Last Friday the waiting ended for the worlds of cookery and publishing. After five years of self-imposed exile, Delia Smith, the doyenne of Britain’s celebrity cooks, was back with a new book, How to Cheat at Cooking.

Britain’s supermarkets and the suppliers of ingredients used in the book were bracing themselves for the inevitable “Delia effect”, a term recognised by the Collins dictionary in 2001.

In the past she has started a nationwide run on cranberries by using them on her television show, boosting sales by 200%. She has been credited for a 10% increase in sales of eggs, and rescued a Lancashire firm that was selling just 200 pans a year before she described them as “a little gem”. It sold 90,000 in the next four months.

Seasoned Pioneers, based on the Wirral, was one of the lucky ones to be offered a “Delia cheat ingredient” sticker for its products this time, its premixed spices getting the nod.

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“We’ve had to ramp up our production by about 500% and we’ve trebled the number of staff we’ve got packing,” said Mark Steene, the firm’s founder. “And that was before the book came out.

“It’s all exciting but a bit scary. I’d like to think it will make my fortune but maybe it will kill me.”

For her publisher, Ebury Press, sales success was guaranteed. Delia’s books have sold 19m copies and, according to Waterstone’s, preorders of the latest were the largest in any category since Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. It was already No 2 on the Amazon bestseller list before it had been published and predictably hit the top spot on its first day.

For its readers, though, there was a surprise in store. When she says “cheat”, Delia really means it.

The woman who taught a nation how to make perfect mashed potato has announced that we are allowed to get it out of a packet. And that’s not all. She also extols the virtues of fried onions in a can, precooked bacon and ready-made cheese sauce. A television series will follow in the spring.

Her aim, she says, is to show us “how to discover and use ready-prepared ingredients, how to sometimes short-circuit the accepted rules of cooking”.

The book, she feels, is not only a boon to the overworked and harassed parent who doesn’t have time to spend hours slaving in the kitchen, but also a necessary corrective to the smorgasbord of uppity television chefs now being served up on all channels.

All that effing and blinding may be good entertainment, but the effect, according to the sainted Delia – with whom the whole country is on first-name terms – is to have left many of us feeling that cooking is a dangerous sport reserved for the professionals.

Her theory is backed up by a recent survey by Waitrose Food Illustrated magazine that found only 5% of viewers were inspired to cook by watching celebrity chefs on television.

The initial reaction to Delia’s book was puzzlement. “I can see that she’s trying to reach out to people who are intimidated by cooking, but I’m not sure people will feel much more fulfilled by opening a tin of mince and putting frozen potato on top than they will by buying a ready meal,” said Henrietta Green, founder of the gourmet website Foodlovers britain.com. “This isn’t cooking – it’s assembly.”

One reader said online: “I’ve been mixing scratch ingredients with ready-made for years with great success. I wish I’d known people were waiting for permission to do the same. I’d have written a book myself.” The unthinkable question was being asked: had Delia somehow misjudged the state of the culinary nation?

This is not the first time that Delia has ventured into the arena of cheating. In fact her first book, published in 1971, was also titled How to Cheat at Cooking, and featured such delights as fish pie made from fish fingers, tinned mushrooms and tinned tomatoes.

One might have hoped that the nation had moved on since the early 1970s, those culinary doldrums when cheesy pineapple sticks were all the rage. But apparently not: this time, the first ingredient in her recipe for lobster soup is a can of lobster soup.

As I am a busy working mother and longtime Delia aficionado, How to Cheat at Cooking would seem to be aimed squarely at me, so I decided to try her “good old shepherd’s pie”.

A concoction of tinned mince, frozen mash, pregrated cheddar and frozen diced onion, it sounded, to be frank, horrible. But Delia says it is “nothing short of sensational”, so who was I to argue?

On closer examination, the “quick” recipe required one trip to Marks & Spencer, at one end of my high street, for the mince; a second to Tesco, at the other end, for the diced mixed carrot and swede (fail to get the Tesco kind, she warns darkly, and you’ll have to get out your chopping board, which kind of defeats the object of the exercise).

I couldn’t find any minced lamb – perhaps the Delia effect already in operation – so had to settle for a £1.69 tin of beef.

And although there were bags of unadulterated potatoes in every shop I passed, the Aunt Bessie’s Homestyle frozen mashed potato discs required a bit of a hunt. I unearthed them in Iceland, although I gave up on the frozen onion (Delia does allow you to slice your own in extremis).

Laden with plastic bags from different supermarkets, I staggered home. The shopping trip took an hour; assembling and cooking the ingredients, a further hour. The result was . . . okay. That did surprise me, as it had looked like a concoction of cat food and ice hockey pucks to begin with.

But not only does my normal recipe (involving meat that I fry myself, a good slosh of red wine and potatoes I peel, boil and mash to a Delia recipe with crème fraîche, butter and milk) taste nicer; it is also a lot quicker to shop for – and takes no longer to make. I was left wondering what the point of cheating was.

Are there shoppers out there who are too time-starved to peel a potato, but happy to trek to several supermarkets to obtain the ingredients? Delia is very particular about which item comes from which supplier, though she insists no money changed hands.

Of course, the idea is that you stock up at the supermarkets in advance – but it’s not much harder to store real potatoes, and freeze raw mince, is it?

“This is really how people cook,” insists William Sitwell, the editor of Waitrose Food Illustrated, a fan of the new book. “It’s totally realistic to expect people to cheat and cut corners. It’s how most of middle England cooks anyway and Delia knows that. She’s making it acceptable.”

Last week Delia suggested that she was partly influenced in writing the book by the scourge of child poverty. “I feel that’s a disgrace and that somehow or other we’ve got to make sure that everybody gets enough nutritious food to eat in the first place,” she said.

It’s a laudable aim, but my pie was rather expensive. The cost of the ingredients (leaving out the olive oil and cinnamon, which I had at home) was a smidgen under £7. I couldn’t help noticing that an 800g Tesco Finest shepherd’s pie would have set me back just £3.97 – and there was even an economy pie for 79p.

Where the book makes most sense is in the chapter on Asian food, in which combining prepared ingredients, such as spice mixes and coconut milk, with fresh meat is the only sensible way to proceed.

But do we really need Delia to tell us this? Who, aside from Michelin-starred Indian chefs, is such a purist that they create their own spice mixes and milk their own coconuts?

Among Delia’s fellow chefs last week, the reaction to the book was bafflement. “I’m surprised,” admitted Tana Ram-say, wife of Gordon and author of Real Family Food. “Delia really taught me to cook, and I’ve got all her books. They were my bibles.

“I’ve been really looking forward to this one coming out, but I thought it was going to be full of clever chef’s tips about how to make things quicker – like setting aside an afternoon and stocking the freezer when you’ve got time. My first thought would be that it’s going to be much more expensive for people on a budget to cook like she suggests.” Others are less charitable. “It’s depressing,” says the uncompromising food writer and publisher Tom Jaine, who edited The Good Food Guide for five years. “This simulacrum of cooking doesn’t make anyone nearer a cook than before. It may be a very accurate reflection of what really goes on in English kitchens but that doesn’t mean it should be encouraged.”

Delia's critics do not merely object to the book on grounds of good taste; some say that her message is irresponsible.

Consumers are generally being encouraged to cut down their carbon footprint, avoid supermarkets, buy as locally as possible and minimise packaging. But anyone cooking their way through Delia’s new tome will become intimately acquainted with most of our major supermarkets and have to chuck out acres of wrapping.

Last week Delia was quizzed about her eco-credentials and disclaimed any knowledge. “Don’t ask me – I haven’t got a clue,” she said, confessing to a liking for fresh Kenyan peas in winter. “I’m a cook. I can’t get into the politics of food.”

Many of her readers will nod in approval. But, like it or not, food is a political hot potato. Yesterday a report by the Sustainable Development Commission suggested that the food chain accounts for a fifth of UK greenhouse gas emissions.

“Delia is a very smart person, and I’m sure there is a logic to what she’s doing,” said the restaurateur Oliver Peyton, owner of Inn the Park and the National Dining Rooms. “But I wouldn’t suggest cheating by buying loads of processed food from supermarkets with lots of packaging.

“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with using some frozen vegetables – frozen peas are great. But someone with as much influence as she has ought to be focusing on seasonal food. She has the power to make a huge difference. We all have a responsibility to take on these issues. Food, the production of food and the way we think about it is pivotal to our society.”

But isn’t that merely a middle-class preoccupation?

“That’s twaddle,” he said. “Food trends are very important, and most trends end up filtering down to the whole population. What's important is doing the right thing.”

Last week it was reported that sales of organic and free range chicken had soared by more than 35% after the screening of television programmes campaigning against battery farming methods by Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, and supermarkets are struggling to meet demand.

Will this movement overtake Delia’s packet-and-tin crusade? The sales figures of Aunt Bessie’s frozen mash, Seasoned Pioneers’ spices and M&S tinned minced lamb will give us an answer.

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