With a new cookbook out and another food-related tome up her sleeve, one half of Two Fat Ladies, Clarissa Dickson Wright, is happy. Not something she could always have said, writes Stephen Jewell.
From Jamie Oliver's 30-Minute Meals to Madhur Jaffrey's Curry Easy, increasing numbers of cookbooks are being aimed at busy workers seeking to make tasty fulfilling meals in a short space of time.
Now with her latest book Potty, Two Fat Ladies' Clarissa Dickson Wright has produced a diverse
selection of recipes that can be made in a single dish, cutting down on electric bills and saving on washing up. While she often makes her meals in a solitary pot, the Edinburgh-based author was initially reluctant to take on the task after being approached by her publisher.
"I was a bookseller for 20 years and all the one-pot cookbooks I've previously seen have been very disappointing," says Dickson Wright. "But then I thought 'don't be ridiculous, yours doesn't have to be disappointing.' I wanted to have fun with it, to widen the boundaries a bit and see what sort of thing I could come up with. I'm very pleased with the book, which is not something I say about all my books - although I'm not displeased with them - but instinctively I think this one has worked very well."
As the 63-year-old notes in Potty's introduction, one-pot cooking is as old as time itself and the pot concerned does not necessarily have to be a saucepan. "It could be a frying pan, a casserole dish or a pastry case," she says. "As long as it's all cooked in the one thing."
From Sri Lanka curry to oven-fried chilli chicken, the majority of Potty's recipes are easy to follow and don't require a long list of obscure, hard to find ingredients.
"I'm not a chef, I'm a cook so my recipes are not difficult," says Dickson Wright, who is not a fan of most contemporary celebrity chefs. "It has been said that what this country needs is fewer chefs and more cooks. I can remember going to a book launch in Hereford in 1989 and somebody there told me that it was the first time they had been able to buy pasta in their local shops. And that's not fresh pasta, just ordinary pasta."
She expresses disdain for the overly aggressive macho style of leading restaurateurs-turned-television personalities like Gordon Ramsay and Marco Pierre White. "There are one or two bright sparks but all most of them seem to be about is unpleasantness, swearing and producing complicated food," says Dickson Wright, who is also not fond of reality TV shows like Masterchef, which turns the delicate art of high-end cuisine into a nerve-wracking competition.
"The original Masterchef Sue Lawrence, who won the second [UK] series in 1991, is a great friend of mine and the most brilliant cook," she says. "She has said that she has spent the rest of her career trying to get away from the Masterchef label, which is exactly what it is. You never seem to hear anything of these people after the event. They say that food is their passion and that they want to cook. But if you really want to know how to cook, you go and do your apprenticeship in a kitchen. [Masterchef] is entertainment. It doesn't serve any purpose in the long run."
However, she expresses admiration for fellow food writer Nigella Lawson, whose sumptuous recipes and sly humour owe much to the acerbic wit of Two Fat Ladies. "It's like a spoof," she says. "She's very funny. It's like how it was when I was a barrister, most barristers take themselves very seriously so if you can make the jury laugh, it's your client who will get off."
Born and raised in the exclusive north London suburb of St John's Wood, Dickson Wright was originally destined for a stellar law career after becoming Britain's youngest barrister at the age of 21.
However, alcoholism proved to be her undoing and she was disbarred in 1982 for practising without chambers.
"After my mother died, I acquired a drinking club in London as part of a debt on her estate," she says. "Nobody wanted to do anything with it so I took it over. I thought I'd be one of the pub queens of London, sitting on my barstool and telling jokes while people bought me drinks."
Dickson Wright's masterstroke was to introduce an attractive lunch menu. "I've always hated things that don't work and the place was going down the tubes fast," she says. "I made friends with the bailiffs who would come around every morning. It had a tiny little kitchen and at that point in the late 70s-early 80s there was nowhere to eat in St James other than gentlemen's clubs. So I gave group membership to some nearby companies, including Collins, who were our landlords, and Christies who were across the road. We started serving food and we turned the place around within two years."
After being charged with drink driving, she started attending Alcoholics Anonymous sessions and spent several weeks in a Kent detox clinic in 1987. Following her release, the opportunity arose to run Books For Cooks on west London's fashionable Portobello Road. When the popular cafe and shop was sold in the mid-90s, Dickson Wright moved to Edinburgh, where she has lived ever since.
"I came up here to set up something with Scobie and McIntosh, the big Scottish catering company, who wanted to have some chef books," she says. "I liked it so much that I remember coming back up from London on the train, passing all the sea as you do on the East Coast line and thinking 'how lovely it is to be home. So if it's home, I might as well stay.' I've been here 17 years now. It's somewhat inconvenient because all my work is in England and it's quite a long way north. But I love it here."
Dickson Wright first met former Spectator writer Jennifer Paterson at a party in Tuscany in 1992. "We had a cook's chat for about 10 minutes and I thought, what a nice woman," she told The Independent in 1997.
It was BBC producer Patricia Llewellyn who suggested that the pair should team up together as Two Fat Ladies. Renowned for their politically incorrect views and vegetarian-baiting opinions, the series ran for four seasons until Paterson's death from lung cancer in 1999.
"It was such a successful programme and it made my name," says Dickson Wright, who has since penned 16 books and appeared in numerous television shows.
"It continues to show as it's repeated all the time. It would be nice to get paid for that but one doesn't. I then went on to do three series of Clarissa and the Countryman, which was all about the countryside, food production and field sports and it also did incredibly well."
Paterson and Dickson Wright were frequently criticised for their rich, creamy fare and their liberal usage of lard, dripping and other fatty products. In contrast, many of Potty's recipes are almost indecently healthy and there is even a vegetarian section.
"There's an image that people have of me from Two Fat Ladies, which is that I must be a glutton," she says. "But the weight came about as a result of my drinking. I do eat well and it showed when I recently applied to renew my shotgun certificate. As part of the process, the police rang up my doctor, who told them 'we haven't seen her for three years.' I go down and get my tablets and that's it."
Two Fat Ladies also frequently revived recipes from years gone by, a theme that Dickson Wright returns to in her next book A History of English Food.
"I get very cross when people who write about it assume that our ancestors who lived in beautiful buildings ate worse than we do," she says. "My cleaner said to me the other day that life would be so much easier if we had never learnt to read. The house is full of books and because I've been writing this book, they've all been off the shelves and in piles around the house, so she has had to work around them."
Dickson Wright is fascinated by diets from down the ages.
"When the first English language cookbook the Forme of Cury came out, the authors described themselves as cooks not chefs," she says, referring to the 14th century collection, which is credited to the chief master-cooks of King Richard II.
"The first celebrity chef as such was a man called Robert May, who was alive during the English Civil War in the 16th century."
Some of Potty's recipes also date back several centuries including an 18th century orange tart, which was a favourite of George III's wife Charlotte of Mecklenburg.
"I work very hard on not doing what everybody else is doing," says Dickson Wright, who claims that A History of English Food has been a lifetime in the making while the text has taken four years to complete.
"I've tried to look at not just food but food production in the various periods," she says. "I start with Eleanor of Aquitaine because she went on the Second Crusade with her ladies. She probably financed it because she was the wealthiest woman in Europe at the time, as she was married to the King of France.
"She was responsible for bringing back all those spices and sugar and also established the Aquitaine Bordeaux and started the wine trade between France and England. The publishers have been very pleased with what they've seen so far and I'm very excited. In the meantime, Potty seems to be selling well."
Life is good, admits Dickson Wright. There have been many times when she couldn't say that. But with her 64th birthday next month and new projects in the mix, the cook, author and TV star is enjoying herself.
Potty (Hodder Stoughton, $59.99) is out now.
