean she seems totally unused to experiencing those two states, after all those years of rigorously protecting her image, but at least she's making an effort. That immovable hair is happily flopping over her forehead. In fact, when she first greeted me - "Hello Louise!î she said, offering to take my bag and coat and get me a coffee - she was so refreshingly unlike herself that it took me a minute to realise who she was.

But I don't suppose she could have been as successful as she has been without a massive dollop of business nous, and the recently redesigned football club, overseen by herself of course, looks as if it would fit quite happily in Manhattan rather than Norfolk. There's the new restaurant, Delia's, replete with a full-sized picture of Delia clad top to toe in red silk surrounded by black and white chefs. It serves things like Pepper Crusted Monkfish with Red Pepper Relish. When Delia and Michael bought two seats for £1 million, 10 years ago, I don't suppose the board members envisaged anything like this happening. How does all the roast pepper this and wilted that go down with the die-hard directors, supporters and local businessmen? After all, the bits of the club that have not been Delia-ed still have the traditional flock wallpaper and carpets decorated with yellow canaries, the emblem of Norwich City FC.

"Everyone loves it," says Delia, showing me the new director's boardroom with its wooden-slatted blinds, cream leather chairs and black minimalist bar. "It just needed a woman's touch. It's the same with the food. Yes this is Norwich and it's not the same as London so there's no point in being prissy. But I've never done sprinkles and jus and towers of things. They wouldn't go down well so we don't do that. I taste everything here and we try to source as much produce locally as possible. The public know they are going to get good food."

All this abandonment of the rest of us to the lure of football is actually her husband's fault. When she met him in 1969 - he was on the Daily Mirror, where she started her first column - he took her to meet his family in Norfolk and they all trooped off to see Norwich play. "I've been a convert ever since," she says. Perhaps the football club is a surrogate baby, something she could get her teeth into when she found out she couldn't have children. "It's certainly always been timeconsuming and involving," she says.

But all this modernising and massive catering operation isn't actually about improving the quality of food found at football grounds, which is usually inedible, but solely about finding money to fund the actual football. "We were left in a terrible predicament by the collapse of ITV Digital," she says. "So I decided the only way to make money was to trade on what I was known for. There'd be no point in me and Michael going out and buying new players. For a start we can't afford them and a one-off player would make no real difference. It's better to make the club profitable through the catering side and then pour that money back into the club." She is so evangelical about all this that she recently cut short a holiday in Provence to fly back in a private jet, just to see Norwich play Sunderland. "Do you know that women are not allowed in the director's box at Sunderland?" says Delia. "The Stadium of Light? I call it the Stadium of Dark!"

I should think Norwich City FC doesn't know what's hit it. She is, as those who have encountered her probably know, a match for any man or woman or beast. I don't suppose anyone really gets to say no to her. "They did here for a while," she says. "They wouldn't let me take over the catering. It took a bit of persuasion." They capitulated, though. "Of course they did," she says, "and last year we made £612,000 profit." Then she grabs my hand and marches me off around more cafès and rooms, all with dimmer-switched spotlights. She tells me she loves football because it's so "genuine and warm".

People accept you for what you are here," she says, which makes me wonder if she feels that she has been, in some way, not accepted in the previous world she inhabited. The cooking/chefing fraternity have always been tediously rude about her. Maybe it's because she's always been hard to warm to. Maybe it's because her cooking has always been simple and unsnobbish. She's always hated "modern British cookery" as she calls it and laments the demise of more traditional ways. "What's happened to the amateur cook in the country house? Or that lady down the pub who only the locals knew about and who cooked up a storm? Now everyone wants to be on TV. The bubble will burst. I know it will."

Antony Worrall Thompson once described her as "the Volvo of cooking" and Gary Rhodes had a pop at her for teaching people to boil eggs. In the past Delia responded by saying Worrall Thompson's television programme Food and Drink was "awful". "I got into a lot of trouble over that," she says. "I was caught out. I think Antony is fun. And now I have a Volvo outside! It was given to me. I feel very relaxed about it." But maybe she's relaxed because she doesn't have to go back out into that bitter soufflè of a world again. Not that hers ever sink, mind you. "Delia's soufflès never sink," says Mackay. "Oh they do, Alex," says Delia. "They do."