Delia Smith ingredients top shopping lists

Delia Smith cookbook boosts supermarket sales

Two days after Delia Smith’s new cookbook hit the shelves, supermarkets have reported a surge in its key recipe ingredients.

The queen of home-baking released How to Cheat at Cooking on Friday and, since then, Sainsbury’s has sold twice as much ready-made pastry as last weekend, and requests for frozen mashed potato and Italian meat have increased.

The items are all listed as key ingredients in the book, which is designed to help busy families make quick and easy yet nutritious meals.

Sainsbury's store manager Ben Williams said: ‘Customers are picking up the book and using it as a shopping list.’

Other foods that have been big sellers include anchovy fillets, dried porcini mushrooms, pine nuts and tortellini pasta - all listed in Delia's recipes. The latest book is an updated version of her first cookery tome, published under the same title in 1971.

Delia, whose books have sold more than 19 million copies, last week hit the headlines after saying that cheap chickens were important for poorer families in what was seen as a backlash against Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fernley-Whittingstall’s recent attempts to get the nation to only eat organic chicken.

She said: ‘I don’t like the way battery chickens are reared but we still have a lot of poverty, particularly among children, and I feel that’s a disgrace.

‘We have to make sure everybody gets enough nutritious food to eat.’