This article is taken from the April 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £5.
We must watch. It’ll be hilarious.”
My wife had summoned an old television show to her screen: Fanny Cradock Invites You to a Cheese and Wine Party. When the programme aired in 1970, “cheese and wine” was already a phrase with comic resonance.
But Fanny took everything seriously. Her ear for humour was as tinny as her pans. Her audience may not have laughed, but her critics sniggered.
She was viscerally officious, with a bark like Barbara Woodhouse. Her severe dress and angular face were ideal for inhibiting viewers and bossing her amanuensis: demobbed Major Johnny Cradock, who bustled at her bidding.
His toothbrush moustache and uxorial devotion bristled, although the “marriage” was — to put it politely — honorific, sanctified only by the BBC: two other “husbands”, one of whom was the remnant of a previous bigamous contract, lingered throughout.
Despite the moral ambiguity, Fanny affected goddess-like inerrancy. In the kitchen, she was without stain, setting the annoying precedent all subsequent celebrity kitchen-queens have followed of defying, without an apron, the spray from sputtering grills and the spit and spite of deep-fat friers.
Her contempt for splashes matched her disdain for her viewers, whom she lectured, with schoolmarm superiority, on the virtues of bourgeois manners, ergonomic kitchens and social climbers’ cuisine. Alternations of unconvincing bounciness and sourpuss strictness hinted at manic depression.
For her first cheese and wine episode, Johnny was absent — he’d be back next week, Fanny promised, to advise on inexpensive wines. To replace him, two plump, humped adolescents slid dishes around with bowed heads and respectful expressions.
The recipes Fanny plugged were utterly unsuitable for eating on one’s feet — calculated to splatter the carpet with splodges and cover the guests with embarrassment. The highlights included little pots of lumpily ill-melted cheese, designated as “fondue”, and obscenely gigantic versions of those feeble croquettes of mashed potato the English used to like. Fanny squeezed them to show how yielding they were.
Genuinely eye-catching, however, was the pièce de résistance: the green baked omelette.
Fanny’s omelettes were notorious. Many punters claimed her sweet version, filled with the scrapings of leftover Christmas mince pies, was impossible to cook, unpalatable to eat or both. The cheese-and-wine event enlisted what Fanny said was a French recipe, though I have never seen any concoction resembling hers emerge from a French oven.
It was a conjuring trick worthy of Tommy Cooper: ludicrously unbelievable and carried off by chutzpah
She whisked a dozen eggs with large inputs of grated parmesan and puréed spinach, poured the mixture into a soufflé dish, stuffed it into a hot oven with a bowl of water to keep things moist, and, after an hour or two, turned out a soufflé-like structure almost as topping as a high hat.
It was a conjuring trick worthy of Tommy Cooper: ludicrously unbelievable and carried off more by chutzpah than legerdemain. I did not see the switch, but the dish that emerged was a ringer for the one that went in. Maybe Fanny did have a sense of humour after all: the joke was on anyone who tried to follow her recipe.
Her mixture must have collapsed as it cooled. Baked omelettes are rarely much deeper than those made over a flame. They tend to be unpleasantly chewy. The only excuse for making them at all is to serve a lot of people at once. To get one to inflate and stay upright a cook must have a soufflé in mind — separating the whites and beating them stiff. In any case, despite the example of œufs à la florentine, I find spinach and eggs unappealing in combination. The consistency of spinach is too moist, its colour too dull.
A green filling, however, can seep temptingly from an eggy envelope, if it’s formed of vivid and fresh fines herbes, roughly chopped so that the textures of thyme, parsley, chervil and chives are distinguishable. A grating of garlic, a drop of water and a pinch of salt in energetically mixed whites and yolks, poured over a generous dab of hot olive oil in a broad, flat pan, will produce an omelette more interesting and satisfying than any oven.
If the cook adjusts the position of the pan so that one half of the mixture is thoroughly coagulated, whilst sprinkling the herbs thickly over the other half before folding, the horrors of cheese and wine party-food can be mercifully forgotten.
