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Laurie Graham on Fanny Cradock, Coping with Christmas - Slightly Foxed Issue 64 - (© Getty Images)

The Fanny Factor

It was some time in the mid-Sixties when things began to change in my mother’s kitchen. First we got a fridge. Farewell mesh-doored meat safe, farewell flecks of curdled milk floating in your tea. The second thing that happened was Fanny Cradock. This was a brief love affair – my mum later transferred her culinary trust and affection to Delia Smith – but while it lasted its impact was astonishing. Expenditure on piping bags, time spent tracking down a butter curler and a grapefruit knife, foods coloured contrary to the laws of Nature: the responsibility for this and much more could be laid at Fanny’s door.

My mother was a typical post-war housewife, a thrifty provider of good, plain cooking. It’s hard now to picture a time when every pantry contained packets of blancmange powder, when olive oil was something you bought at the chemist for use in cases of earache. But so it was. Our kitchen bible was a 1937 edition of Cookery Illustrated & Household Management. I have it still. It has recipes for Boiled Smelts and Cabinet Pudding, hints on the best season to buy capercailzie (September to November) and not one but two home remedies for lumbago.

In the Beginning was Philip Harben, but we didn’t know about him. When Fanny burst upon the scene we had only just acquired a television, so my mum was an impressionable cookery-show virgin and Fanny Cradock swept her off her feet. Not only did Fanny cook wearing lipstick and no apron, she was also a seductive blend of straight talking and aspirational glamour. Old enough to have weathered wartime rationing and prescient enough to recognize that the British public was ready for something new: tiddled-up food.

Where did she spring from, this born-for-television phenomenon? She’d been a travel journalist and a restaurant reviewer, presumably before her eyebrows and oak-smoked voice made her instantly recognizable. She was also a prodigious sausage machine of novels and, somewhat surprisi

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It was some time in the mid-Sixties when things began to change in my mother’s kitchen. First we got a fridge. Farewell mesh-doored meat safe, farewell flecks of curdled milk floating in your tea. The second thing that happened was Fanny Cradock. This was a brief love affair – my mum later transferred her culinary trust and affection to Delia Smith – but while it lasted its impact was astonishing. Expenditure on piping bags, time spent tracking down a butter curler and a grapefruit knife, foods coloured contrary to the laws of Nature: the responsibility for this and much more could be laid at Fanny’s door.

My mother was a typical post-war housewife, a thrifty provider of good, plain cooking. It’s hard now to picture a time when every pantry contained packets of blancmange powder, when olive oil was something you bought at the chemist for use in cases of earache. But so it was. Our kitchen bible was a 1937 edition of Cookery Illustrated & Household Management. I have it still. It has recipes for Boiled Smelts and Cabinet Pudding, hints on the best season to buy capercailzie (September to November) and not one but two home remedies for lumbago. In the Beginning was Philip Harben, but we didn’t know about him. When Fanny burst upon the scene we had only just acquired a television, so my mum was an impressionable cookery-show virgin and Fanny Cradock swept her off her feet. Not only did Fanny cook wearing lipstick and no apron, she was also a seductive blend of straight talking and aspirational glamour. Old enough to have weathered wartime rationing and prescient enough to recognize that the British public was ready for something new: tiddled-up food. Where did she spring from, this born-for-television phenomenon? She’d been a travel journalist and a restaurant reviewer, presumably before her eyebrows and oak-smoked voice made her instantly recognizable. She was also a prodigious sausage machine of novels and, somewhat surprisingly, of children’s books. Fanny’s novels are what you might expect. The language tends towards the over-wrought and the groundwork was done by her research elves, possibly cousins of the kitchen elves who were always on hand to spirit away messy saucepans. If you’d like a taster of Fanny’s novels, I recommend The Lormes of Castle Rising (1975), the first of her grand country-house sagas, larded with lashings of below-stairs goings-on – all very Downton. And strangely, for a work of fiction, it has explanatory footnotes, in case you don’t know your Rognons en Brochette from your Mousseline de Soie. It’s as though Fanny, as a novelist, wasn’t sure whether she wanted to be upstairs huntin’, shootin’ and eatin’, or in the kitchen directing ops. For me, one of her most revealing television cookery tips was, ‘Now, have this rushed through for service while it’s piping hot.’ It could be a line from one of her novels. Where did it all come from? There was no Mrs Patmore in Fanny’s childhood. Her parents flitted from hotel to hotel, one step ahead of debt collectors. But somewhere along the line she caught Escoffier Fever and with it that cruise-ship buffet tendency to over-adorn. Her life story – her own version of which she gave in Something’s Burning (1960) – was as bizarre as her appearance. She had four husbands, sometimes two at a time. To be a bigamist once may be regarded as a misfortune. To do it twice looks like carelessness. Fanny was a serial bolter and her children, whom she dumped on their grandparents, grew up not knowing her. When they met her, later in life, they didn’t like her and the feeling was entirely mutual. In Fanny’s heyday it was quite common for women to lie about their age, but she did it with the same bravura she brought to whipped cream piping. When she eventually married her fourth husband, Major Johnnie Cradock, she lopped off a jaw-dropping fifteen years for the official record, thereby making medical history by having given birth at the age of 5. Many of Fanny’s books and leaflets have disappeared from circulation, among them, to my very great regret, Coping with Christmas (1968). If you have a copy, treasure it. ‘Coping’, I think you’ll agree, is not a neutral word. It suggests a hill to be climbed, a burden to be borne. Well, gimlet-eyed Fanny told it the way she saw it. ‘Let us not delude ourselves,’ she wrote, ‘Christmas dinner is a monstrous intake of the world’s most indigestible food.’ The words ‘sheer hell’ and ‘plague of relations’ also crop up. Although not round at Fanny’s, one imagines. She’d fallen out with all of them. You could be forgiven for thinking that Fanny’s heart just wasn’t in the Christmas project, but she was a woman with a mission: to give her readers a blueprint for Christmas which left absolutely no eventuality uncatered for. I don’t know about you, but fuse wire has never been on my Countdown to Christmas list, and neither has ‘make dental appointment’. What a very far cry from Mary, who set out from Nazareth with nary a provision for the possibility that the days might be accomplished that she should be delivered. But back to Fanny. ‘Ideally,’ she wrote, ‘your preparations begin in July, with preserved raspberries.’ Not quite true. Elsewhere she exhorts us to make our puddings in January and then take them out of storage once a month to inspect them for mildew and give them a quick basting with brandy. My mum followed this palaver to the letter and her puddings were superb. Of the green brandy butter fashioned into a Christmas tree, perhaps the least said the better, but having invested in a butter curler I suppose she felt under pressure to use it. Fanny also advised on how to deal with unexpected guests. In our house we did it by turning off the lights and sitting very still until they stopped knocking at the door and went away. Fanny, though, never missed an opportunity to demonstrate how completely sorted she was. Had we wished to emulate her we’d have made sure always to have a spare Swiss roll panel on standby for an impromptu Bûche de Noël. It might be one you’d made earlier, or one you whipped up effortlessly while your other half plied the unexpected guests with sherry. Either option invites the question, why bother? Rolling up a Swiss roll without it cracking is such a test of nerves. Personally, I’d have thought a crack would lend a realistic touch, especially if you follow Fanny’s instructions to slather the log in mocha buttercream and then rough it up bark-like with a cocktail stick. Besides, what kind of ungrateful chancers would quibble at a cracked Bûche? As they achieved fame and fortune Fanny and Johnnie became quite grand. They got a Bentley and a place on the Côte d’Azur. Whether they awarded themselves a family crest, I don’t know, but had they done so, a very fitting motto would have been ‘Garnish and Present’. Fanny could leave no lily ungilded and this tendency, picked up by my mum, was the cause of ructions between my usually devoted parents. My dad was a house painter. His working days were spent on building sites where men were men and their lunchtime grub was a sort of urban ploughman’s: big sandwiches (crusts on) and perhaps a wedge of pork pie or fruit cake. Definitely not a pastry barquette filled with cream cheese and chopped celery and steered with a Twiglet rudder. Burly bricklayers and plumbers gathered around to witness my dad’s unmanning. The verdict was that my mother had developed notions. At home that evening, words were exchanged. Then the United Nations were brought in and a compromise was reached. My mother was free to go Full Fanny in the privacy of her own home, but there was to be no more tiddling with Dad’s lunchbox. A signature Fanny touch was to make the edible look like the inedible. I’ll let a veil fall over her Banana Candle, but I must mention her choux pastry swans and chestnut stuffing ducks swimming on a pond of green aspic. Even honest dishes like mashed potato got the treatment, dyed green and piped into Duchesse swirls. Fanny was a one-woman lobbyist for the glacé cherry and candied angelica industries. How have they fared since her demise, I wonder? Perhaps Bake Off has given them a fresh boost. Mincemeat, homemade of course, was also a big item with Fanny. She was the touchpaper that ignited a mince pie revolution in our house. Normally the high priestess of fiddle and faff, she ordained that individual pies were a nuisance to make and a disappointment to eat: too much pastry, too little filling. The answer was a family-size pie, to be served in slices, and so it was in our house, ever after. Her big pie had merit. If only one could say the same for her Mincemeat Omelette. Don’t. Just . . . don’t. But back to those Christmas preparations you should have made in the summer. Peach jam for the Boxing Day trifle? Tsk, tsk. What about new potatoes? Fanny’s method was to take one of those deep merchant’s biscuit tins and store freshly lifted baby potatoes between layers of sawdust. I think you then buried the tin in the garden until Christmas Eve. I’m sure it was all made clear in the booklet. But Fanny, isn’t the joy of new potatoes that they mean summer has arrived? And doesn’t everyone want crunchy roast potatoes on Christmas Day? Christmas Cradock-style was much photographed, probably in August, given magazine production schedules. The groaning board, the swags and garlands and royal-icing penguins, Fanny with a hair ribbon, Johnnie with his monocle. What were they really like after the curtain came down? Did they ever sit around in their jarmies, eating crisps? And what became of them when the TV circus moved on and their moment of celebrity passed? They had no family. Johnnie had abandoned his own children when he met Fanny, and Fanny’s two sons had long since votedwith their feet. So there they were, the henpecked old buffer and the lemon-lipped termagant, saddled with each other for the duration. It wasn’t a happy ending. Fanny didn’t ‘do’ illness. She abandoned Johnnie as he lay dying and after his death she lived alone, descending into squalor and battiness until a few remaining friends rescued her. Will the wheel of foodie fashion ever turn back to doing things Fanny-style? It’s hard to imagine and yet she still has a following. Undecided how to stuff your turkey? Anxious lest your petits fours emerge from the oven blighted with inner goo? Get yourself over to YouTube where dear departed Fanny still has thousands of viewers. Piping bags at the ready!

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 64 © Laurie Graham 2019


About the contributor

Laurie Graham is the author of the often mis-shelved novel Perfect Meringues and has form as the inserter of dodgy recipes in her novels, The Future Home-makers of America and The Early Birds. She does not own a butter curler.

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