Pot luck for Clarissa as she calls for TV to put the cooking first

Nothing is quite as bracing as a cup of tea with Clarissa Dickson Wright.

Formerly one half of the Two Fat Ladies, the larger-than-life cook loves hunting, fresh meat from the butcher and chewing the fat.

But it's a while since you last saw her on television. "Blair was trying to ban everything I stood for... and Alastair Campbell ran the BBC," she says, as explanation for her absence.

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Since New Labour's exit, Clarissa says her agent has been inundated with offers and she's just back from a bout of filming.

"I always said that when there was a change of government I'd be back

on television. The old lot hated Clarissa and the Countryman (her second BBC series]. I was making television about all the

things Blair was trying to ban and get rid of – like farming."

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While the former PM might disagree with her interpretation of history, it's a fact that Dickson Wright marched with the Countryside Alliance against the Hunting Act, and has always been keen to voice her disapproval over any perceived lack of support for British food and agriculture.

For the last few years, the aristocratic cook and former alcoholic (who managed to drink her way through a 2.8m fortune in her early years) says her professional life has revolved around writing books.

Her new book Potty: Clarissa's One Pot Cookbook has just been published.

"When the publisher Hodder approached me with this idea, I said, 'Oh God no' because, having been a cookery book seller for 20 years, I knew that one pot cookbooks are always rather dreary."

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Still, she likes a challenge, and soon began experimenting with the idea.

"There are lots of variants on what constitutes a pot," she laughs. "I remembered the eggs and bacon in a tin mug idea from when I was rector at the University of Aberdeen and was rustling up food for the students."

One of the recipes in Potty has attracted attention for its less than appetising title: Primordial Soup.

"I was sitting next to a biologist who worked at the Natural History Museum. We were discussing where life came from and she said she thought it came from primordial soup. What a great idea for a recipe', I thought, so I went off and created a Japanese-type soup filled with seaweed, so it looked like the beginnings of life."

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Luckily for CDW, having written 16 cookbooks she now has "a palate in (her] head".

"I lie in bed thinking about what to do. I think about a chicken, add flavours to it and then I get up and make it – and nowadays it virtually always works."

She describes her style of cooking as very simple. "It's all about the quality of ingredients. But while your food will be 10 times better if you've got a good fishmonger and a good butcher, if you get the flavours right it will still be good.

"Although if anyone who has read more than one of my books still buys their meat in supermarkets, I'm surprised they're still buying my books."

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Having just completed some filming for a new series, The Great British Food Revival, to be broadcast in January on BBC2, she says she wishes people would focus programmes on food, rather than celebrity chefs.

"I plead with Pat Llewellyn (the producer behind the Two Fat Ladies, Gordon Ramsay and Jamie Oliver): 'Go away from the chef thing – no one cares any more what the food tastes like'."

Potty: Clarissa's One Pot Cookbook by Clarissa Dickson Wright is published in hardback by Hodder, priced 20.

To order a copy from the Yorkshire Post Bookshop call free on 0800 0153232 or go online at www. yorkshirepostbookshop.co.

uk Postage and packing is 2.75.