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"It's nice to see that she's still referred to as 'the first lady of food'. You sometimes think, when is she not going to be that any more? But at the moment she still is. It was a television-driven craze and, like all things on television, we all got a bit bored of it eventually."Ms Smith, who is working on an unspecified "project", though not a new book, for Christmas, was unavailable for comment. However, her agent, Deborah Owen, said it was inevitable that individual cookbook titles were now selling fewer copies than they once did, given the sheer number and variety of books by different chefs on the market."What she [Ms Smith] would say is that the whole cookery field has exploded and that means there are more people involved now," said Ms Owen. It was a bit like the internet bubble."Delia had a renaissance and Nigella was something else. It wouldn't be realistic to say that the cookery book market is now in recession: it's just not quite as crazy as once it was."For two to three years it was a cult of celebrity thing.

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All are expected to sell solidly but unremarkably.The downturn in cookbook sales has not gone unnoticed among publishers. Richard Atkinson, of Hodder & Stoughton, whose finds include Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, the presenter of Channel 4's River Cottage series and one of the rising stars of TV cookery, said of the late 1990s boom: "I think it was an extraordinary blip. And she added: "Often returns cannot be resold as they are damaged, and so there is not a lot a publisher can do with them."Though several new celebrity cookbooks will hit shelves in coming months - among them The Delia Collection, a new "bite-size" series cataloguing Ms Smith's vintage recipes - the autumn schedule is free of anything resembling the must-have Christmas blockbusters of old.Of the big names, it is only gourmet-style chefs such as Gordon Ramsay, Antony Worrall Thompson and Antonio Carluccio who have new books out in the next few weeks. The original advance orders from booksellers totalled over 850,000, which is huge for a hardback cookery book, and sales are still very high but not as high as they'd hoped."While she insisted there were no plans for the remaining copies to be pulped, she conceded that was a possibility if they could not be sold on through specialist retailers such as book clubs or discount shops. Industry insiders believe that, in many ways, she has become a victim of her own success.A BBC Worldwide spokeswoman confirmed booksellers had returned "high numbers" of unsold copies of How to Cook, Book Three, after admitting they had been over-ambitious with their advance orders."It's certainly true to say that we overprinted on that one," she said "Everyone's enthusiasm proved to be slightly over the top It's true to say we had quite high returns. If the BBC fails to find a new way of marketing the book on the back of upcoming repeats of the first How to Cook TV series, some or all of them may eventually be pulped.Ms Smith's most recent books - the latest of which, Delia's Vegetarian Collection, has sold 330,000 so far - may have failed to match up to the stratospheric sales of her first two How to Cook volumes, but she is hardly doing badly. Her first How to Cook guide has sold 1.7 million copies and rising, and the second was similarly successful, but nearly two years after its release the third volume appears to have stalled at 660,000.So convinced are many booksellers that the title has had its day they have sent their remaining copies back to its publisher, BBC Worldwide.

The overall value of cookbook sales in 2002 amounted to £38m, compared with a peak of nearly £44m two years before.By far the biggest loser, in relative terms at least, is Ms Smith, who for more than 30 years has been the doyenne of simple, no-frills home cooking. The star, whose recent series Jamie's Kitchen won over critics and public alike, has so far sold 200,000 copies of the tie-in coffee table book in the UK, compared to 450,000 for its precursor, Happy Days with the Naked Chef.Figures from the publishing industry suggest it is not just individual chefs whose stock is falling. A year after publication, sales of Forever Summer have yet to top 150,000 - a reflection of the popularity of the programme it accompanied, which was dropped by Channel 4 last year after one episode drew fewer than 900,000 viewers.Even Jamie Oliver, the golden boy of the TV cooking world, is failing to reach previous heights. While Nigella Bites, the spin-off from her TV series of the same name, sold half a million copies, according to her publishers, her latest book has failed to match this success. The BBC has been left with a stockpile of 190,000 unsold copies of Ms Smith's How to Cook, Book Three, after tens of thousands were sent back unwanted by booksellers.Meanwhile, Nigella Lawson, the celebrity cook who put the hedonism into baking with her sensual presenting style and high-calorie recipes for chocolate brownies and cr? br?, is also suffering a downturn. From the moment sales of Delia Smith's How to Cook boiled over into the millions, no television chef or cookery series was seen to be complete without their own tie-in recipe book. Now the TV cookbook boom - likened by one publisher to the internet bubble - appears to be over.