Television cookery and French home cooking
Fanny Cradock
1909–1994 · United Kingdom
Fanny Cradock was born Phyllis Nan Sortain Pechey in Leytonstone, London, in 1909. She began writing under the name Fanny Cradock in the 1940s, and with her husband Johnnie she built a career as a demonstrator, cookery-school teacher, and eventually a television performer.
Her programmes, above all the long-running Fanny Cradock Cooks for Christmas, brought French dishes and holiday showpieces into British homes. She was theatrical, exacting, and often outrageous, and critics found her bossy, but she was among the first to treat cooking as entertainment rather than instruction.
She wrote many books and later appeared as a forthright restaurant critic. She died in 1994.
Allan warren · CC BY-SA 3.0
Dishes
A dark, boozy steamed pudding of dried fruit, suet, and spice, made weeks ahead and flamed at the table.
Thin, lacy ginger biscuits rolled while hot around a wooden spoon and filled with whipped cream.
Eggs baked in individual dishes with cream and a little butter, a French first course Cradock made look effortless.
Hosted
A Christmas rehearsal in London · 1972 · London, England
Attended
A quiet supper with Clement Freud · 1985 · London, England