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Delia Smith has given her honest opinion on French cuisine, declaring that good meals are now “very hard” to find in the region.
The 83-year-old celebrity chef and food writer, known for teaching basic cookery skills in a no-nonsense style, has said that modern French dishes have become style over substance with fancy displays and “towers, foams, drizzles and dusts” being served on plates.
Speaking to Noble Rot magazine for its 36th issue, Smith said that some of France’s greatest chefs have scrapped “utterly essential” ingredients butter, cream and flour, in favour of fancy-looking food displays that lack calories.
“Sadly, all that is a distant memory and it’s very hard to find that kind of food in France now,” Smith said, pointing towards the “fancy smears” on plates in modern restaurants.
She blamed the late French chef Michel Guerard’s “cuisine minceur” – a style of cooking that recreates traditional French dishes with lower calories and limited use of starch, cream, butter and sugar – for appealing to “foodie snobs” concerned about their “waistlines”.
These comments echo Smith’s outspoken statements about modern dining, when she claimed in 2017 that restaurant dishes had become “theatre on a plate”.
“If I get one more plate put in front of me with six dots of sauce on it, I will go mad,” she declared at the time.
Smith has long been vocal about separating what constitutes a proper meal, and what is merely a fad.
The chef previously made it clear that she isn’t concerned with keeping up with any fashionable cuisine trends.
“When I sit in the back of a taxi in London and see all these new restaurants – hundreds of them – I think, ‘I don’t know anything about that kind of food,’” she toldThe Times earlier this year. “My favourite food is Italian and then British. I think I’m a bit behind the times.”
Smith, famed for her Christmas recipe books and teachings on core basics of cooking, also claimed that young people today lack culinary skills, saying, “I feel sorry that a lot of young people don’t know what a good pork chop is like.”
Last year, Smith took aim at veganism when she declared that having a plant-based diet is wrong and does not help the planet.
“Everything within me tells me that [veganism is] wrong,” she told the Financial Times. “If people just want to eat vegetables – and some people do – that’s fine. But don’t say you’re helping the planet, because you’re not. Full stop.”
She has also been vocal about her disdain for fashionable ingredients such as kimchi, sriracha and chipotle, which are often seen on trendy menus in newer restaurants.
“I see recipes in magazines and I don’t know what the ingredients are,” she told the publication. “Food has always been faddish, and I’ve always tried to lie low and let it go.”
She cast doubt over whether there will be a future generation of British recipe writing after Nigella Lawson and Jamie Olive, who she calls “the last of the army” of old-screen home recipe writers.
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