Pressure cooking: Delia Smith recalls royal dinner

Delia Smith said royal chefs felt the pressure of cooking for her at a dinner with the late Queen.

Queen Elizabeth entertained the celebrity cook after Smith was made a member of the Order of the Companions of Honour.

"It was incredible, so completely unexpected," Smith told BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs.

"The food was brilliant. There were about 20 people together. But it was very, very, very special."

The late Queen invited Smith and her husband Michael Wynn-Jones to the dinner party at Windsor Castle after being honoured for services to cookery in 2017.

Smith, who was made a CBE in 2009, had been previously named in the Queen's Birthday Honours list.

When asked if the kitchen crew at Windsor Castle felt any pressure cooking for her, Smith said: "They told me so. They did tell me so.

"But that's not what I'm about at all. Because I only ever did anything everyone can do."

Delia Smith said she sometimes "feels like a spectator" on her own life, recalling meeting Keith Richards about an album cover

Having left school at 16 with no qualifications, Smith started her career at a French restaurant in London before she became a food stylist.

An early commission was to make a cake for the cover of The Rolling Stones' album Let It Bleed, which she said happened in "such an ordinary way".

"Just a phone call from a photographer: 'Delia are you free on Thursday - can I book you?'"

On discovering who the cake was for, Smith said: "I think Keith Richards arrived.

"Sometimes you feel like a spectator on your life. You think, how did that happen? It's still there. I get albums sent to me to sign."

'Food drew us together'

She later got a job writing a cookery column for the Daily Mirror’s supplement, where she met her husband of 52 years, who was the deputy editor of Mirror Magazine.

"Michael liked food a lot, and I liked food a lot and that was something that drew us together," she said.

The couple, who live near Stowmarket in Suffolk, have been majority shareholders in Norwich City Football Club since 1996, with Smith saying "we will still be going to football with our zimmer frames".

Delia Smith said she and her husband Michael "will still be going to football with our zimmer frames"

In 2005, Smith went viral when she was filmed urging fans to get behind the team, who were losing to Manchester City, taking a microphone to say: "Let's be having you".

"I was trying to get somebody to put it on the message board because they were like church mice and we were losing.

"And somebody just gave me the microphone and said 'say it' and I forgot that Sky were there.

"I go to away matches and they all call out 'let's be having you, Delia'.

"It's lovely. I love it," she said.

The full interview will air at 11:15 GMT on Sunday, 24 December on BBC Radio 4 and afterwards on BBC Sounds.