“Accompanying the series”: Early British television cookbooks 1946-1976

Abstract

This paper provides a historical analysis to demonstrate the connections and developmental links which emerged between cookbooks and television in Britain after World War II, focused on television broadcasts in the period 1946 and 1976. In this paper, I discuss how early presenters of British television cookery programmes, and their publishers, had vision and marketing skills which enabled links between visual and printed media, and established a pattern of connected cookbook and television production which is taken for granted today. I examine the connected television and publishing careers of three early British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) television cooking pioneers: Marguerite Patten, Philip Harben and Fanny Cradock, who collectively dominated on-screen cooking programmes from the late 1940s until the mid-1970s. By analyzing their cookbooks, particularly their jackets and promotional materials, and interpreting archival research conducted in the BBC Written Archives and other documentary archives, their contributions will be discussed alongside the development of the television-connected cookbook in Britain. I conclude that these television cooks and presenters made a significant contribution on and off our screens during that period which established the connection between television cooking programmes and cookbooks in Britain.