Celebrity cooks go off the boil

The appetite for cookery books released off the back of TV shows once seemed insatiable.

But the lucrative spin-offs may be starting to leave a sour taste in the mouth, sales figures suggest.

Queen of the kitchen Delia Smith is worst hit. Tens of thousands of copies of How To Cook, Book Three, have been sent back to the BBC after lukewarm sales.

Jamie Oliver, once the darling of the cookery world, is also struggling to shift copies of Jamie's Kitchen.

And red-blooded males seem to be tiring of saucy Nigella Lawson. Her Forever Summer series was axed by Channel 4 last year after viewers found it a turn-off, and sales of the book have also struggled.

Only Gary Rhodes seems to be bucking the trend, with his Cookery Year title. Jennie Allen, of BBC Books, said sales were no longer at the 'frenzied' level of recent years.