Let's be Fanny Cradock's cooking show

I am, com-dit-on, les over-pronounced Fraaaaaaaaaaawnch phrases.

I am today's lipline.

I am a programme about fish.

I'm a dumb cunt who can't cook.

I am green mashed potatoes.

[R4] But who's the girl?

I am the UK Gas Council. Nothing screams "fine cuisine" quite like my name.

I am pipe cleaners stuck into hard boiled eggs to make them into charming little swans with mayonnaise wings.

I am Bubbles DeVere, having the oddest dream.

I am a CAPON for YOU to LOOK at.

I am the glacé ginger, crisply pronounced as "glassy ginger," joining glacé cherries and some sort of glacé green things in a Christmas pastry.

[quote]I'm a dumb cunt who can't cook.

Welcome to the club.

Actually, the 1960s films aren't bad. She is certainly less of a drag queen gorgon.

Didn't she have an old Colonel Blimp of a husband who used to turn up on the show from time to time?

Johnny

"The marriage was in fact bigamous as Fanny was still married to her second husband, and fraudulent as she lied about her age on the marriage certificate."

I'm Johnny's signet ring. Or, at least, I was.

I am Julia Child, throwing shade from Boston, with a cutting remark about the vulgarity of people who dye food blue.

I am the abandoned bus station broom closet that served as the set.

I'm Arthur Fleck, horrified yet inspired.

I'm Sarah, the assistant, who still has major PTSD all these years later.

I'm "bramble". I am like a combination of garlic and the Blessed True Cross where kabuki demon TV cooks are concerned.

I'm Johnny's monocle.

The horror I have seen.

The horror.

I'm Fanny's fanny.

Also known as "the horror".

See above.

I'm Fanny's rare excursion into mod....

I'm Esscoff-ee-ay.

I don't know her.

I'm very clean hands, darling, just washed, just washed.

I'm a little almond pastry topped with green grape ice cream and crowned with spun sugar.

I'm a bowl of rejected coffee pudding. I sit, unused, in the fridge and watch as Fanny's career crashes and burns before me.

I am....SMILING.

I'm a television viewer in Baltimore, wondering if Fanny wears a little too much make-up.

Discovering a thread here is what caused me to fall in love with Datalounge.

I read that thread too. I howled with laughter. And maybe terror, too.

Rather grimy, like 70s England.

I'm the plastic bucket for the washing up.

I'm unbelievable levels of tacky.

I have never heard of her. Cool.

She is a DL Goddess, r 38

Scrummy!

The Big Time...

I'm the "small pastry boat filled with fruit sorbet and covered with spun sugar, decorated with an orange slice and a cocktail stick through a cherry to give the dish the look of a small boat," her suggestion of which spelled Fanny's doom.

Love this thread. I have to watch the videos before I can participate. Fun.

I'm butter flowers. I am "a cube of dry bread or cake covered with butter that has been colored with a harmless vegetable dye". I can be seen in the above short film, where I resemble a Cheeze Whiz hand grenade.

I am the growing realization that British people who refer to Julia Child as "the American Fanny Cradock" have no fucking clue who Julia Child was.

Let's compare to a fresher, younger face....

R46 I noticed she said, ‘onions in the Lauder (sp)’. It’s around :13 mark. I have never heard that term. Does it mean pantry?

The word is "larder" and can indeed mean a small room used as a pantry. In the US it is most often a large cupboard used for storing spices, flour and expensive ingredients that require cool, dry storage.

Ultra-glamorous at Royal Albert Hall!

R48 thanks.

Originally the larder was where potted and cured fats were hung or stored - bacon rashers, lardons, jugged dishes, etc. - thus "LARDer". A further distinction is that a pantry can be used for the preparation of food and sometimes has a sink or space to store pots and dishes where the larder is food only.

R51 thank you.

I'm the back of that tacky, trashy woman's hand. I am used for nose wiping (while cooking).

From "Fabulous Fanny Cradock: TV's Outrageous Queen of Cuisine" by Clive Ellis:

[quote]She couldn't always avoid reverting to type: Nationwide viewers in 1971 were shocked to see Fanny wipe her nose with the back of her hand and then carry on cooking.

Ewwwww!

I'm the rest of that woman's hand. I am evidently used to jerk off random tricks for rent money before she hit the Big coffee-pudding-hating Time.

I'm the bleak, bare walls of the set constructed by an impoverished 1970s BBC. But I set the trend for chic minimalist kitchens 30 years later.

I'm flat lighting and shit sound. I ensure that she looks like a boiled vampire about to be mown down by the Empire Builder.

I am the fact that Fanny thought she was in direct communication with past incarnations of herself who could actually cook.

I am Brenda Dickson. This chick is fucking ridiculous.

I am Hell on wheels.

I’m am all the rotten onions in the larder. The camera does not show all the food waste.

I am the blank, unholy irony of the fact that Fanny could not cook.

I'm the fact that you can cut oranges into little fucked-up nicknacks. This was evidently a big deal for some reason.

Do you eat them? Do you put out your cigarette in them? Do you slip them into your bra and dance the gerund?

I'm Hi Pete. Have you met my identical twin, Get Out of My Way Cunt.

What R63? Have you been at the sherry again?

I've just realized that Fanny Craddock's horrible recipes have the same problem as her more recent successor in camp cooking, Sandra Lee:

All either cares about is how the food looks, neither gives a rat's ass how anything tastes! That's why they love bizarre presentations and combining ingredients that nobody else would ever allow in the same room.

I suspect both get/got all their calories from alcohol.

I hate to admit it, but I think even Sandra Lee's food looks better than Fanny's. Sandra Lee is the epitome of the Basic Bitch, but at least her food is generally edible-looking and her more outre ideas - lemon sorbet served in a lemon shell - are straight out of the 1920s fake-book. Fanny serves up the kind of shit you'd think H. P. Lovecraft would have one of his scholarly antiheroes trip over in an adjacent dimension.

I'm harmless vegetable dyes. I make sure that when you shit this stuff out, it's just as pretty as when you shoveled it in!

I am shrimp cocktail. I am known as prawn cocktail in the UK, where people think Fanny invented me. She didn't. She just fucked up the sauce by adding mayonnaise.

From the BBC... FEAR OF FANNY.

Fanny, like Kellyanne, looks like she needs a good bath.

More like sandblasting, r70.

I am "Madame's Tonic."

I am Royal Mincemeat.....

We're the ghosts of Peter Vernon Evans and Christopher Chapman. We were both abandoned by Mummy. We used to curse the old gorgon whenever she appeared on telly.

I'm Fanny's glamorous cigarette holder.

I went and watched the episode of The Way We Cooked that covered her, and I feel the males who dismissed her, did so out of misogyny. Most of her recipes actually taste good, I've made some of them. And, I wish people would pay more attention to making food look good, again. Her food should work well in the Instagram age.

Quel glamour!!!

Was she a lesbian? This thread made me discover her and I LOVE HER!! I'm getting a really loud ping out of her, and not because she looked like a tranny. Any les tea ladies?

[quote]Her food should work well in the Instagram age.

So instagrammable.

[quote]I wish people would pay more attention to making food look good, again.

Maybe in a hilarious retro sense?

Instagram needs more of us.

We're the lemon sows at the trough.

Is that slop in their trough?

I am Springtime Abortion Vert Caca d’Oie, avec Petits Pois.

Oh god, r84, I just ate!

I'm Hyacinth Bucket. Would any of Fanny's recipes be suitable for one of my candlelight suppers?

Try this DL fave, Hyacinth. A little dribble of custard goes well.

Wearing her wrap off the shoulder in an insouciant manner....

[R88] Is that Johnny with her? They don't look half bad there. It was the grim death-mash Gotham City Geshia period that really made the flesh crawl.

Her love of boiled skin-on chicken with green-dyed mashed potatoes piped onto it in fanciful patterns really is bizarre. Only in England.

[R76] The thing is that she didn't make food look good. She made food look like deranged Victorian mantle ornaments decorating the fireplace in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Her harmless vegetable dies transformed everything into a crap ribbon candy version of itself.

Julia Child's food looks good.

R88/R89 That's French chef Raymond. Fanny looks like a thin, cheap version of the Queen Mother.

Having just spent this whole thread ragging on her and laughing my head off, I confess the "Fear of Fanny" show seemed shallow and somewhat sadistic. From what I've heard she was saved from possible suicide by a friend and did rally somewhat in her few final years. She was a dreadful person in many regards but had an unhappy final act.

R93 She made lots of money ... and lots of people unhappy including herself.

She seemed to be broke at the end, which I suppose happens.

The story about her refusing to see Johnny on his deathbed and then doing so only to make off with his ring sounds horrid, but might be tied into an abandonment phobia, which she certainly may have suffered from. People like that abandon others first out of the fear of losing them otherwise. And I don't think I'd leave an item of jewelry with my spouse in the hospital.

Anyway, I howl with glee at her culinary/fashion/celebrity-television disasters either way.

We're the bottles Fanny drained before breakfast.

Fanny revenge-fucked Sarah the Assistant after every show.

The Duchess of Windsor had a face like the back of the bus; Cradock looked worse. Cradock: just vulgar and ugly without enough charm, jewels, clothes to make up for it. Cradock's a bit like a female version of Kenny Williams with her voice and affectations.

I cancelled Fanny before cancel culture existed.

Th Duchess of Windsor was a truly appalling person. but even many of her detractors said that she had gracious manners, a certain sexual charisma and a disarming yet commanding presence. Plus she had taste - not mine or anything that necessarily translates outside of a certain period, but more than enough to make her a fashion icon of a sort, albeit a glacial one.

Poor Fanny was the original mutton-dressed-as-lamb, a thoroughly British low class attempt at high class that was only slightly less convincing than the thought of cobalt-blue boiled eggs.

I thought she was more middle class putting on the act of upper.

I am Johnnie's legacy...

[quote]May all your donuts look just like Fanny’s.

She is completely gross: unwashed and powdered.

[R83] I think it's spinach with cashew chunks.

R91 I love all those dyes. Green mashed potatoes, yes please. I would love to see a Christmas spread like this.

I'm the sudden dash into existentialism in the mincemeat episode.

"Because there's nothing more disappointing than coming to the edge and finding there's nothing there, is there?"

How very true.

It's the cooking show of a disgusting old bag.

[R107] Fuck me, here I was thinking it was a shadow-puppet performance of the Tale of Genji.

R108 Most here don't understand what language you speak Lemini.

Fanny....

She means business...

I win!

R110 Awful. Who was paid to take that pic?

Who was paid to pose her?

I don't think this has been mentioned, but she may have been a joke in the kitchen, but she was apparently quite skilled in the bedroom. She and Johnny were notorious for having sex parties before they were something talked about in public. In certain circles, she was quite well known for her talents. (With a face like that, she would have to have some pretty impressive talents.)

Adding some veracity to the joke from Viz: "I had just purchased an Eton Mess - a traditional dessert of meringue, fruit and cream - but nodded off on the bus ride home. While sleeping I had a dream in which Fanny Cradock turned into King Kong and chased me down the street! Upon awaking, I discovered that someone had stolen the dessert. Yes - I had a dream about a big, hairy fanny and when I woke up I'd lost my mess."

Send in the clowns.....

I'm Kellyanne Conway, overjoyed to find inspiration for my next new look.

I'm her concern, which seems sincere (and understandable given her background), for the average housewife. I come through in her program when I say things like 'it's only once a year' (which also suggests some concern for their inner life too).

[R115] I wonder if she gave the same sort of instructions at her orgies?

"In order to double penetrate a lady in a hot tub, one must first rub the two male members with a sufficient amount of unguent - to which I have added a harmless vegetable dye...yes, yes, darling, quite all right, just washed my hands - there! Now Sara will pop them both in, there's a love. The French term for this is frottage a la sewer aux deux. You could kill pigs with it."

I'm 'her girl, Sarah' and the glare off-camera if Sarah is even a microsecond too slow at walking into shot that follows.

Counter sitting......

I am Sara's wardrobe, which consists of potato sacks to which harmless vegetable dyes have been applied.

I'm the other shows -- the non-Christmas ones -- not on YouTube. I wish the BBC would do something with them. I saw a clip of one in that documentary and in it she actually had two helpers, both of them and Fanny were exasperated running out the kitchen.

I'm the fact that she looked relatively normal and sane when she started out.

I'm the difficulty I imagine episodic TV posed -- given that her 'lips' and 'eyebrows' seemed like they could be anywhere on any given day. How did they match up episode to episode?

R122 She's all dressed up with a chic white telephone in a ... peasant kitchen - what's going on? Interesting snap.

I'm the slight shakiness in her hands and voice, and her surprising confession that she's terrified for the minute on camera.

I'm the plastic bowls. Did she use me just on camera because they made less noise?

I'm the new Drag Race UK, and the opportunity it presents to have a Fanny themed challenge.

I'm the decade I'm going to bet she scraped off her age.

I'm drag queen doing a later-life Marlene Dietrich that she resembles.

FYI R131: "For this marriage [to Johnny in 1977] ... the then 68-year-old recorded her age as 55 on the marriage certificate, even though she had a son who was nearly fifty."

R133 Is that so wrong?

I am the facial features she scraped off with that decade, [R131].

[R128] Yeah, that was surprising and made me feel sympathy for her.

Green cuisine, so good for the planet darling, it's all in the booklet so I won't explain now.

[R79] I am the image in R79. I appear to be a waffle sandwich full of shat-out birdseed.

I can't be that, can I?

You’re a mincemeat galette, r138. You’re circles of “paste” (although she later admits that you’re just puff pastry) from the booklet, split violently and then stuffed with the dregs after the pies have all been made. You get some harmlessly vegetable-dyed marzipan decorations to make you feel less like garbage. Don’t you remember?

It...it's...it's coming back to me, [R139]. There were lights - bright lights - and people hovering over me. There was a pair of hands - just washed - and someone named "Sarah" popping me into something. And then it was cold...so cold. And there came the realization that the pair of hands had, in fact, not been washed for a rather long time.

Then everything went black...

In these uncertain times, you can always rely on Fanny.