Two Fat Ladies
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Movie Reviews of Two Fat Ladies
Movie Review: Cooking with "Well Seasoned Cooks"
Summary: 5 Stars
While I was growing up, my dad owned a restaurant. I learned early on that the most interesting place to be was in the kitchen with the cooks. Not only were there great smells and the occasional morsel of food to be had, but also the intermittent scrap of overheard adult conversation, spiced with local gossip and experiences that young ears were probably not supposed to hear. The kitchen was certainly never boring. The cooks put me to work doing all sorts of elementary tasks like peeling vegetables and helping make deserts and, in payment, I learned a lot of colorful information about the outside world. I also learned how to cook. Many years have passed. They are all gone now and I miss them terribly, especially when I'm in my own kitchen cooking as I do now quite often. It's no fun cooking by oneself.
Now something delightful has happened. After many years of absence from television, a comprehensive compilation has been made of the smash 1990's BBC cooking show, The Two Fat Ladies, and it is available for American audiences to buy. I find that I can go into my kitchen, slip one of my four new DVDs of the Two Fat Ladies into my computer, and cook with ladies very much like my former idols. The two fat ladies are the late Jennifer Paterson, a spirited lady who spent her life living in many different corners of the world both as a privileged member of the British upper class and as a cook, caterer, and eventually food writer for the Spectator. She relates the most remarkable stories from her past and has the tendency to sing an occasional show tune or pub song, or recite a childhood poem. Clarissa Dickson Wright is her down to earth complement. Early circumstances for her also included maids, cooks, butlers, and travel. Both women are able to bring to the screen a multitude of cultural dishes with a side dish of entertainment similar to that provided to me in my childhood.
Each week, the beginning of the show features Jennifer, driving her trademark BSA motorcycle, with Clarissa sitting beside her in the sidecar, to some of the most picturesque parts of the English or Scottish countryside. After arriving at their destination, they are given the use of a remarkable kitchen, sometimes in a century old building complete with the quintessential Aga stove. In those kitchens, the two ladies turn out sumptuous meals using enough butter, double cream and lard to send people conscientious of their fat intake away screaming. In the process they are delightful. Along with watching them making wonderful looking meals, one is treated to an occasional history of food, utensils or ingredients; weekly trips into the country to buy farm fresh ingredients; local folklore; royal gossip and a lexicon of pre 20th Century measuring terms that have always given the serious measurer fits: a `slop' of cream, a `touch,' a `slurp' and a `splash' of this and that. For anyone who loves to hang around in kitchens, The Two Fat Ladies is not to be missed.
Movie Review: Quite probably the best cooking show EVER! Eat it up!
Summary: 5 Stars
Hitting the TV screens in the mid 1990's at the height of the `healthy food crazy' the Two Fat Ladies were a refreshing burst of exuberance saying "It's ok to enjoy good food." With a wonderful disdain they ignore diets and mass produced food products in a wave of good old fashioned commonsense and fresh products. In an age of desperately counting each gram of fat, these two wonders took what the BBC's programming director called "A nearly pornographic joy" in spreading real butter on bread.
The two ladies were both long time food writers and cooks with long and colorful careers, who were brought together by the BBC before such a thing as "Food TV" got off the ground, and filled the lack of GOOD cooking shows with cooks who were also characters between Julia Childe and Emeril.
Each show followed the theme that the ladies were showing up to cook for a particular group or gathering and the food they prepared followed that theme.
For example a picnic themed show was to provide a lunch for a Welch men's choir, or a breakfast themed show was to provide a morning break for workers in a Yorkshire brewery. A cocktail party snack show was done at the Brazilian embassy in London, and so on.
In each well edited half hour show they produced five or six meals or treats that proved to be remarkably easy to produce despite looking insanely complicated. It was seeing how easily Jennifer Paterson attacks the mythic cock-au-vin that gave me the courage to do it myself.
Interspersed with each episode is their obvious good humor and delight in working with a kindred spirit. An example is in an episode where they are cooking meat dishes at a girls' private school. One says "In this day and age they're probably all vegetarians!"
"Not the la cross team! Surely!" comes the reply.
My wife and I imagined they were actually on the run after dubious cookery, and had a good laugh in the 3rd season, when after serving particularly spicy food to young children, one lady commented "I think we might have poisoned some of them."
"Well" replied the other, "We'll be long gone before they work it out."
This is probably one of the best cooking shows ever produced. Well edited and concise the `presenters' know their work and their stuff. Their amusing to watch and very good at conveying their knowledge to the viewer and along the way, the manage to make a very firm statement against the food fascists who they feel get in the way of enjoying not only good food but good living. Even if you don't cook, this is fun to watch and just might challenge you to pick up a pan.
Movie Review: SLOW COOKERY DEATH from laughing, fats, cholesterol, & fun
Summary: 5 Stars
Expect fun and cooking delight without real recipes. These Two FAT Ladies, really fat, show how they got that way, by their cooking. Butter, bacon, anchovies, sugar, salt and booze combine to scare the hair off a cardiologist. This show was everything I was warned about in my heart attack rehab. Well, except plenty of exercising from slapping my knee, and holding my aching belly after another round of laughter. These 2 girls had rather eccentric lives and they are just being themselves during the TV series productions. TWO FAT LADIES was an instant pilot success in the UK and a world-wide hit not long after. Only the death of Jennifer put the show at its end. Yet it lives on, with used DVDs commanding good resale prices.
Not exactly a cooking show because many ingredients are never weighed or measured, and you have to guess how much their pinch, dollop, splash, or other odd measurement might be. Names of some items are particularly rare to the typical home cooking male or female. Cooking times sometimes never given and temperature comes in the form of "gas-7" (whatever that Argo language means.) But who cares? The delight of seeing these 2 perform their skill is enough. And the scenery and education you get along the way in seeing a goat cheese source worked out in a "rapid fire" grip; or the "don't look" warning for cooking live lobsters; desserts for the gents made to look like female parts; and always just slipping off the tongue smoothly delivered. Songs, poetry and the like appropriate for a dish is an appealing as the scenic motorcycle rides through the countryside of Britain and Ireland. Just too many favorite parts (ingredients) to list for this Chef-less Bikin'-Cooker Ladies Duo-nut.
BONUS material is great!
24 episodes at 30 minutes each come WITH SUBTITLES.
Booklet: 8 YUMMO Recipes with true instructions minus the nutritional disaster for the fat/salt/cholesterol unconscious types (including famous Hedgehog).
text bios for each of the TWO FAT LADIES, a delight to read after becoming acquainted with the pair, thus realizing they are quite transparent, not actresses.
Bonus Program: A Tribute to Jennifer Paterson, with interviews from former employers, friends, family, and even showing parts of the funeral. An amazing story, it could have been a movie.
My wife also declared it a KEEPER, to be returned to for viewing. Soon!
I think I gained 5 pounds just watching the butter melt. Laughed it off.
A great gift idea for that lady you know who has an immaculate kitchen.
Movie Review: So much more than a cooking show....
Summary: 5 Stars
These shows are what cooking is all about, and even if you choose not to eat some of their dishes, as I, the shows are such great fun that the pleasure comes not just from their creations but from the cooks themselves, their stories and quips, their adventures, and of course, the lovely scenery and kitchens which are refreshingly different for every single show.
I have been a long-time fan and still lament over Jennifer Paterson's untimely death. When I saw that this show FINALLY went to DVD, I pre-ordered in about 5 seconds flat, then passed out from the sheer excitement of anticipating my order's arrival.
These are wonderful, informative shows, and FUN FUN FUN! Jennifer and Clarissa pull no punches and do not ruin our day with worries over too much of this cream and too much of that butter. Indulge yourself and enjoy.
And, as if that were not enough to send me to heaven and back on a sheet of shortbread, there are 11 - count 'em -ELEVEN MORE episodes than were available on VHS (which of course I purchased ages ago). PLUS the bonus feature about Jennifer Paterson. I am thrilled beyond all measure, and so thankful to the media reps responsible for getting these wonderful shows put on DVD. Thank you!!
Movie Review: Two Fat Ladies
Summary: 5 Stars
Just received my DVD's of Two Fat Ladies. I was heartbroken when their show went off the air, and mostly so when Jennifer Patterson died of lung cancer. A sad ending to an incredibly delightful duo of chefs. You can't find a cooking show that comes close to the antics of these two "fat" ladies, and the fact that they could make fun of themselves and vegetarians. They cooked the way my grandmother Belle did on the family farm in Vermont in the early 1900's. Lots of lard, butter, fresh cream (from the cows), bacon, and meat. Jennifer and Clarissa would have loved Belle's breakfasts....homemade pie, bacon,blood sausage, fried eggs, toast laden with lots of fresh butter, homemade molasses cookies, salt pork and gravy. Watch these two ladies cook up sumptious meals in castles with huge kitchens full of copper pans hanging from the ceilings and stoves they don't make anymore, to cooking in a hole in the ground; and feel your mouth water when they serve up the meals to Benedictine nuns in Ireland to a hunting party in Scotland or an embassy in London. You will be mesmerized by their unending jocularity and humorous intelligence on world affairs. This is not your typical cooking show-they outshine them all.