In an age when everyone can literally shop around the world for ingredients at supermarkets, where they can buy instant meals or their salads and vegetables ready prepared, when every other shop in the high street is a take-away or fast food outlet. "Delia's How to Cook" returns to the roots of cooking to rediscover the joys and simple pleasures of food. In this, the first of two volumes, Delia starts at the very beginning, explaining in detail the staple ingredients of all cooking - eggs, flour, potatoes, rice and pasta. Here, she guides beginners through many of the basic techniques that will serve them for a lifetime of cooking, right from boiling and poaching an egg, through bread and pastry making, to sauces and cooking all kinds of rice perfectly every time. For those who have mastered the techniques - and for those who are already accomplished cooks - the book provides a collection of recipes, incorporating new ideas such as fat-free white sauces, chips you don't have to fry and souffl s that don't collapse.

Author Biography

Delia Smith is Britain's bestselling cookery writer, whose books have sold over 21 million copies worldwide. Delia's first job as a cookery writer was for the Daily Mirror in 1969 - numerous phenomenal best sellers and television series followed including Delia Smith's Complete Cookery Course in 1978 and Delia's Christmas, Summer and Winter Collections in the 1990s. Towards the end of the decade Delia commenced work on a new major project - Delia's How to Cook, publishing three separate volumes and the accompanying TV series. The Vegetarian Collection and The Delia Collection followed. After a five year break concentrating on Norwich City Football Club (where she is a director) and Canary Catering, Delia returned triumphant in 2008 with a new BBC TV series and the fastest selling cookery book of all time 'Delia's How to Cheat at Cooking' - which has sold over 800,000 copies to date. Delia is married to the writer and editor Michael Wynn Jones. They live in Suffolk.