Fanny Cradock and the fabulous summer party
One of the festival's themed events was a summer party built around Fanny Cradock, the television cook who dominated British food broadcasting from the 1950s to the 1970s.
Cradock is a genuinely strange figure in British food history. She was the first television cook most of the country ever saw, she performed in an evening gown with a monocled husband beside her, and the style of cooking she taught — elaborate, piped, coloured, aspirational — was swept away within a decade of her leaving the screen.
She is also the reason a great many British kitchens of that generation owned a piping bag. A themed party of this kind works because the material is so specific: the colours, the garnishes and the presentation are instantly recognisable to anyone who remembers the programmes, and faintly unbelievable to anyone who does not.
The event itself was a fringe fixture, not part of the Main Event.
A record of one themed evening, and of the television cook it was built around.