Two great ladies

Mary Berry’s dependable The Aga Book — a book of the last century and part of my kitchen library — is full of the good sense of a domestic science instructor. There’s little hint Mary would later be crowned glam granny celebrity judge on TV’s The Great British Bake Off; neat as a pin in floral jacket, tough but twinkly, fair but firm. The iron hand in a pastry glove. Post-Bake Off, she is still unstoppable. There has been a surge of cookery programmes, accompanying hardbacks and further explorations into her life, her garden, her travels — recently being zoomed around Rome on a motorbike. Wherever we turn, there smiles Mary, instructing us beneath eyelashes rivalling those of Barbara Cartland. Extraordinary in the ordinariness that the British adore, viz Delia.

But cooks on motorbikes are not new. In the 1990s, two middle-aged mavericks in black leather, goggles and helmets rode on to our screens, on the saddle and in side car. Jennifer and Clarissa had a passion for cooking, respect for tradition and authenticity — but scant regard for correctness and conformity. Where did these comely cuisinières provocateurs spring from?

A talented TV producer, Pat Llewellyn,  discovered Clarissa Dickson Wright demonstrating the cultivation of an unspeakable vegetable called a cardoon — with a certain panache — on her allotment. Clarissa was then co-owner of specialist shop Books for Cooks. For Pat, she sparked the notion of a fresh genre of character-led cookery programme, with the hosts engaging with the audience through chat to each other. In Jennifer Patterson — food writer and cook at The Spectator, who went to work on her motorbike — Pat found the ideal other half and persuaded the BBC to make a series.

They became Two Fat Ladies — a mischievous duo who brought fat into fashion without shame; demonstrating recipes, mincing meat but not words, full of sauce and spiked with wit, once quoting a far less cuddly culinary predecessor, Fanny Cradock (God!), with her advice on achieving good pork crackling: ‘Rub salt into the fat as if into the face of your worst enemy.