Delia's How To Cook Book One Delia Smith

Delia’s How to Cook Book One

Delia Smith

Published by BBC Worldwide, 1998 (Hardback)

Design by Flo Bayley, photographs by Miki Duisterhof

This book is in the top 50 bestselling books ever, it was published to accompany a BBC television series in which Delia Smith aimed to demystify the cooking process beginning with how to boil an egg. Starting with the cover photography and typography, the book establishes an idea of simplicity, authority and practicality that reflects the ethos of Delia Smith. This is an easy book to navigate with clear hierarchies of information and with photographs that clearly show what the food will look like. The design is functional and practical with typography and images combining to help the reader understand the cooking process, reflecting the sensible and pragmatic writing of the author.

However, from a design perspective, this is not a hugely exciting book to look at. Perhaps because Delia Smith’s persona is about practical, safe advice the designers have opted for a rather pedestrian design. The design functions well but lacks sophistication: the typography is somewhat basic, for example: there are no ligatures which makes for some ugly collisions of letterforms, especially in the larger size texts; the designer has used tabular lining numerals - I think proportional oldstyle would have been a more elegant solution with, if necessary, tabular oldstyle for lists; the book could benefit from running heads for each section to make the book even more easy to navigate. The photographs are perfectly nice photographs doing a good job of showing what the finished dishes look like but, in their lack of styling, they are rather bland and the effect is somewhat uninspiring.

Front cover

The cover of this book is so pale that it appears to be have been bleached by the sun. The dominant element, taking up a third of the cover, is a centrally-positioned photograph of six white eggs and a white feather arranged in a white bowl on a white table. The cover is printed on a matt coated paper which gives the photograph, with its subtle shades of greys, the feel of a painted still-life. The classically-proportioned cover with its delicately composed photograph suggest simplicity and serenity and represents both the author’s ethos and her starting point in the book - how to boil an egg.

The title of the book is positioned above - and matches the width of - the photograph, it is set in centred uppercase Garamond and printed in a warm brownish-grey. The sub-title of the book appears just below the title, set at a smaller size and printed in the same colour. The author’s name - first name only on the cover - appears above the title of the book and printed in a subtly different shade of grey. Below the photograph is a strapline, set in lowercase Garamond and printed in the same grey as the author’s name, underneath this is the publisher’s logo which is darker than the other text, becoming the the second most dominant, eye-grabbing item after the photograph.

This is not a cover that uses graphic design to grab the reader’s attention - the cover signifies calm, order and balance as well as understated authority through its choice of subtle colour palette and centred neo-Classical typography. We are on first name terms with the author and, although Delia Smith is instantly recognisable from her numerous television appearances, this cover does not use her image to sell the book, rather it subtly, though emphatically, establishes, through graphic design means, the Delia Smith brand of quiet confidence, order and calm in the kitchen.

Inside Pages

The book is 21.5 cm by 27.5 cm and is printed full colour on white coated paper. The layout is based on a two-column grid with symmetrical facing pages: headings and recipe titles are set in titlecase Garamond, printed in grey; ranged left Garamond in black is used for the body text; pagination appears on the outside of each page, at the bottom, set in italic Garamond. Chapters open on a double spread; the verso has a full-bleed photograph, the recto has a different, three-column layout from the rest of the book with titlecase Garamond at a slightly larger size than elsewhere. The design of the book is extremely reader friendly: it is easy to navigate with a strongly demarcated hierarchy within the information; ingredients are separated from the main body of text with the method clearly separated from the author’s commentary by the use of italics. The book aims to simplify cooking and the design reflects this, creating a book that is easy and practical to use.

Photographs, taken by Miki Duisterhof, are used extensively throughout the book: most recipes have a full bleed image, usually of the finished dish; others have several smaller images; occasionally, some recipes are illustrated with photographs as diagrams to explain a particular process. Like the cover photograph, the photographs have a subtle simplicity, showing the food close-up with little or no background and with crisp, clear colours that suggest the dishes were photographed in daylight. Although these photographs have obviously been styled for the camera and are uniform in style throughout, they have the appearance of being ‘natural’: photographs as information with few signifiers of lifestyle - as such they are not about aspiration but have a purpose of showing, in plain terms, what the food looks like. Of course, you could argue that, for the beginner cook the target audience for this book) the aspirational element is the desire to cook as well as, and with the same confidence, as Delia.