One Fat Lady

Clarissa Dickson Wright, Rebel TV Chef, Dies at 66

Clarissa Dickson Wright, who rose to middle-aged fame as the co-star and co-chef of “Two Fat Ladies,” a popular British television show known as much for the hosts’ irreverence and eccentricity as for their indulgent and sometimes confounding recipes, died on Saturday in Edinburgh. She was 66.

She had been ill for several months, according to Heather Holden-Brown and Elly James, her literary agents in London, who announced the death.

Ms. Dickson Wright grew up in an affluent family, became a lawyer at 21 and an alcoholic not long after. Sobered up, she got serious about cooking in her 40s.

She was writing a cooking column and running a store called Books for Cooks in London when a television producer recruited her to collude with another culinary rebel, Jennifer Paterson, on a cooking show unlike any other. “Two Fat Ladies” made its debut in 1996 on the BBC and was picked up in the United States the next year by the Food Network.

Each episode opened with the pair heading to a new location to cook, Ms. Paterson steering a motorcycle while Ms. Dickson Wright rode in a sidecar, sometimes beneath the carcass of an animal bound for the dinner table. They spoke approvingly of royal mistresses, less so of vegetarians. They enjoyed imitating profound flatulence.

Clarissa Dickson Wright, right, and her co-star, Jennifer Paterson, on the iconoclastic 1990s cooking show “Two Fat Ladies.” Credit Associated Press

In an era of health-conscious cooking, Ms. Dickson Wright and Ms. Paterson just said no.

On lard: “Just in case you think it’s unhealthy,” Ms. Dickson Wright said, “don’t be put off by that.”

On bacon: “I’m told that more vegetarians relapse on bacon than any other substance.”

On a lofty legume: “Always get rid of all the lentils. You would have no idea how randy it makes all the vegetarians.”

On tongue: “It’s wonderful stuff, tongue. Everybody forgets about tongue.”

On flavorful Indian tea: “Yes, I quite like a strong Indian myself now and again.”

On the proper application of butter to a cake pan: “You really want to get it well greased. Did you see ‘Last Tango in Paris’? Something like that.”

Clarissa Dickson Wright was born Clarissa Theresa Philomena Aileen Mary Josephine Agnes Elsie Trilby Louise Esmerelda Dickson Wright on June 24, 1947, in the St. John’s Wood section of London. In her 2007 memoir, “Spilling the Beans,” she recalled the inspirations for her numerous given names, including her mother’s favorite saint, Philomena, and a woman who cooked for her family, Louise. 

Perfect examples of enjoying life while you have the chance.

Crock-Pot chef fed slow-cook craze

George De Gennaro Studios/HP Books

This obituary has a phrase worthy of comparison to a good British phrase. An unexpected best-seller, "Crockery Cookery" dethroned "The Joy of Sex" as the No. 1 selling trade paperback in June of 1975, providing a clue as to which is the stronger human urge.


Mable Hoffman 1921-2010 - Crock-Pot Chef Fed Slow-Cook Craze

By STEPHEN MILLER

Hitching her wagon to the nascent slow-cooking craze, Mable Hoffman created one of the fastest-selling cookbooks.

Ms. Hoffman, who died Feb. 9 at 88, was author of "Crockery Cookery," an early entry among books of recipes for an old technique transformed.

Crock-Pots debuted in 1971 and sold in the millions, spurred in part by the increase in working women who wanted to present a fresh-cooked meal when they came home in the evening. But conventional stew recipes turned to mush or solidified because meats and vegetables acted differently when cooked for long periods at low temperatures.

"The cookbooks that came with the Crock-Pots did not work," says Howard Fisher, an editor at HP Books who hired Ms. Hoffman to provide answers.

A home economist and food stylist, Ms. Hoffman had experience developing recipes for another emerging kitchen labor-saver, the microwave oven. She was soon cooking up a storm with 20 or more slow cookers bubbling around the clock.

"There was dinner ready every night, but some of those pots you really didn't want to eat from," says Ms. Hoffman's daughter, Jan Robertson, who pitched in to help with the culinary explorations.

"Crockery Cookery" presented more than 250 recipes for solid middle-American fare, such as pot roast and "squash medley," but also more exotic fare including baked beans cassoulet and fresh pears in wine. Some critics have derided slow cookers for encouraging "dump cooking," but most contemporary reviews hailed the book for extolling inexpensive and convenient food.

An unexpected best-seller, "Crockery Cookery" dethroned "The Joy of Sex" as the No. 1 selling trade paperback in June of 1975, providing a clue as to which is the stronger human urge. More than six million copies have been sold in several editions, says Mr. Fisher.

Ms. Hoffman was born in Virginia, the daughter of a postman and his wife, a superior Southern cook. She majored in home economics at the University of Maryland. She had a stint writing marketing reports for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. She later moved to California and consulted as a recipe developer for Sunkist Growers and Hunt Foods, and as a food stylist for publications such as Better Homes and Gardens magazine.

Ms. Hoffman followed "Crockery Cookery" with a dozen more cookbooks, some elaborating on slow-cooking and others dealing with chocolate, ice cream, pasta and entertaining. Her husband, Gar Hoffman, a civilian Navy employee, was her co-author on several books, helping with research and production. The Hoffmans traveled the country doing cooking demonstrations and television appearances.

A voluble hostess who never tired of extolling the advantages of slow cooking, Ms. Hoffman liked food. A San Diego Union-Tribune interviewer who dropped by her kitchen in 1985, when Ms. Hoffman was promoting, "Make-Ahead Entertaining," noted that she served coffee with dainty napkins that said, "Skinny cooks can't be trusted."

March 5, 2010

Aleksandr Y. Bovin, 73, Who Twitted Kremlin

No, not twitter, not in 2004.

May 5, 2004
Aleksandr Y. Bovin, 73, Who Twitted Kremlin
By SETH MYDANS

MOSCOW, May 4— Aleksandr Y. Bovin, one of the most colorful and daring commentators of the late Soviet period and for more than five years Russia's ambassador to Israel, died during the night of April 27-28. He was 73. His wife said the cause of death was a long-standing vascular problem.

Fellow Soviet-era journalists described Mr. Bovin's light-footed dance with the forbidden in his widely read newspaper commentaries and his weekly television program, International Panorama.

''He had a very subtle feel for the time and was always the first one to say things you couldn't say a day ago,'' said Yevgeny Kiselyov, editor in chief of the weekly Moscow News. ''The times Bovin was forced out of International Panorama and came back again served as a kind of a political barometer for everyone back in the tumultuous 1980's.''

Few journalists had better connections. Mr. Bovin joined the mass-circulation government newspaper Izvestia in 1972 after serving as a Kremlin adviser and speechwriter for top leaders, including Leonid I. Brezhnev, who led the Communist Party. In that job as well, he is said to have stretched official limits: ''an oppositionist within the establishment,'' according to a fellow commentator at Izvestia, Vladimir Kondrashov.

Mr. Bovin was among the thinkers whom Mikhail S. Gorbachev called the ''foremen'' of perestroika, who had been formulating some of the ideas he put into practice when he became the last Soviet leader. In 1991, Mr. Gorbachev named Mr. Bovin ambassador to Israel, reopening a diplomatic relationship that had been dormant for two decades. Mr. Bovin returned in 1997 to Izvestia, which said he was survived by his wife and a daughter.

During his years on International Panorama, Mr. Bovin was perhaps the most recognizable face among Soviet newscasters, described by one colleague as ''a quirky-looking fat man with a lush, jaunty handlebar mustache and long hair over an enormous forehead, somehow akin to Balzac.''

With a relaxed, seemingly extemporaneous style, he took television viewers on what was then a heady ride into independent analysis. ''I tried to say things that were almost forbidden,'' he said once, ''to simply approach the edge.'' He courted official displeasure, and was sometimes removed temporarily from the air, for comments about subjects that included the war in the Falklands, Russia's Afghan war, and the shooting down of a Korean passenger plane in 1983.

Mr. Bovin was also well known for his love of food and drink, surrounding himself with plates of food and bottles of champagne at parties and official receptions.

His raffish trademark was his refusal to wear a necktie unless he absolutely had to, a symbol of his self-confident irreverence and also of the concessions he had to make along the way.

''There were such battles over the necktie,'' he told the newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets in one of his last interviews. ''I couldn't stand wearing them. I hate ties. Why couldn't they leave me alone? But they forced me; they even called Brezhnev to influence me. So sometimes I had to make compromises.''

Photo: Aleksandr Y. Bovin (Photo by Lisa Berg, 1990)