In each episode, the pair would go on a food scavenging hunt to a local butchery, fishing boat, farm or vegetable garden, where they’d secure fresh, seasonal and locally-sourced produce.īack to the kitchen they would motor, to prepare labour-intensive, slow cooked food, running one of the funniest comedy double acts since Morecombe and Wise (or, perhaps more appropriately, Statler and Waldorf from The Muppets). Each week Jennifer would crank up an antique motorcycle (with Clarissa good-naturedly squeezed into a sidecar), and head to a country location to cook a meal for one of the lost tribes of middle England: girls’ school lacrosse teams, polo clubs, grizzled motorcycle enthusiasts, country cricketers, troops of Ghurkas, Welsh male voice choirs, rosy-cheeked rowers from Cambridge, nuns and the occasional lumberjack. Into this anxious haze came The Two Fat Ladies: large of personality, corpulent of frame, gleefully un-politically correct and unashamed advocates of “traditional” English food, rich in butter, cream, red meat and alcohol. Red meat became illegal overnight, and suddenly everyone was dutifully peeling the skin off chicken breasts and getting excited about things like tofu. Foods once rich in fat were repackaged in low fat incarnations (usually with the helpings of sugar and artificial flavourings racheted up to help with the taste). As medicos advised that saturated fat was the enemy and warned that everyone’s cholesterol was dangerously high, out went the butter and cream and in came margarine, skimmed milk and mung beans with everything. At the time, the worried Western World was still clinging to the “fat is bad” mantra that had hung around since the great cholesterol scares of the 1980s. It’s difficult now to appreciate the impact that the Two Fat Ladies had on popular culture in the mid 1990s.

I was saddened last week to read of the death of Clarissa Dickson Wright, the TV cook and food writer, who along with the late great Jennifer Paterson, formed The Two Fat Ladies – one of the strangest and most distinctively English cookery double acts to come out of this soggy, pudding obsessed island. The recent death of Clarissa Dickson Wright, the surviving member of the Two Fat Ladies TV cooking duo, leads me to review their fun, cholesterol-rich legacy.

Two fat ladies jennifer paterson