By Lianne Kolirin
Delia Smith, the doyenne of British cooking and the passionate owner of Norwich Football Club, took a massive step outside of her comfort zone last year.
The bestselling author of countless cookery books and famed for teaching the nation to boil an egg, made headlines with You Matter: The Human Solution, which “ponders on the presence of the human spirit”.
The book, she says, is not about religion, but about human nature and “how when we take time to really reflect, we realise we all matter, we are all unique and we all play an important part and have our own responsibility in the universe”.
Now in the Big Interview with the Religion Media Centre’s Roger Bolton, Delia Smith, 81, says she is utterly optimistic of the strength of the human spirit despite all the “turmoil in the world at the moment”.
“I’d probably die for it because I do know that every single human life is precious, is unique, is different and that every human needs other humans,” she says.
Baptised in the Church of England, she converted to Catholicism when she was 22. This is not the first time she has written a spiritual book. Combining her passion for food and faith, she published A Feast for Lent and A Feast for Advent in 1983 and a book on prayer called A Journey into God in 1988.
Her latest offering, she tells Roger Bolton, is aimed at everyone, whatever their background.
“I really tried to summarise that throughout the book,” she says. “What is wonderful about football and what is wonderful about church is people being community and coming together. If you don’t belong to a church, you don’t go to a church, that doesn’t matter. It’s the community that’s the most important thing about it.”
Essentially, she hopes to encourage people to realise their inner strength. “We have that spiritual side of our lives which is the deeper side of our lives and perhaps we don’t actually discover that or develop it,” she says.
This needs work, like going to the gym to build muscles. “If you’re willing to stop sometimes, to think more deeply and to be still and silent you develop the spiritual side of yourself and the spiritual side of yourself, when it’s developed, helps you to understand your unique role in the world.”
Delia is grateful to her mother, Etty — who died in 2020, aged 100 — for enabling her to do just that. “I owe an awful lot to my mother who put me to bed too early when I was young,” she says.
“All the kids were playing outside and there was I, in bed and not able to sleep. So, I spent a lot of time thinking. I spent a lot of time reflecting, daydreaming, so much so that it became a part of who I was. And through the rest of my life, I always had to have some time for that.”
She describes her mother as a “totally amazing woman”, adding: “My mother, ever since I was born, has always been my worst critic so therefore I always had somebody keeping my feet on the ground the whole time.”
Speaking before the first anniversary of the war in Ukraine, Delia says the conflict illustrates her steadfast faith in the human spirit. “What we’re seeing in Ukraine is what can happen when humans … come together as one and they are determined to retain their freedom,” she says. “If anybody is listening to this now and they lose a little bit of faith in humanity they should watch Zelensky’s New Year’s Eve address to his people … [it] would be enough to understand what we have in human life and we have to fight for it and they’re fighting for it.”
The book, she says, should encourage people to find that faith within themselves: “We’re in turmoil in the world at the moment, particularly politically but as we evolve we are evolving towards understanding more about what causes that chaos … It is a call to arms. It needs everybody as individuals to value themselves and to spend time knowing themselves.”
Perhaps the woman who gave us the Delia Effect — the mere mention of cooking ingredients on her television shows could cause supermarkets to sell out the next day — can spread her optimism, too.
Listen to the Bog Interview here on all major podcast platforms and on our website here
