User:SchroCat/Fanny

Phyllis Nan Sortain "Primrose" Pechey (26 February 1909 – 27 December 1994), better known as Fanny Cradock, was an English restaurant critic, television cook and writer frequently appearing on television, at cookery demonstrations and in print with Major Johnnie Cradock who played the part of a slightly bumbling hen-pecked husband.

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Early life
Cradock was born Phyllis Nan Sortain Pechey on 26 February 1909 at Apthorp, Fairlop Road, Leytonstone, Essex, her maternal grandparents' house. Her mother was Bijou Sortain,  Hancock; her father was the novelist and lyricist Archibald Thomas Pechey. Cradock's parents were married eight months before her birth; he was 32; she was around 18, although in her autobiography, Cradock writes that her mother was 16. In 1911 Cradock's brother, Charles Pechey was born. During her younger years, Cradock was known by all as "Phyl"; when older and known to the public as Fanny Cradock, "Phyl" was the name she would ask close friends to call her.

Cradock's early life is unknown. Paul Levy, writing Cradock's biography for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, reports that she said her father was an inveterate gambler who lost the family's money in the casinos of the South of France, where they would spend the winters. While he was at the gambling tables, Cradock's mother would be courted by admirers, and Cradock would be given a bribe to ensure she left the couple in peace. She would visit the chef in the kitchen to watch him work instead. An alternative story is that Bijou—unable to cope with parenthood—gave her mother Cradock as a present on the child's first birthday. Her grandmother is then said to have raised Cradock until she was ten, at which point she was sent to boarding school. The latter history is the one Cradock relates in her autobiography. Cradock attended the Downs boarding school, which she disliked intensely, writing "I learned nothing, forgot all I knew and hourly hoped to die". After she was caught holding a séance in the school library she was nearly expelled, but allowed to remain at the school for a further term before she left.

Media portrayals
Fanny Cradock's husky voice and theatrical style was ripe for mimicry, such as Betty Marsden's 'Fanny Haddock' in two BBC Radio comedy shows, Beyond Our Ken (1958–1964) and Round the Horne (1964–1968). Fanny and Johnnie were also parodied by The Two Ronnies and on Benny Hill, with Benny as Fanny and Bob Todd as an invariably drunk Johnnie.

Cradock's life has also been the subject of the plays Doughnuts Like Fanny's by Julia Darling and Fear of Fanny by Brian Fillis. After a successful run by the Leeds Library Theatre Company, touring the United Kingdom in October and November 2003, Fear of Fanny was turned into a television drama starring Mark Gatiss and Julia Davis and featuring Hayley Atwell. The production broadcast in October 2006 on BBC Four as one of a series of culinary-themed dramas.

Sucking Shrimp by Stephanie Theobald has Fanny Cradock as one of its central characters. To provincial Cornish heroine Rosa Barge, Cradock represents glamour, sophistication and the life she aspires to in her concoctions of a Taj Mahal out of Italian meringue and duchesse potato dyed vivid green.

In 2019, the cabaret group 'Duckie' staged Duckie Loves Fanny as part of the London Borough of Waltham Forest's programme of events marking the locale's year-long status as London Borough of Culture. Members of the cabaret group described their performance as a "very queer mashup of postwar pop culture, style, food and gender politics in honour of the fearsome TV cook in her home area of Leytonstone".

Legacy
Fanny Cradock came to the attention of the public in the postwar-utility years, trying to inspire the average housewife with an exotic approach to cooking. She famously worked in various ball-gowns without the customary cook's apron, averring that women should feel cooking was easy and enjoyable, rather than messy and intimidating.

In her early anonymous role as a food critic, working with Major Cradock under the name of 'Bon Viveur', Fanny introduced the public to unusual dishes from France and Italy, popularising the pizza in the United Kingdom. She and Johnny worked together on a touring cookery show, sponsored by the Gas Council, to show how gas could be used easily in the kitchen and, as their fame increased, Fanny's shows transferred to television, where she enjoyed 20 years of success.

Cradock has also been credited in the United Kingdom as the originator of the prawn cocktail. Although some have suggested that Cradock popularised her version of an established dish that was not well known until then in Britain. In their 1997 book The Prawn Cocktail Years, Simon Hopkinson and Lindsey Bareham note that the prawn cocktail has a "direct lineage to Escoffier".

In the course of her shows Fanny made frequent concessions to the economic realities of the era, suggesting cheaper alternatives which would be within reach of the housewife's purse. The BBC published her recipes and suggestions for dinner-parties in a series of booklets, consolidating her reputation as the foremost celebrity chef of her day.

Marguerite Patten has described Fanny Cradock as the saviour of British cooking after the war. Brian Turner has said that he respects Fanny's career and Delia Smith has attributed her own career to early inspirations taken from the Cradocks' television programmes. Others are less complimentary and in the BBC series The Way We Cooked in an episode dedicated to Cradock and Graham Kerr, Keith Floyd and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, amongst others, disparaged her methods and cooking skill. Despite their extravagant appearance and eccentricity, her recipes were extremely widely used and her cookery books sold in record numbers. In the third series of The F Word, Gordon Ramsay held a series-long search for a new Fanny Cradock.