One of the world’s best-selling cookery writers tells Peter Stanford why she has decided to write a book about spirituality and climate change

Delia Smith is sharing a memory with me of her great friend, Sr Wendy Beckett. With her husband, the journalist and publisher Michael Wynn Jones, she had accompanied TV’s most unusual art historian on a trip to Venice to see works in the city’s churches by Giovanni Bellini. “Wendy suddenly said she wanted to go on a gondola. I’d been to Venice before and had never wanted to go on one, but she was right. It was amazing … the motion of the water and the light.”

It must have been, I suggest, quite a spectacle for anyone to see Sr Wendy (who died in 2018) in the full, old-fashioned nun’s habit that she preferred, floating down the Grand Canal in a gondola with Britain’s favourite television cook.
“No,” she says laughing, “people don’t recognise me.”

I am not sure. Though it may be nine years since she announced her retirement from the small screen after four decades teaching the nation to cook (“my former day job” as she refers to it), so secure is Delia’s enduring place in the public’s affections – and in the nation’s kitchens – that no surname is ever necessary when referring to her. She is always just “Delia”.