Jennifer Paterson (3 April 1928 - 10 August 1999) was a chef and TV personality who appeared on the television programme Two Fat Ladies with Clarissa Dickson Wright.

The pair were famous for their sometimes unhealthy, but presumably very delicious, meals made from scratch. Their preferred means of transportation was a motorbike with sidecar, which Paterson drove.

Personal life

Jennifer Paterson was born in Kensington, West London. Her life was as unconventional as her on-screen persona suggested. She came from an army family and was expelled from convent school at 15 for being disruptive.

Paterson later became a matron at a girls' boarding school near Reading before ending up as a cook for the Ugandan legation in London and becoming a well-known figure on the London party circuit. She worked on the ITV show Candid Camera and later went on to become a food writer for The Spectator and provided weekly lunches for personalities including the Prince of Wales for 15 years.

Paterson was a devout Roman Catholic who never married. She died in 1999 of lung cancer in England. She asked for caviar for her last meal, but died before she could eat it. She was cremated at Putney Vale Crematorium and her ashes were then buried in the cemetery there.

She was survived by an uncle, Monsignor Canon Anthony Bartlett OBE (who died in 2000), a close clerical associate of Basil Cardinal Hume to whom he was Gentiluomo.

Paterson was a parishioner of the London Oratory. She would cook for the Fathers on a weekly basis. An abstract portrait of her hangs in the Kitchen of Oratory House.

DVD Release

The Two Fat Ladies DVD set contains a 40-minute BBC tribute to Paterson that aired in 2004. The DVD box set was released in the States in July 2008. The Acorn Media release contains all 24 episodes across four discs. The show previously was released in Britain as a Region 2 DVD set.

References

External links

• Jennifer Paterson at BBC Food
• Telegraph obituary