Delia Smith and Heston Blumenthal: food"s oddest couple? Life and character

Chefs Delia Smith and Heston Blumenthal, who are to front a new promotion debate for Waitrose. Photograph: Waitrose/PA

Here"s one from the hold up imitating, well, if not art, afterwards caprice department: a year or dual behind we ran an Apr dope square announcing that Delia Smith had enlisted the assistance of Heston Blumenthal to assistance her "go molecular". She was, we alleged, operative with the Fat Duck cook to emanate homemade spam, rebuilt sous vide, a comfortable preserve version of her chocolate bread and butter pudding and a shepherd"s cake ice cream. Oh, how we laughed. The some-more so when thenews table called the BBC to check the story, and Blumenthal"s own emissary roughly flew in to a fury since he had been kept out of the loop. Ridiculous. Because such a thing could never happen.

Or maybe it could. Waitrose, the whim supermarket sequence where the irreverent middle-classes go to worship, currently voiced that it has sealed up both Delia and Blumenthal to action as "food ambassadors for the Waitrose brand, pity their imagination and showcasing recipes". Which equates to they will be versus adverts and bigging up the mixture accessible in the supermarket. It is an viewable marriage. Delia creates recipes for the home cook, as does Blumenthal – though in the box of the latter, usually if you occur to live in a residence versed with the own Hadron Collider, Magnetic Resonance Imaging complement and a bespoke pick up of pipettes.

Now a small of you will reply with a shrug of roughly Gallic intensity, and wish to have a prolonged blubber about rarely paid TV personalities receiving the corporate dollar. Some of you will, as usual, wish to bellow "Emperor"s new clothes" at Blumenthal. Perhaps this time turn we could take all that as read; we do similar to a small accumulation in the comments.

What intrigues us some-more is the thought of doubtful culinary marriages. If Delia and Heston, the have a difference and anti-matter of the culinary world, can be partnered what alternative possibilities are there out there? What wonders would the teaming of Bernard Matthews and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall produce? Surely we are ready for the impeccably sourced, organically-reared, hand-fed gastronomically re-engineered turkey twizzler?

Would not Gary Rhodes, famous for his precision, his eremite friendship to the measuring jug and the weighing scales, have honeyed song with heavenly Nigella, who has never intentionally weighed or totalled anything in her life? And we would only kill to see Gordon Ramsay and Marco Pierre White re-enact the exposed fireside wrestling stage from Women in Love. They"re not essentially food opposites in any way, those two. We"re only a bit pervy similar to that.

Still you get the idea. What conspicuous food partnerships have great ambience and usual clarity attacked us of? If Heston and Delia, a pairing we literally regarded as a culinary joke, can eventually be brought together, certainly any one can?