‘Grab that crab, Clarissa!/ Eat that meat, Jennifer!’ It was with these words – the start of their self-sung theme tune – that Two Fat Ladies first burst on to our screens 30 years ago. Jennifer Paterson and Clarissa Dickson Wright were exceptionally unlikely stars. Both heavy drinkers and smokers, they had slightly fallen into cooking careers on the edge of the British Establishment. Jennifer used to be the cook at The Spectator, creating cream-laden dishes for staff while necking wine. Clarissa developed quinine poisoning from consuming around six pints of gin and tonic a day. Jennifer died in 1999; Clarissa in 2014.
Clarissa was sober by the time Two Fat Ladies was filmed, but she had been seriously affected by her love of booze. She only learnt about her greatest culinary triumph – a ten-course meal for ten – after she was congratulated by one of the guests years later. She had been so tanked up while cooking that she had forgotten the menu altogether. My bucket list includes one day recreating this meal, which Clarissa recounts in her autobiography, Spilling the Beans: ‘Prawns in chau-froid and aspic, game consommé with tiny herb dumplings, fillets of wild salmon wrapped round a mousseline of trout and smoked trout with a champagne sauce, English partridge with watercress salad and bread sauce, a medley of tomato, champagne and mint sorbets, hare with wild mushrooms flambéed in brandy, a salad of endive and walnuts, assorted puddings, pot au chocolate, apple jalousie and queen of puddings, cheese beignets with a piquant sauce.’
