Phyllis Nan Sortain Pechey (26 February 1909 – 27 December 1994), better known as Fanny Cradock, was an English restaurant critic, television cook and writer. She frequently appeared on television, at cookery demonstrations and in print with her long-term partner, Major Johnnie Cradock, who played the part of a slightly bumbling hen-pecked husband.
Cradock was born at her maternal grandparents' house, 33 Fairlop Road, Leytonstone, Essex. The birth was recorded in the registration district of West Ham.
As a child, Cradock lived with her family at Fairlop Road, with her maternal grandparents. A plaque (with her name misspelt) can be found at Fairwood Court, Fairlop Road, London E11: "Fanny Craddock 1909–1994. On this site until 1930 stood a house called Apthorp, birthplace of the famous TV cookery expert Fanny Craddock; born Phyllis Pechey."
Her birthplace was named after Apthorp Villa, in Bath, Somerset, where her grandfather Charles Hancock had been born. Cradock's parents did not manage their money well; her mother, Bijou, spent extravagantly, and her father, Archibald Thomas Pechey, had sizeable gambling debts, many run up in Nice. In attempting to keep their creditors at bay, the family moved around the country, going to Herne Bay in Kent, then to Swanage in Dorset and on to Bournemouth in Dorset, where Archibald's brother, Richard Francis Pechey (1872–1963), had become the Vicar of Holy Trinity Church in 1912. While in Bournemouth the 15-year-old Fanny attended Bournemouth High School (now Talbot Heath School).
Archibald moved the family again to Wroxham in Norfolk, around 1927, where his creditors caught up with him, and by 1930 he was appearing in Norfolk's bankruptcy court faced with debts of £3,500. Cradock began the next ten years of her life in London living in destitution, selling cleaning products door to door. She then worked in a dressmaking shop.
Cradock's fortunes began to change when she started work at various restaurants and was introduced to the works of Auguste Escoffier. She later wrote passionately about the change from service à la française to service à la russe and hailed Escoffier as a saviour of British cooking.
Fanny and Johnnie Cradock began writing a column under the pen name of "Bon Viveur" which appeared in The Daily Telegraph from 1950 to 1955. This sparked a theatre career, with the pair turning theatres into restaurants. Cradock would cook vast dishes that were served to the audience. They became known for their roast turkey, complete with stuffed head, tail feathers and wings. Complete with French accents, their act was one of a drunken hen-pecked husband and a domineering wife. At this time, they were known as Major and Mrs Cradock. She also wrote books under the names Frances Dale, Bon Viveur, Susan Leigh and Phyllis Cradock.
In 1955 Cradock recorded a pilot for what became a very successful BBC television series on cookery. Each year the BBC published a booklet giving a detailed account of every recipe she demonstrated, allowing her to frequently say in later years, "You'll find that recipe in the booklet, so I won't show you now." Cradock advocated bringing Escoffier-standard food into the British home and gave every recipe a French name. Her food looked extravagant, but was generally cost-effective, and she seemed to care about her audience. Her catchphrases included "This won't break you", "This is perfectly economical", and "This won't stretch your purse". When presenting her Christmas cake recipe she once justified the cost of ingredients, saying "But on the other hand, we do want one piece of decent cake in the year."
As time went by, however, her food began to seem outdated, with her love of the piping bag and vegetable dyes. As she grew older, she applied more and more make-up and wore vast chiffon ballgowns on screen. Cradock had always included relatives and friends in her television shows. Johnnie suffered a minor heart attack in the early 1970s and was replaced with the daughter of a friend, Jayne. Another assistant was Sarah, and there was a series of young men who did not last long.
Throughout her television career, the Cradocks also worked for the Gas Council, appearing at trade shows such as the Ideal Home Exhibition and making many "infomercials", instructing cooks, usually newlywed women, on how to use gas cookers for basic dishes. Despite the BBC's ban on advertising, Cradock used only gas stoves in her television shows and often stated that she "hated" electric stoves and ovens.
Her series Fanny Cradock Cooks for Christmas is the only one out of several she made to have survived in the TV archives and to have been repeated in recent years, on the UK channels BBC Four, Good Food and Food Network UK, usually in the run-up to Christmas. Good Food also occasionally broadcasts Fanny Cradock Invites You to a Cheese and Wine Party, one of a few surviving stand-alone episodes from other series.
Cradock appeared in twenty-four television series between 1955 and 1975.
In 1976 Gwen Troake, a farmer's wife from Devon, won the Cook of the Realm competition, leading to the BBC selecting her for its TV series The Big Time, where talented amateurs were given the opportunity to take part in a spectacular professional event. Troake was to organise a three-course Foyles' Literary Lunch at The Dorchester in honour of the former prime minister Edward Heath, with Lord Mountbatten and other dignitaries in attendance, and asked Cradock—by then a tax exile in Ireland—along with chef Eugene Kaufeler, actor and gourmet Robert Morley, nutritionist Magnus Pyke and many other experts Troake admired to advise her.
The result brought about the demise of Cradock's television career. Troake went through her menu of seafood cocktail, duckling with a lemon-jelly-and-cornstarch fortified bramble sauce and coffee cream dessert with rum. Her idea was that with seafood, water fowl and rum, the meal had a nautical theme, which would appeal to Heath's love of sailing and also be an appropriate salute to the former Admiral Mountbatten. Cradock, grimacing and acting as if on the verge of gagging, told Troake that her menu was far too rich and she would "never in a million years" serve a seafood cocktail before duck. She appeared not to be familiar with the term "bramble", and when told it meant a blackberry, was horrified that it would be paired with a savoury duck, remonstrated that a sauce like that should be brushed on a flan. She derisively declared that the jam in it was "too English" and that the English had never had a cuisine, erroneously claiming that "Yorkshire pudding came from Burgundy". While accepting that Troake's dessert was delicious, she insisted that it was not suitable, as it was "too sickly" served after the sweetly sauced, rich duck, countering Troake's numerous objections with "Yes, dear, but now you're among professionals."
Cradock suggested that unless Troake were to serve salad and cheese afterwards, as is done in France, then she should use small almond pastry barquettes filled with a palate-cleansing fruit sorbet with spun sugar sails, as this was equally suitable for the naval theme. Troake kept insisting that she liked her signature coffee pudding with "nautical" rum in it, while Cradock appealed to her to think of her diners' taste buds and stomachs, and try to achieve a balance in her menu. Unfortunately, the replacement dessert was not executed properly, and Morley said he felt that Troake's original coffee pudding was perfect.
The public were incensed at Cradock's eye-rolling rudeness and condescension, and felt that she had ruined Troake's moment. The Daily Telegraph wrote "Not since 1940 can the people of England have risen in such unified wrath". Cradock wrote a letter of apology to Troake, but the BBC terminated her contract two weeks after the broadcast of the programme. She would never again present a cookery programme for the BBC. (Troake, by contrast, published Gwen Troake's Country Cookbook of recipes the following year; it included the bramble sauce as well as the coffee cream dessert Cradock had vetoed.) Speaking about the incident on Room 101 in 1999, The Big Time's producer Esther Rantzen described Cradock as "hell on wheels", and that she had "reduced this poor little lady [Troake] to nothing".