Delia Smith - Chef, Author and TV Personality

Chef, Author and TV Personality

Born to a Welsh mother in Woking, Surrey, Smith attended Bexleyheath School, leaving at the age of 16 without a single GCE O-level. Her first job was as a hairdresser and she also worked as a shop assistant and in a travel agency before starting her career in cookery. When Delia was 16, her boyfriend often complimented her, saying how good her food was. This was the nudge forward which made her take that step into cookery. At 21, she started work in a tiny restaurant in Paddington called "The Singing Chef". She started as a washer-upper, then moved on to waitressing before being allowed to help with the cooking. She started reading English cookery books in the Reading Room at the British Museum, trying out the recipes on a Harley Street family with whom she was living at the time.

"Dee" (as she was then known) worked for Carlton Studios, in Fredrick Close near Marble Arch in London, as a 'Pinner'/Home Economist where she worked with photographers such as Barry Buller and Peter Knab, mostly preparing food for studio photography.

In 1969 Delia was taken on as the cookery writer for the Daily Mirror's new magazine. Their Deputy Editor was Michael Wynn-Jones, whom she later married. Her first piece featured kipper pâté, beef in beer and cheesecake. It's not well known that she baked the cake which was used on the cover of The Rolling Stones' album "Let It Bleed" that year. In 1972 Smith started a column in the Evening Standard. She later defected to the rival Evening News, but she returned to The Standard when that newspaper bought out The News. She wrote for both for 12 years; later she wrote a column for the Radio Times until 1986.

Smith became famous by hosting a cookery television show "Family Fare" which ran between 1973-1975. Her 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.

Smith approached BBC Further Education with an idea for their first televised cookery course. Her aim was to teach people how to cook; to take them back to basics and cover all the classic techniques. Accompanying books were needed to explain not only how, but why, things happen. This led to her three Cookery Course books.

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 and did basic cooking demonstrations; she and host Noel Edmonds had a flirtatious way of interacting with each other back then. She purportedly phoned in during the reunion programme It Started with Swap Shop, though that particular "appearance" is debatable.

Her television series, "Delia's How to Cook" (1998), reportedly led to a 10% rise in egg sales in Britain and her use of ingredients such as frozen mash and tinned minced beef and onions - as used in her 2008 TV series - or utensils such as an omelette pan, could cause sell-outs overnight. This phenomenon – known as the "Delia Effect" – was most recently seen in 2008, after her book "How to Cheat at Cooking" was published. Her fame has meant that her first name has become sufficient to identify her to the public and the "Delia Effect" has become a commonly used phrase to describe a run on a previously poor-selling product as a result of a high-profile recommendation.

Also in 1998, she created a stir when she taught viewers how to boil an egg.

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 original best-selling 1971 book "How to Cheat at Cooking", was published by Ebury Press in February 2008, immediately becoming a number one best-seller. Items to have benefitted from the "Delia Effect" include the Kenwood mini-chopper, Martelli pasta and Aunt Bessie's mashed potato.

In 2005, Smith announced that she was supporting the Labour Party in the forthcoming election.

In 2009, she announced that in order to help Norwich City's finances, she has "been working extremely hard on another book and TV series." It is to be a retrospective of her 40 year career, "looking at how things have changed".

In 2010, Delia's latest television series, Delia through the Decades, was first broadcast on 11 January on BBC2 at 8.30pm. The show lasted for five weeks, with each episode exploring a new decade of her cooking. Her biggest selling book Delia Smith's The Winter Collection (1995) sold 2 million copies in hardback.

In March 2010, Delia Smith and Heston Blumenthal were signed up to appear in a series of 40 commercials on British television for the supermarket chain Waitrose.