This biography of a living person needs additional citations for verification. English cook and delia smith presenter, known for teaching basic cookery skills in a no-nonsense style.
One of the best known celebrity chefs in British popular culture, Smith has influenced viewers to become more culinarily adventurous. At 21, she started work in a small restaurant in Paddington, initially washing dishes before moving on to waitressing and eventually being allowed to help with the cooking. Her next job was at Carlton Studios in London, where she prepared food for studio photography. In 1969 Smith was taken on as the cookery writer for the Daily Mirror’s newly launched magazine. Their deputy editor was Michael Wynn-Jones, whom she later married.
Smith’s first television appearances came in the early 1970s, as resident cook on BBC East’s regional magazine programme Look East, shown on BBC One across East Anglia. Following this, she was offered her own cookery television show, Family Fare which ran between 1973 and 1975. Smith became a recognisable figure amongst young people in the 1970s and early 1980s when she was an occasional guest on the BBC’s Saturday morning children’s programme Multicoloured Swap Shop, giving basic cooking demonstrations. Her 1995 book Delia Smith’s The Winter Collection sold 2 million copies in hardback, becoming the fifth biggest-selling book of the 1990s. In 2003 Smith announced her retirement from television. However, she returned for an eponymous six-part series airing on the BBC in Spring 2008. The accompanying book, an update of her 1971 best-seller How to Cheat at Cooking, was published in February 2008, again becoming a best-seller.
In 2005, Smith announced that she was supporting the Labour Party in the forthcoming election. In 2010 she appeared in a five-episode series, Delia through the Decades, with each episode exploring a new decade of her cooking. In March 2010, Smith and Heston Blumenthal were signed up to appear in a series of 40 commercials on British television for the supermarket chain Waitrose. In February 2013 she announced that she had retired from television cookery programmes, and would concentrate on offering her recipes online.
Britain and her use of ingredients such as frozen mash and tinned minced beef and onions, or utensils such as an omelette pan, could cause sell-outs overnight. From 1993 to 1998 Smith worked as a consultant for Sainsbury’s. Smith has developed other business interests outside of her culinary ventures, notably a majority shareholding in the football team Norwich City, with her husband. Both Smith and Wynn-Jones were season ticket holders at Norwich and were invited to invest in the club, which had fallen on hard times. In February 2005, Smith attracted attention during the half-time break of a home match against Manchester City. 20 million in the club, but wanted Smith and the other shareholders to relinquish their holdings. In August 2011, Smith announced that, anticipating her 70th birthday, she was stepping down from her catering role at Norwich City’s Carrow Road football ground: “It is now time for a fresh approach and a younger team who, I am confident, will take the business even further.