The Greasy Spoon | Food & Culture

Food in the Sixties: The Enigma of Mr and Mrs Fanny Cradock

 

Here’s a piece I originally wrote for The Dabbler, but I don’t think it appeared on The Greasy Spoon. Subscribers may have to log directly onto The Greasy Spoon website to view the videos: 

 
There was so much to admire about Fanny Cradock. And then it all went wrong, horribly wrong...

 

I can’t quite make up my mind about Fanny Cradock. I’m on the fence about this one. There are many things to admire: the innovative cookery programmes, the slick, ball-gowned cookery demonstrations presented to packed audiences at the Albert Hall (ground-breaking stuff at the time), her grasp of the complexities of French gastronomy- oh she knew her stuff all right. Utterly professional, in those scary days of one-take television she could talk directly to the camera in a continuous stream without fluffing her lines, an extraordinary task for a cookery presenter. And she was one of the very first.

And then in the latter days, it all went wrong. Very wrong. The world moved on, leaving Fanny behind. I’m watching an old YouTube clip as I type. Fanny lampooning dear old A J P Taylor on the Parkinson show; pancaked make-up, grimacing Dan Leno eyebrows, all the glamour and snobbery of caustic coffee mornings and gin-sodden bridge parties at The Club. Strange. Aggressive. An excruciating performance:

  

 

Fanny on Parkinson: An excruciating performance...

 

But that may be part of the fascination. In those days, the servant-less middle classes aspired to sophisticated gluttony- to black-tie dinner parties held in honour of The Boss, graced by the food of Escoffier, as re-packaged and regurgitated by the Cradocks in their numerous books. Today, aspiration is dead, unless you count the current vogue for both the manners and diet of the Mediterranean peasantry. Fanny would flounder in the brave new world of dancing Hairy Bikers and guitar strumming, long-haired River Cottagers. Or would she have done battle?

 

 Johnnie Cradock, Major of Artillery...

 

Johnnie strikes me as an enigma. He left his wife and four children to shack up with Fanny, and if you believe The Independent, apparently never saw them again. Fanny was the star, Johnnie the claret quaffing, henpecked stooge. Does he not seem like a minor character from a Dornford Yates thriller or one of those badged blazer-wearing characters propping up the bar at the local Rotary Club? Patrick Hamilton or Murder at the Vicarage? An Old Harrovian and Major of Artillery- the Cradocks liked to remind you of both facts, often. Funny that. But then ‘bi-lingual’ Fanny was supposed to have been born in the Channel Islands, wasn’t she? When, in truth, her birth was formally registered in West Ham.

There’s a blurry black and white photograph of the couple: Fanny’s in an early 70s Liz Taylor trouser suit, (slightly plump, helmet hair); Johnnie’s sporting a monocle and a Conan Doyle tweed cape. Slightly shell-shocked. Unaware of his predicament. Planet Nine.

I’ve got some inside info. My mother once spent a day with the Cradocks. Back in 1967, my mother wrote to Bon Viveur declaring (their words) her ‘ever-lasting gratitude to The Daily Telegraph and Bon Viveur if they could teach her how to bake cakes’.  She won the competition but was forced to make bread instead- which, as a Cordon Bleu graduate,  she knew how to do perfectly well as it was. The event took place at the Cradock’s Georgian dower house, near Watford. Johnnie – I quote- was a ‘sweet old boy’, but the silly sausage forgot to turn on the oven and Fanny gave it to him: all two barrels of her scorn. It makes you wonder if this was all part of the act. Or was this the reality behind their marriage? But then, they weren’t actually married, were they?

I turned to Time to Remember, a year in the life of- a monthly account of their Continental excursions. There’s a bizarre moment when Johnnie, at the wheel of  “the Duchess” (their Bentley Flying Spur) is attacked by a huge flock of enraged owls. It’s also a catalogue of outrageous name-dropping:

“We brooded over what to give to Somerset Maugham when he came to luncheon…we unearth a dinner we gave for Mrs Douglas Fairbanks…a dish of very fine asparagus set Nubar Gulbenkian in a wilful humour, debating the perils of striving for a place in heaven….”

And in a later television interview, Fanny lets slip:

“Mr Heath has a very discriminating palate…”

 

 

"Would you like to impress that Mrs Jones next door?” 

 

Despite all this- or again, because of it, Britain has to be a better place for the Cradocks. Anyone who reveals the Mirabelle’s over-complicated recipe for a bog-standard Irish Stew has to be a good egg. In Fanny Cradock Invites you to a Wine and Cheese Party, the camera lingers on the Cradock’s West Highland Terrier, Mademoiselle Lolita Saltena, lolling by their front door. As Fanny herself said (of her dog): ‘Not quite a lady, but we adore her.'

 

Gangster Chic & The Chicago Pizza Pie Factory

 

 

Faye Dunaway as Bonnie Parker (1967)

 

When was the first time you tasted the savoury delights of a pizza? If you’re under forty, this will probably seem like a strange question. It’s hard to get your head round now, but back in the 70s, pizza was an alien interloper in the land of Cap’n Birds Eye, frozen beef burgers, dehydrated Vesta Curry, Spangles, Angel Delight, soupy Brussels spouts and assassinated mutton.

I remember saving up to take a girlfriend to The Chicago Pizza Pie Factory. It must have been in 1981 or thereabouts, stylistically the fag end of the 70s. And like Joe Allen’s, I seem to remember that No. 17, Hanover Square, was hard to find: a hole situated in a dark corner the other side of Vogue House, iron steps leading down to a basement in the speakeasy manner, neon lights, soda-fountain graphics, exposed brickwork, a cocktail bar, brash American waitresses (the real thing, presumably imported en masse from a Chicago diner?), a television screen broadcasting recorded videos of American Football, background chatter courtesy of Chicago’s WFYR radio. And you could pay in dollars; at that time a genuine culture shock, especially when a waitress thrust a ghastly doggy bag in my hand and insisted that we took it away on pain of death.

The Chicago Pizza Pie Factory (“Purveyors of Chicago Pizza to London and the World...”) was the brainchild of Bob Payton, an Anglophile American entrepreneur who- in an inspired eureka moment- cooked up the concept of selling deep pan pizza to the impoverished Brits. The first pie factory was installed in Crown Passage, St James’s, a rancid Dickensian alleyway running between Christie’s and Pall Mall.

As you will remember, deep pan pizza is more like a pie or a quiche: the thick doughy crust is cooked in a special oiled pan, covered in grated mozzarella, filled with toppings such as pepperoni, mushrooms and onions, and then filled in with a thick blended tomato sauce. According to Wikipedia:

"it is often reported that Chicago-style deep-dish pizza was invented at Pizzeria Uno in Chicago, in 1943,by Uno’s founder Ike Sewell, a former University of Texas football star. However, a 1956 article from the Chicago Daily News asserts that Uno’s original pizza chef Rudy Malnati developed the recipe...”

 

A dream-like 1930’s Chicago as re-imagined in The Sting (1973): beautiful set design

 

The Sting again...(1973) 

 

With hindsight, the look of the pie factory was very much a product of the late 1970s: Gangster Chic. There’s a convincing theory that middle-aged marketing types become obsessed with the time as it existed just before they were born, which explains why the American Depression, Chicago Gangsters, Fedoras, Soda Fountains, Art Deco, Cloche Hats, Kipper Ties, Tiffany Lamps (and Chicago Deep Pan Pizza) spawned Ralph Lauren, Jack Clayton’s The Great Gatsby, Biba, The Sting (wonderfully evocative and elegant set design), Bonnie & Clyde, Strikes 1926, Soda Stream and Bugsy Malone; an appealing fashion that began in the 1960s and lasted until the late 70s, and, as with the last gasp of the wonder that was Disco, lingered on until the very early 1980s.

 

Stephanie Farrow, Mia’s little sister and the face of Biba

 

For my father’s 40th birthday party, my mother bought a vast purple feather boa from Biba in High Street, Kensington- like a 20s courtesan, although I doubt if she saw it quite like that. And then some genius had the bright idea to repackage Soda Stream with the hint of a 20s soda fountain: Coca-Cola influenced graphics and little glass bottles with impressed swirls, to which your kiddywinks could add brightly coloured cordials, which, ignoring the goody-goody instructions, you fizzed up by pressing a little button two hundred times, not unlike Gatsby’s butler and the machine that extracted the juice of two hundred oranges in half an hour.

 

Fat Sam’s Grand Slam: Alan Parker’s Bugsy Malone (1976) 

 

Alas, the Chicago Pizza Pie Factory is no more, and I can’t remember the last time I ordered a Chicago style deep pan pizza on these shores. 

 

Pinstripe suits and a Yellow Rolls Royce: Ralph Lauren’s take on The Great Gatsby (1974)