Why Gen Z needs its own Delia
“I wasn’t entertaining. I was just about teaching you how to cook”, Delia Smith said of her televised cooking shows, in a recent interview with the Sunday Times. Like the shows, it was a characteristically no-nonsense observation. Delia cooked, where food content today seems more designed to entertain. Where TikToks and Instagram reels aim to dazzle and delight, she demonstrated how things are done properly. She was “a Volvo,” she went on to say, “a boring lady explaining step by step” – and while today’s food landscape is infinitely more exciting, she “feel[s] sorry that a lot of young people don’t know what a good pork chop is like.”
Naturally, it was this last comment that ensured the interview went viral. The only thing we enjoy more than pork is pointing out what’s wrong with younger generations. But when you look at some of the food habits of Gen Z and millennials (of which I am one) it’s hard to deny that Delia has a point. They are the most likely to rely on a recipe delivery service such as Gousto; the most dependent on Deliveroo; the most likely to throw away food because they don’t know what to do with the leftover ingredients. Where once cooking content was confined to a few choice books and TV programmes, now there are hundreds of billions of recipes and food influences.
“Food is bigger than it’s ever been, more fashionable, more impressive – and yet we are cooking less,” says Kitty Coles, a food writer, cookbook author and stylist. Over a generation, the amount of time we spend preparing meals has reduced by 45 minutes, and most adults would rather spend less than 30 minutes on their dinner. “We’re consuming more cooking content through our screens, but I don’t think that’s translating to our kitchens,” she says – or at least, not enough to reduce our reliance on convenience foods and takeaways. We’ve grown up with these foods being readily affordable and accessible, she continues, whereas “our parents and grandparents grew up cooking from scratch” – and if they didn’t, they learned from Delia.
At a time when women were increasingly going out to work, and home economics was being steadily removed from the curriculum, Delia was the authoritative voice on everything from poached eggs to fish pies. “She was one of the core people you could trust,” says Coles, whose own go-to growing up was Delia and a “small, image-less book from Mary Berry. You learned their recipe for whatever it was, and that was that.”
Of course, it is “amazing that there is more space for new, exciting talent,” Coles continues. “But to those who are not ‘in food’ or confident cooks, it can be confusing.” Though Coles is a millennial, she is capable of navigating a world in which a search for Victoria sponge throws up 8,970,000 options. To someone without that grounding, “it’s hard to know where to start.”
As Delia’s unofficial strapline demonstrates, it takes skill to write a recipe that works; and if you’re trying to decide between different recipes, “you have to know what you are looking for,” says the food writer Sophie Wyburd. “There is so much recipe noise out there, it can leave young people crippled by indecision.” Without knowing a few core principles of cooking and baking, how can one sort the reliable recipe wheat from the clickbait chaff?
“Are we trusting, for example, a recipe for a loaf cake from Kevin in Massachusetts? How has he learnt it? How often has he baked it?” says Coles. The advantage of Delia was that you could trust her without even having baked before, such was the granularity of her teaching method. But picking a recipe off the internet without knowing if it works, or even how to know if it works or not, is the culinary equivalent of a stab in the dark.
“I do think people are now learning recipes, not skills,” says the food writer and author Anna Jones. Give a man a recipe, and he can whip up a spaghetti bolognese; teach a man to make a ragu, however, and he can devise dishes according to what else he has to hand. Of course, “there are always skills in recipes,” Jones acknowledges – “but if the technique isn’t named or explained, people assume they don’t have those skills, and they don’t know how to put those skills together with ingredients and make a dish themselves.” They don’t have the confidence not to follow the recipe to the letter.
I myself am guilty of this; not of lacking skills, necessarily, but of starting with a recipe rather than what’s in the fridge; of being inspired by the internet, rather than ingredients. On the one hand, this leads me to cook more interesting meals than I might if I were relying purely on my half-remembered repertoire of dishes. But is there a risk something gets lost in my quest for the new – which more often than not, manifests in relentless scrolling?
“The risk of being bombarded with food content is that you feel you need to be cooking something new every day. But the reason classics are what they are is because they have been honed 200, 300 times to have become a sacred, beautiful, repeatable thing,” says Jones. As such, her cookbooks are designed to “give people a framework, so that they can experiment and hone their instincts.” Jones’ dream – and it’s one she shares with Coles and Wyburd, both of whom have tried to structure their books along these lines – is to enable people to “have an ethos of experimentation – but also to understand and be able to create a catalogue of 20 or 30 recipes which they know and love.”
Which is where MOB comes in; an online cooking and content platform founded in 2016 for young students and graduates. It has grown with its audience, and now meets the needs of mums, dads and even grandparents – yet it has retained its youthful appeal thanks to its portfolio of chefs and use of social media. Its homepage is a riot of colour and trendy recipes for things like prawn ponzu salad and courgettes with whipped tofu – but there are also guides to filleting fish, cooking steak, making mayonnaise – even how to boil an egg; a throwback to Delia who, in a move as famous and as brazen as her “Let’s be having you” chant to Norwich fans, once made boiling an egg the opening recipe of a cookbook.
Then, as now, she was meeting a need, says Jake Gauntlett, the senior content editor at MOB. Then, as now, our food landscape was rapidly changing. “Delia is convinced from the questions she receives in her postbag that people are no longer handed down the basics,” ran the book blurb for How To Cook at the time – which simultaneously dates it and makes it timeless.
“She took away barriers to cooking and made it welcoming,” says Gauntlett. “We aren’t doing anything different. We’re just doing it on the most accessible platform there is, which most people are looking to these days. As the focus shifts from traditional to social media, “people still need that brand they can trust,” he says. They still, deep down, need a Delia.
Its 10 contributing chefs – of which Wyburd and Coles are two – represent an array of ages, cultures, cuisines and socio-economic backgrounds. “Being one visual person, they [Delia et al] could be considered inaccessible because of who they are, whereas when you have multiple talents from all walks of life, it’s a more open gateway. We look for the best writer in that space,” Gauntlett explains, be they students or parents. “It’s easy to be snobby about digital platforms, but it’s a nuanced landscape,” says Wyburd, who has worked with MOB for four years. “Because online is where people are going to find food content, it’s also where incredibly skilled chefs go to build a new audience.”
Whether MOB works as an antidote to the confusion of cooking content is hard to say; they still release around 60 recipes a month, and – as with all things online – clicks are crucial. It’s also interesting to note that the authors of the most lauded, comprehensive cookbooks in the last two years – Bee Wilson’s The Secret of Cooking and Jeremy Lee’s Cooking Simply and Well, for One or Many – do not really have a social media presence. Though most Gen Z and millennials cook and eat while staring at their phones, there is clearly an appetite for cooking offline. Yet MOB appears to understand that too, with seven cookbooks out and one in the offing.