Speed in the kitchen is obvious the in thing right now. Hot on the heels of Nigella Express comes Delia Smith’s how to cheat at cooking. As far as I know, she hasn’t really made it across the Atlantic, but Delia is a patron saint of British kitchens (and of Norwich City football club) and I suspect that almost every British woman of my generation has at least one of her books. Naturally I had to grab the new one.

My mother is disgusted at the idea that people might actually buy frozen puff pastry rather than making their own (which would, of course, be much cheaper, not to mention save oodles of carbon emissions). But, as Delia points out, much of the cookery we have grown up with was predicated on the expectation that you had servants to do it for you. Indeed, I have the distinct impression that the whole housewife scene back when my mother was young was designed to give other people the impression that you did have servants, or at least could live as well as you would if you did have them. I prefer to have a different sort of economic relationship with people who provide things for me, and I’m not averse to buying pre-prepared food.

Unfortunately product placement is the order of the day with modern cook books. Delia used to make a fortune for kitchen gadget manufacturers, but a quick browse through the new book suggests that these days she has done a deal with Marks & Spencer’s food department. That’s sure proof that she doesn’t sell in the US, because there is no point in putting out a cook book if your readers won’t be able to buy key ingredients (though I see it is on Amazon’s US site so maybe there’s a US version with different product placement). Fortunately I am a cunning cook, and can doubtless find replacements for most of the label items. But I won’t be back in my own kitchen for a few weeks yet, so you are going to have to wait for recipe reports.