You Matter
DELIA SMITH
(MENSCH PUBLISHING, 224 PP, £14.99)
Tablet bookshop price £13.49 • tel 020 7799 4064

Delia Smith is a benefactor of mankind. Her 40 years and more of cookbook writing, an attempt, she says, to teach a generation to cook, made families and marriages happier and people better- fed. She’s also terribly nice. I invited her once to speak to the Catholic Writers’ Guild, and she charmed everyone with her interest in other people and her unassuming simplicity.

She came to talk about her Catholicism, which was, I thought, profound and deeply felt; she’s a convert. 

So what do we have in You Matter? Peter Stanford, in his interview with Delia in this magazine, asked her about her motivation in writing it: “My sole purpose,” she explained, “was to write a book about spirituality with no religion in it. When I did [my] early books, they were religious ones, bought by religious people. This time I wanted to do a book for people who didn’t have religion.”