text: The remaining half of the screen culinary duo Two Fat Ladies has died in hospital in Edinburgh aged 66 
   
   She was a brilliant cook, an erudite food historian and a champion of hunting and shooting once convicted of attending an illegal hare coursing event. She had no time for rudeness and little for those whose philosophies she could not understand, including Labour politicians and "manky" vegetarians. 
   
   But most of all, Clarissa Dickson Wright, who has died aged 66, was a great British eccentric who became a most unlikely television star as one half of the BBC's Two Fat Ladies partnership. 
   
   The worlds of food and television paid tribute to Dickson Wright on Monday following her death in hospital in Edinburgh, where she had been undergoing treatment since the start of the year. 
   
   Producer Patricia Llewellyn, who teamed her up with Jennifer Paterson for the Fat Ladies show – in which they toured the UK in a motorcycle-sidecar – first met Dickson Wright when the cook decided to launch a one-woman campaign to get the cardoon back on to British dining tables. 
   
   "The cardoon is a prickly vegetable – an edible thistle – and not immediately lovable, but wonderful when you get to know it – it couldn't have found a better champion", said Llewellyn. 
   
   "Clarissa was a marvellous cook and hugely knowledgeable about food and food history. She was possessed of a formidable intelligence, and held strong opinions, a powerful combination that made her a commanding presence on television." 
   
   Jennifer Paterson (left) and Clarissa Dickson Wright filming Two Fat Ladies in 1996. Photograph: Tim Walsh/PA 
   
   She also had a fiery temper. "We called her 'Krakatoa' because if you didn't notice the rumbling you could find yourself in trouble. She was a force of nature." 
   
   Dickson Wright's agents, Heather Holden-Brown and Elly James, said her fun, laughter and intelligence would be missed: "Clarissa was utterly non-PC and fought for what she believed in, always, with no thought to her own personal cost." 
   
   The Observer's restaurant critic Jay Rayner tweeted: "Goodbye Clarissa. A truly fabulous woman. Worked with her many times and it was always fun, at least for me. She had a towering intellect." Television chef Jamie Oliver added: "She was always entertaining to watch and was of course a passionate foodie." 
   
   Baptised Clarissa Theresa Philomena Aileen Mary Josephine Agnes Elsie Trilby Louise Esmerelda, Dickson Wright grew up in north London. Her father, Arthur, was a brilliant surgeon and food lover – pigeons were flown in from Cairo for the Dickson Wright table and caviar was frequently on the menu. But he was also a violent alcoholic who beat Dickson Wright and her mother. 
   
   She became a barrister but after herself descending into alcoholism quit law and began working as a cook in grand homes. 
   
   Dickson Wright was running a culinary bookshop when she was discovered by Llewellyn. She would joke that she had put on her weight without the help of junk food. "It was all good quality," she said. But the Two Fat Ladies programmes attracted some criticism for the high-fat ingredients the pair loved. 
   
   Following her screen partner's death in 1999 aged 71, Dickson Wright appeared in other television programmes including Clarissa and the Countryman with presenter, naturalist and baronet Sir John (Johnny) Scott. 
   
   She was a champion of countryside pursuits, claiming she was prepared to go to prisonto support people's right to hunt. In 2009 she was convicted of attending hare coursing. 
   
   In more recent years she joined the debate over the badger cull to suggest the mammals ought to be eaten. "It would solve the problem. There's going to be a cull, so rather than just throw them in the landfill site, why not eat them?" she said. 
   
   Dickson Wright said she had enjoyed a "fantastic life". "I've done everything I could have wanted to do and more." In 2011 she told the Guardian she did not worry about ageing. "I am oriented to country matters; you are born and eventually you die." ||||| Clarissa Dickson Wright, who rose to middle-aged fame as the co-star and co-chef of “Two Fat Ladies,” a popular British television show known as much for the hosts’ irreverence and eccentricity as for their indulgent and sometimes confounding recipes, died on Saturday in Edinburgh. She was 66. 
   
   She had been ill for several months, according to Heather Holden-Brown and Elly James, her literary agents in London, who announced the death. 
   
   Ms. Dickson Wright grew up in an affluent family, became a lawyer at 21 and an alcoholic not long after. Sobered up, she got serious about cooking in her 40s. 
   
   She was writing a cooking column and running a store called Books for Cooks in London when a television producer recruited her to collude with another culinary rebel, Jennifer Paterson, on a cooking show unlike any other. “Two Fat Ladies” made its debut in 1996 on the BBC and was picked up in the United States the next year by the Food Network. 
   
   Each episode opened with the pair heading to a new location to cook, Ms. Paterson steering a motorcycle while Ms. Dickson Wright rode in a sidecar, sometimes beneath the carcass of an animal bound for the dinner table. They spoke approvingly of royal mistresses, less so of vegetarians. They enjoyed imitating profound flatulence. 
   
   Photo 
   
   In an era of health-conscious cooking, Ms. Dickson Wright and Ms. Paterson just said no. 
   
   On lard: “Just in case you think it’s unhealthy,” Ms. Dickson Wright said, “don’t be put off by that.” 
   
   On bacon: “I’m told that more vegetarians relapse on bacon than any other substance.” 
   
   On a lofty legume: “Always get rid of all the lentils. You would have no idea how randy it makes all the vegetarians.” 
   
   On tongue: “It’s wonderful stuff, tongue. Everybody forgets about tongue.” 
   
   On flavorful Indian tea: “Yes, I quite like a strong Indian myself now and again.” 
   
   On the proper application of butter to a cake pan: “You really want to get it well greased. Did you see ‘Last Tango in Paris’? Something like that.” 
   
   The show led to a book in 1998, “Cooking With the Two Fat Ladies.” Reviewing it in The New York Times, Suzanne Hamlin found many of the recipes impossible to follow — at least if one wanted the promised results. 
   
   “On camera, the two hefty middle-aged women do nothing — including cooking — by the book,” Ms. Hamlin wrote. While acknowledging their appeal, she added, “Eccentricity and farce fail to be compelling in a cookbook that purports to be useful.” 
   
   The show ran until 1999, when Ms. Paterson died shortly after learning she had lung cancer. 
   
   Clarissa Dickson Wright was born Clarissa Theresa Philomena Aileen Mary Josephine Agnes Elsie Trilby Louise Esmerelda Dickson Wright on June 24, 1947, in the St. John’s Wood section of London. In her 2007 memoir, “Spilling the Beans,” she recalled the inspirations for her numerous given names, including her mother’s favorite saint, Philomena, and a woman who cooked for her family, Louise. 
   
   She was the youngest child of Dr. Arthur Dickson Wright, a prominent surgeon who treated members of the royal family — and who was also, she said, abusive and an alcoholic. Her mother, the former Molly Bath, came from a wealthy Australian family. When both her parents died, Ms. Dickson received an inheritance that, she later admitted, she spent much of during her years of alcohol abuse. She quit drinking on her 40th birthday. 
   
   Ms. Dickson Wright lived in Edinburgh. Her survivors include two sisters, Heather and June. 
   
   Despite her television persona, Ms. Dickson Wright was not all puns and off-color jokes. In 2011, she published a well-received book, “A History of English Food.” ||||| Image caption Clarissa Dickson Wright went on to front several TV shows solo, including Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner in 2012 
   
   Clarissa Dickson Wright, one half of TV cookery duo Two Fat Ladies with the late Jennifer Paterson, has died in Edinburgh aged 66. 
   
   The former barrister filmed four series of the BBC Two programme before Paterson's death in 1999. 
   
   "Her fun and laughter, extraordinary learning and intelligence, will be missed always, by so many of us," said a statement from her agent. 
   
   Dickson Wright died on Saturday at Edinburgh's Royal Infirmary. 
   
   "Loved dearly by her friends and many fans all over the world, Clarissa was utterly non-PC and fought for what she believed in, always, with no thought to her own personal cost," said agent Heather Holden-Brown. 
   
   She and Paterson were brought together for Two Fat Ladies by TV director Patricia Llewellyn in 1996, during which they were often seen travelling the UK together in their motorbike and sidecar in search of good British grub. 
   
   Image caption Jennifer Paterson and Clarissa Dickson-Wright on their famous motorbike and sidecar in series one of Two Fat Ladies 
   
   Speaking on Desert Island Discs in 1999, following the death of her cooking partner Paterson from cancer, she said: 
   
   "She died magnificently, she was an example to all of us, if I can die that well I should be very happy." 
   
   During the same interview Dickson Wright also explained her "pathological" hatred of the humble carrot. 
   
   "My father used to pull them out of the ground and dust them off and feed them to me with the slugs on them so I think I got put off them. Now of course I would quite readily eat the slug but I still have this thing against the carrot," she said. 
   
   'Very intelligent' 
   
   Dickson Wright's former career as a young barrister at Gray's Inn was brought to "an abrupt end" by her well-documented battle with alcohol, which she wrote about in her autobiography Spilling the Beans. 
   
   Her forthcoming birthday on 24 June would have marked her 27th anniversary of abstinence, a birthday her agent said "meant much more to her than another year on the clock". 
   
   During an interview with The Guardian in 2009, she said of her AA meetings: "You'd go there and you'd know they would be pleased to see you without wanting anything from you. 
   
   "And that you could talk about the stresses in your life. To me it's very important to go to AA. It helps with the serenity levels." 
   
   She added: "I don't mind people drinking. I keep a very good cellar for my friends in my house - it's only me who doesn't drink." 
   
   Celebrity chef Brian Turner called Dickson Wright a "very intelligent lady". 
   
   "She was very outgoing," he told BBC News. "She knew what good service was all about… she did her own thing." 
   
   After leaving law, she worked as a cook at St James's club in the capital and in private houses before managing the Books for Cooks shop in London's Notting Hill, then the Cooks Book Shop in Edinburgh. 
   
   Image caption Clarissa and the Countryman saw Dickson Wright travel the country with tenant farmer John Scott 
   
   During her cooking career, Clarissa ran her own catering business, worked on a yacht in the Caribbean and served 60 meals a day at her London luncheon club. 
   
   She also became one of only two women in England to become a guild butcher. 
   
   She recently said: "I've had a fantastic life and I've done everything I could have wanted to do and more". 
   
   Countryside campaigner 
   
   Dickson Wright was also an outspoken campaigner for rural life and a keen supporter of the Countryside Alliance and after Paterson's death, she made the controversial series Clarissa and the Countryman, which ran until 2003. 
   
   During an interview with The Telegraph in 2012, to promote her book Clarissa's England, she accused the BBC of dropping her and the show because she went too far in praise of hunting, angering then-Prime Minister Tony Blair. 
   
   "Those were glorious years," she said of the time. "There we were, fighting the war against them on the same BBC that the leader considered his own personal mouthpiece." 
   
   She also caused a storm by declaring people should eat the meat of badgers that had been culled - and even suggested ways to cook the animal. 
   
   Dickson Wright was particularly proud of her time working with students as the Rector of the University of Aberdeen between 1998-2004. 
   
   A spokesman for the university said it was "saddened" by her death, adding on Twitter that she had "brought her individualism and style to many University of Aberdeen events." 
   
   After being raised as a Catholic "her faith remained with her, in her own personal way, for the rest of her life, a life lived fearlessly and with conviction," according to her agent. 
   
   Image caption Paterson, right, died during filming of the fourth series of Two Fat Ladies 
   
   When asked during an interview if she wished the show that propelled her to fame had been called something other than Two Fat Ladies, she replied "no". 
   
   "If you're fat you're fat. I hate this modern-day political correctness, that you don't call things by their proper name," she told The Guardian. 
   
   'Privileged upbringing' 
   
   She was christened Clarissa Theresa Philomena Aileen Mary Josephine Agnes Elsie Trilby Louise Esmerelda Dickson Wright. 
   
   In her autobiography, she talked of "a well-to-do, privileged upbringing", that was overshadowed by her surgeon father's drinking. 
   
   "It was like having a wild animal in the house, never knowing when it is going to roar. The only time we felt safe was when my father was abroad or, in my case, when I was at boarding school," she wrote. 
   
   Born in 1947, she was the youngest of four children, with her closest sibling, brother Anthony 13 years her senior. 
   
   Image caption Dickson Wright played a gamekeeper in an episode of sitcom Absolutely Fabulous, which saw Patsy and Eddy join the country set 
   
   She said the years that followed her father leaving the family were happy and, at 21, she became the country's youngest female barrister. But she took to drinking after the death of her mother. 
   
   "The beginning of my drinking career was rather enjoyable. I was rich, good-looking and kept the pain at bay on a wave of champagne and gin," she said. 
   
   She never married but while working at St James Club met Clive, "the man I was to love more than any other in my life". 
   
   "Like me, Clive was a dedicated alcoholic," she wrote. He died in 1982 after his kidneys failed. 
   
   She has been declared bankrupt several times, having spent her £2.8 million inheritance on "drinking and debauchery". 
   
   "[It was] my own stupid fault. I've always been bad with finance," she told The Telegraph. 
   
   "It's from not having to worry about it. If you grow up with money, you never really learn that it doesn't grow on trees."
target: – Both of TV's "Fat Ladies" have sung. Clarissa Dickson Wright, one half of the BBC's "Two Fat Ladies" cooking duo, died in Edinburgh Saturday at age 66, the BBC reports. Wright was a former lawyer who filmed four of the "Fat Ladies" series, going on food-related road trips across the UK in a motorbike and sidecar with Jennifer Paterson, before Paterson died in 1999 from cancer. The New York Times describes Wright as a "rebel," both hosts as "irreverent and eccentric," and the recipes as "sometimes confounding." Wright's eclectic working life also included stints as a cook, an author, and a cookbook shop manager; she also ran a catering business, was a guild butcher, and once worked on a yacht in the Caribbean. In fact, she recently said, "I've had a fantastic life and I've done everything I could have wanted to do and more." It wasn't until her 40s, after she'd recovered from alcoholism, that she got into cooking seriously. As for the perhaps-controversial title of the show that brought her fame? "If you're fat you're fat," she once said. "I hate this modern-day political correctness, that you don't call things by their proper name." Her agent remembers Wright similarly in a statement: "Loved dearly by her friends and many fans all over the world, Clarissa was utterly non-PC and fought for what she believed in, always, with no thought to her own personal cost." There's no word on Wright's cause of death, but the Guardian reports that she had been undergoing treatment at a hospital since the beginning of the year.