As one half of the television chef duo Two Fat Ladies, Jennifer Paterson, who died of cancer aged 71, was outspoken and passionate about food in a series that provided a welcome development in the genre.
Her opinionated banter attracted viewers who were as interested in her comical proclamations as they were in her quintessentially English cuisine.
The BBC2 show, launched in 1996, featured Jennifer Paterson, and her screen partner Clarissa Dickson Wright, speeding around the British countryside on a Triumph Thunderbird motorbike and sidecar, and preparing feasts in stately homes. It won unsurpassed ratings for a food programme, was sold to Australia, Japan, Israel, Canada, South Africa and the United States - and spawned several cookery books.
Before Two Fat Ladies, Jennifer Paterson and Clarissa Dickson Wright had met only once, at a house party in Tuscany, but their on-screen relationship gave the impression they had been friends for years. They shared a sense of humour, and evidently enjoyed similar lifestyles. Their screen personas and home-style cooking of traditional high-fat food - dealt in dollops not ounces - appealed to middle England, while their banter and bickering attracted a student audience.
Jennifer Paterson was scathingly contemptuous of "healthy" eating. She thought vegetarians looked sallow and miserable, and wore yellow shorts and sandals with socks. Worse still, they seemed to be proliferating. "There were few around in my young days," she observed earlier this year, "and those we did come across we considered to be German spies. After all, Hitler was a veggie."
She claimed she never had a cookery lesson in her life - indeed, she recalled that her mother couldn't cook, and her father couldn't boil a kettle. But cooking, she proclaimed, was a talent, like gardening: "All you need is a deep interest in your subject."
A Roman Catholic, she was born in London, the daughter of an army officer, and raised in China until the age of four. Back in England, she attended the Convent of the Assumption in Ramsgate. Expelled at the age of 15 for disruptive behaviour, she moved to the school around the corner and later enrolled at Kingston College of Art. Her family continued its travels, living in Berlin, Portugal, Sicily and Benghazi.
Later, she recalled: "I was always hovering about the kitchen, bothering cook and making horrible little pies."
Education concluded, Jennifer Paterson taught in Portugal. Back in England in the early 1950s, she worked as an assistant stage manager at the Theatre Royal, Windsor, edited London Mystery magazine (where Rolf Harris provided illustrations), spent time as personal assistant to an Italian sculptor, and worked on the pioneering people-caught-in-daft-situations television show, Candid Camera.
After this, she took an unlikely job as matron at Padworth girls' boarding school, near Reading.
She was also a private cook.
In 1978, she became resident chef at the Spectator, providing weekly lunches for visiting personalities. Later, she wrote a cookery column both for that magazine and for the Oldie.
Two Fat Ladies was commissioned by Michael Jackson, then controller of BBC2, at a time when cooking programmes were dominated by people like Gary Rhodes and Keith Floyd, champions of restaurant style.
The series amounted to a parody of the TV cooking queen, Delia Smith; they were both all personality and little instruction, while Delia Smith was no personality and all instruction.
Jennifer Paterson's hobbies were partying, drinking, and smoking.
In one interview she said: "Thousands die from smoking each year, but knowing this I continue to smoke myself. It is my informed decision."
As her personality and taste for good living erupted out of Two Fat Ladies, she became one of the ladies who talked about lunch on other people's programmes, such as Radio 4's A Question Of Taste, and BBC television's Food And Drink, and Wish You Were Here.
Jennifer Paterson never married. "I should have done it when I was 18," she said, "when I knew nothing of life".
Jennifer Paterson: born 1928; died August, 1999