Delia Smith needs to work hard to keep up these days – she doesn't have Gordon's foul mouth, Nigella's boobs or Anthony Worrall Thompson's horrible straggly beard thing.

But what Delia does have is a frozen packet of mashed potato discs. And people literally want to punch her in her stupid face for it.

Delia Smith's new BBC 2 cookery show How To Cheat At Cooking has come in for a bit of a kicking because she's started to use tinned mince and pre-grated cheese in her recipes. And now foodies are so outraged that anyone would think Delia Smith had spent half an hour on Monday shitting into a baby's mouth.

There's nothing that enrages us quite like cookery shows. It's the whole fake middle-class lifestyle food-as-porn posturing that goes along with it, whether it's Jamie Oliver getting stroppy because we buy chicken that hasn't come from an animal which spent its final days sipping brandy and being tended to by a squadron of Swedish masseurs or that slaphead Masterchef wanker who keeps bellowing about his dinner like it's the just-discovered ruins of Ciudad sodding Perdida. 

And it's thanks to this – thanks to the way Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall loves food so much that he never finds the time to wash his face or cut his hair – that the world's filling up with ghastly 4X4-driving, Fresh And Wild-shopping Sophias who'd fall over dead if their little Joshua ever ate something that wasn't organically grown or hand-primped by indigenous Himalayan tribespeople. But at least Delia Smith's here to save the day.

After a few years in the television wilderness – perhaps because her fingers were starting to resemble uncooked sausages so much that she kept stabbing herself with a fork – Delia Smith returned to TV this week with her new show How To Cheat At Cooking. Or, as it's otherwise called, How To Cook Frozen Potato Wedges, Put Them On A Plate With A Couple Of Eggs And Some Salad Creme And Say It's A Traditional Dish From Peru.

Because, as you might have heard, Delia Smith's new show mainly just involves Delia opening a couple of packets of pre-packed food, mixing everything together with a spoon and then eating it. And people have reacted as if Delia was asking them to chew on circumcised otter foreskins, as The Telegraph reports:

"Has Delia Gone Mad?" was the title of one particularly active thread on the BBC messageboard. Even members of her own website, Delia Online, were taken aback. "I sat opened-mouthed as I watched the frozen mash being produced. I squirmed at the mention of the tinned mince, cried at the pre-chopped carrots and swede," said one fan. However, the doyenne of cooks was unrepentant… Kate Adam, her spokesman at the BBC, said: "Delia knew there would be a strong reaction. But this show is not designed for people who already know how to cook."

Sad to admit, but we watched Delia's How To Cheat At Cooking, and it was a failure (sad to admit that we watched it, by the way, not sad because it was a failure).

The whole point of the show is that Delia Smith loves the convenience of frozen mashed potato so much that she's become a freshly-minted religious convert to them. But that didn't come across because the downbeat, apologetic way that Delia presented the show made us think that someone was forcing her to do it as some sort of sick Saw-style torture game.

But mainly Delia's How To Cheat At Cooking failed because – get this – people who don't know how to cook probably aren't going to watch a Delia Smith cookery programme. Not when Pop Stars Go Bad is on ITV2.

Still, let's hope that Delia Smith's How To Cheat At Cooking is a success, because then we get to see the half-arsed copycat shows. In particular we're looking forward to Nigella Lawson's How To Eat Sardines Out Of A Can With Your Fingers Like A Filthy Redneck.

Read more:

Delia's tins and tubs divide and conquer – Telegraph

Delia Smith is the Jay-Z of the middle-class television chef world, albeit a Jay-Z who keeps getting drunk at football matches and has fingers like chubby uncooked sausages.

So why is Delia Smith like Jay-Z? Well, her forthcoming gangsta rap album All Eyez On Me (I'm Making Flapjacks) is certainly one reason, and the other is that she's about to break her own self-enforced retirement. The BBC has announced that Delia Smith is set to make her television comeback next year, six years after announcing that she'd hung up her whisk for good, with an update of her 1971 book How To Cheat At Cooking. Of course, the TV cooking landscape has changed immeasurably over the last six years, so it's clear that Delia needs a gimmick – which is why she plans on screaming all her recipes like they're red-eyed, wobbly-legged football chants.

Look around at the state of television cookery at the moment and what have you got? Gordon Ramsay bellowing swearwords. Jamie Oliver slowly transforming into a Shed Seven-loving Michael Winner. Nigella Lawson dressed in tinfoil knickers pretending that she's friends with poor people. Heston Blumenthal cooking a burger atom by atom using a particle accelerator made out of unicorn piss. Food Poker – a programme so hopelessly schizophrenic that it's like a nightmarish Vietnam veteran's flashback as presented by Matt Allwright.

What TV cookery needs now is a steady hand – an awoken monolith who can show these upstarts how things are done. And, clearly, that means Delia Smith. Delia Smith is the undisputed queen of the TV kitchen – if Delia writes a recipe involving cranberries, the whole country sells out of cranberries in a day. If Delia shows us how to make omelettes properly, the whole country sells out of omelette pans in a day. And if Delia turns up on YouTube drunkenly shouting into a microphone at a football match, the whole country lurches around sporting venues all red-eyed screaming "Let's be 'avin you! Come on!" the next day. That's the all-encompassing power of Delia Smith's influence.

And now, after a six-year absence, Delia Smith is returning to television to teach us slack-jawed morons how to cook food without buggering it up by hitting packets of pasta with wooden spoons like bloody cavemen. Next year Delia Smith will return to the BBC with an updated version of her 1971 book How To Cheat At Cooking, with a BBC spokesperson saying:

"It's going to be something we've not done before with Delia, showing how to cut corners, but not cut corners on quality or taste. We're also going to show her life beyond the kitchen. It's great that she's coming back and it's showing more of her life than ever before."

Now, we know what you're thinking. Delia Smith's How To Cheat At Cooking sounds an awful lot like Nigella Express, but hopefully it won't copy Nigella Express' 'don't worry if you haven't got any eggs, use one of your shoes or whatever instead' mentality. Or end each show with Delia Smith smearing butterscotch sauce across her face in a silky nightie like Nigella does. We really hope that last one doesn't happen, by the way. We have trouble enough sleeping as it is.

But, hey, if anyone's qualified to stare into a TV camera and awkwardly intone ways that the general public can cheat at cooking, it's Delia Smith. All we have to do now is see if Delia Smith cheats at cooking the same way we cheat at cooking – but let's hope not, because watching a 66-year-old woman eat a three-day-old slice of takeaway pizza in front of Loose Women with one sausagey hand rammed down the front of her trousers isn't entertainment. But it is strangely arousing.