KITCHEN guru Delia Smith is teaching the French how to cook eggs — by launching her back-to-basics books in the home of fine cuisine.Publisher Hachette Pratique has taken 150 recipes from her How To Cook books one and two for the book, La cuisine facile d'aujourd'hui, par Delia, which will be published around May of this year.

P15 downpage with secondary pic

SUFFOLK kitchen guru Delia Smith is teaching the French how to cook eggs — by launching her back-to-basics books in the home of fine cuisine.

Publisher Hachette Pratique has taken 150 recipes from her How To Cook books one and two for the book, La cuisine facile d'aujourd'hui, par Delia, which will be published around May of this year.

For this publication, the author has been reborn as simply "Delia", but it is not the first time that the Norwich City director, who lives near Stowmarket, has seen her name stand alone.

For only last month she became the first person to be entered in the Collins English Dictionary under her Christian name only.

The definition of the noun "Delia' is: "The recipes or style of cooking of British cookery writer Delia Smith' and is synonymous with no-nonsense recipes."

Tonight sees the return of Delia's back-to-basics screen cookery series Delia's How To Cook on BBC, based on the books.

The third and final part of the series, which is filmed in the now-familiar surroundings of her Suffolk conservatory kitchen, starts off by giving advice on basic kitchen equipment.

And viewers should get their orders in quickly, as last time Delia praised a cooking implement there was a stampede to buy it.

Recipes in this series include roast fillet of beef with balsamic onions and thyme, tarte tatin, very sticky prune cake and omelette Arnold Bennett.

Delia, who left school with no qualifications, published her first recipe in 1969 and went on to become arguably the country's best-known television cook.

Delia's first two How To Cook books have sold 2.7 million copies between them. A third was published last month, already selling 300,000 copies.

But in the week before Christmas, it was another famous chef who scored the top spot in the book charts with his recipe collection.

Naked Chef Jamie Oliver beat J K Rowling's Harry Potter books in the Christmas week with his Happy Days with the Naked Chef, pushing Delia to fifth position.

The complete course of Delia's books has taken her four years to complete and drew some early criticism for its simplistic approach when it launched in 1998, but viewers were won over.

Editions of How to Cook have also been published in Holland, Singapore, South Africa, Australia and the USA and are selling well.

Recipes in the book include individual steak mushroom and kidney pies (or petites tourtes au boeuf, aux rognons et aux champignons) and bubble and squeak rosti and Welsh rarebit jacket potatoes (pommes de terre facon Welsh Rarebit).