Life's Pleasures Quote by Delia Smith

Delia Smith makes the case for the food processor the way she’s always made the case for good cooking: with pragmatism dressed up as reassurance. The sentence starts by conceding the purist position - you can do it all by hand - as if preemptively calming the reader who fears taking a shortcut will somehow invalidate their effort. That “not an absolutely essential” is doing a lot of social work. It acknowledges a long-running anxiety in home cooking: that tools are moral choices, and convenience is a kind of cheating.

Then she pivots, not to glamour or gadget lust, but to the real currency of domestic life: time and energy. “Very quickly and efficiently” is less product pitch than permission slip. Smith’s subtext is that competence isn’t measured by how much you suffer; it’s measured by whether dinner happens. In a culture that loves romanticizing labor - the artisanal knead, the meditative chop - she’s quietly pro-labor-saving without being anti-tradition. You can still be “proper” even if a machine helps.

The context matters: Delia’s authority was built in an era when British home cooking was being re-taught to a generation balancing work, family, and shrinking patience for kitchen martyrdom. Her tone is almost parental, but it’s also slyly modern: use the tool, reclaim the evening. It’s consumer culture, yes, but filtered through a kind of domestic feminism - not “buy this to be better,” but “buy this to make life less punishing.”