Delia Smith has sold more than 21m copies of her cookery books and inspired generations of British home cooks. Her first name was included in the Collins English Dictionary in 2001, defined as “recipes in the style of the British cookery writer” and with the highlighted phrase “doing a Delia”. She was appointed a companion of honour to the late Queen for services to cooking in 2017, not long after she featured in Sir Peter Blake’s collage of great British icons in his updated Beatles’ Sgt Pepper album cover.
Delia, now 81, left school at 16, with no formal qualifications, to train as a hairdresser. She got her first job in a restaurant in Paddington in 1962. In 1969, she was taken on by the Daily Mirror as its food writer, and got her break on TV in the 1970s with her own show Family Fare and then food demonstrations on the kid’s programme Multi-Coloured Swap Shop. Within a decade she was a primetime fixture. Her 1995 Winter Collection was the fifth bestselling book of the 1990s and caused a national cranberry shortage. She retired from TV in 2013 to concentrate her energies on Norwich City FC, which she co-owns and chairs with her husband, Michael Wynn-Jones, and on her lifelong interest in meditation and spiritual growth reflected in her recent book, You Matter.
