Clarissa Dickson Wright Was (Probably) the Best TV Cook We've Ever Seen

Clarissa Dickson Wright was buried yesterday, her coffin bearing a wreath made from chillies, sage, broccoli, cardamom, and artichokes. They were some of her favorite ingredients. Hundreds gathered around Edinburgh's St. Mary's Metropolitan Cathedral to pay tribute to the inimitable TV chef and force of nature who died last month at age 66.

With the equally bonkers Jennifer Paterson, Wright once owned food television with The Two Fat Ladies, a show that saw the two women bombing around the UK in a Triumph Thunderbird motorbike – Paterson driving while Wright sat snug in the sidecar, often beneath an animal carcass for later on—to cook, it seemed, whatever the fuck they liked.

The producer of the show, Patricia Llewellyn, said that the emphasis on the program was to be on "suets and tipsy cake rather than rocket salad and sun-dried tomatoes," and she wasn't wrong. The ladies shirked anything that was fashionable at the time and preferred instead to cook what they actually wanted to sit down and eat—game, medicine ball-like pies, and all manner of dense sponges that would have you lying prostrate for days.

Their defiance against any semblance of health-conscious cooking was, and still is, remarkable. Recipes invariably involved gallons of animal fat (Wright had no time for "manky little vegetarians") and I'm sure, on their respective deathbeds, both women were at least 92 percent butter and all the happier for it.

In one episode, while cooking at Westminster Cathedral, Wright—or "Krakatoa" as she was known to some because of her temper—cooked bubble and squeak in two ounces of lard, insisting that, besides beef drippings, it was the only fat that could get hot enough to make the dish "properly."

Elsewhere, her recipe for spatchcock chicken saw her covering a bird in a thick layer of butter, then some bread, then another industrial smear of butter on top of that. These recipes, understandably, attracted plenty of derision and it's a testament to the BBC—who, by 1996, had 3.5 million viewers tuning in to the ladies every week—that they just let them get on with it in all their proud, flatulence-imitating glory. Find me a TV cook these days who'll make fart jokes while stuffing handfuls of butter up a chicken's arse and I'll send you a lung in the post.

Wright's death is a shame for so many reasons and there have been acres of tributes written since her death last month, all detailing an often acutely painful life and one with more undulations than the Rockies. Her alcoholism, which saw her becoming disbarred from the law, is well-documented. But with the help of friends, she sobered up (at her death she'd been sober nearly 30 years) and found herself falling in love with cooking in her 40s.

Wright's embrace of life, despite her difficulties, was magnificent and I can't help but mourn for a female presence like her on television now, particularly where food is involved. Food, especially for women, is so inextricably linked with anxiety, fear, and obsession. Today, many of our female food personalities are groomed, restrained, and ever-ready to pout into camera left. They're a fantasy in heavy mascara and powdery cleavages. Speaking of which, Wright was once offered a large sum to promote a supermarket but turned it down. "I don't regret it," she said. "I used to say that all I had left in life was my integrity and my cleavage. Now it's just my integrity."

She wore her size with the same defiance as she did her (often frighteningly un-PC) beliefs. On the somewhat discourteous Two Fat Ladies title, she once said to a journalist, "Well, there are two of us. I have a problem with 'Ladies' as it sounds like a public convenience. But which bit do you object to? Are you saying I'm thin?" It was also, at times, quite the weapon. She put two men trying their luck at mugging her into intensive care. The sheer swag of the woman was something else.

Don't get me wrong. I adore and could write hymns on Nigella Lawson, but would she make fart noises on camera? Would she sing her show's theme tune like she was on stage at some back-alley cabaret? I doubt it. For all The Two Fat Ladies' artery-hardening cooking, there was—is—so much to be said for having two women on television celebrating appetite and desire in the way that they did. Watching them, you couldn't help but associate food with pleasure. Pure, uncomplicated pleasure. And yes, many of today's cooking shows are enjoyable, but they're often more like a production company's projection of middle-class idealism, unlike Paterson and Wright's you-will-bloody-well-sit-down-and-eat-this-because-it's-delicious mantra. I often find myself watching YouTube clips of them late at night thinking, "Please God, find someone else like them, for all our sakes," but of course, that wouldn't be possible.