Delia Smith said royal chefs felt pressure cooking for her after being honoured

The late Queen entertained Smith, one of Britain’s best-loved TV cooks, and her husband Michael Wynn-Jones at a dinner party in 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.

“It was incredible…so completely unexpected, and I still can’t quite believe it,” Smith said on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs.

“The most special thing was after I’d received the award, Michael and I were invited to Windsor Castle to have dinner with the Queen, and stay the night.

“The food was brilliant…there are about 20 people together. But it was very, very, very special.”

Other guests at the soiree included the late monarch’s son the Duke of York, Sir James Dyson, the billionaire inventor, and his wife Lady Dyson.

When asked if the kitchen crew 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.”

Growing up in Bexleyheath, south-east London, Smith spoke about the impact of her parents getting a divorce when she was aged 15.

“Don’t anyone ever think that that isn’t going to affect the children,” Smith told Desert Island Discs, having returned to the programme after being interviewed by Roy Plomley in 1982.

“People say, oh children bounce back there, they’re alright. They don’t. It’s a terrible, terrible thing to happen to a child and I found it terrible.

“You feel rejected by a parent, you go through a long time when you don’t want to have anything to do with them at all but then that does calm down and then later on, it was fine.”

Having left school at 16 with no qualifications, Smith started her career at a French restaurant in London which she thought was “really glamorous” 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’, she said.

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

“It’s like sometimes you feel like a spectator on your life. You think how did that happen? And there it was, and it’s still there. I get albums sent to me to sign.”

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

“I used to deliver my handwritten copy and Michael used to put it into English,” she said.

“He liked food a lot, and I liked food a lot and that was something that drew us together.”

The pair 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”.

In 2005, Smith went viral when she was filmed urging fans to get behind the team who were losing to Man 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.”

Smith said in the first week of the incident people were saying she should be “brought before a disciplinary committee at the FA”, but has since had letters of support “from one end of the country to the other”.

“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 11.15am on Sunday on BBC Radio 4 and BBC Sounds.