Clarissa Dickson Wright: Fat fighter

Clarissa is having her breakfast. What do you think it might be? She is one of the Two Fat Ladies, television cooks famous for loving butter and cream and big, big food. We are in the dining room of her favourite London hotel, where the Full English is on offer: eggs, bacon, sausages, black pudding, the lot. So, what is her choice?

A kipper. A solitary Loch Fyne fish, lonely on a china plate. "I don't really eat that much," Clarissa Dickson Wright says by way of an explanation, and I nod politely... but think of the chocolate bakewell, the treacle tart and the jam roly-poly in her new recipe book, Comfort Food. And the treat she writes of loving after late-night parties, seasoned with paprika: a nice bit of lard.

"Food is not the reason I am fat," she says. Right. Arguing with Clarissa Dickson Wright feels like a dangerous thing to do at any time, let alone this early in the morning. Despite the hour, she is feeling combative about a looming court battle, and in the mood to be spectacularly rude about Jamie Oliver. But first she seems keen to demonstrate her total lack of fear – unlike the rest of us – of being called fat. It is undeniably the right word for the 60-year-old woman, who is wedged into a corner seat at the quietly posh Goring Hotel. A red cotton smock hides the body but not the bulk. Her bare forearms rest on the white tablecloth like uncooked hams. "The reason I am fat," she insists, "is my adrenal gland. I ruined it."

How? "Quinine." The doctor who discovered this thought she must have poisoned herself with malaria tablets. "Actually, I drank too much tonic water." How much? "Four pints a day for 12 years." Gosh. Why? "To go with the two pints of gin." Of course. Her pub would start filling a glass with ice as soon as she came in, then pour on two bottles of tonic and four double gins. "But it wasn't the gin that did the damage, d'you see? It was the tonic!"

She can laugh – having been teetotal for 21 years – but the gland never recovered from the "decade of debauchery". The beauty of her youth was gone, along with the fortune inherited from her mother, spent in a haze of grief and booze. One habit remains, though, from the days of hangover hell: the early avoidance of toast. "Far too noisy in the mornings!"

So the waiter is waved away. Later he is dismissed more brutally for trying to spoon brown sauce on to her plate. "Not with the kipper, I think!" Everything seems to have an exclamation mark, even when she's trying to whisper about the staff. "You have to be beastly to them when they're new!"

Clarissa is not afraid of upsetting people, to put it mildly. The International Fund for Animal Welfare (Ifaw), for example, which is bringing a private prosecution against her for allegedly hunting hares with dogs at two meetings in Yorkshire last year. Passionately fond of hunting animals (whether or not they go in a pie afterwards), she nevertheless denies the charges. "I was not hare coursing." The case will next be heard at Scarborough magistrates' court in just over a fortnight.

Meanwhile, she's chewing on Jamie. Four years ago she accused her fellow cook of selling his soul to Sainsbury's. "The headline was 'Fat Lady Damns Naked Chef for Whore' in huge, 'Hitler Invades Poland' type letters." Did she use that word? "I did, yes. I said, 'Well, the trouble is he has become a hoor.' So much nicer in the Scottish pronunciation, don't you think?"

Up to a point. "The thing is, Jamie Oliver is actually a very good cook. The reason I get so cross is that he could have been such a force for good. As opposed to a force for spin." Whose spin? "Supermarkets'." These – all of them – are "the antichrist." Why? "So many things," she says. "Treating the farmers badly. Forcing them to sell for almost nothing above the cost of production. Importing milk. Irradiating the food. It tastes of nothing. The meat is bad, the fish is worse."

Is it true she turned down £2m to advertise Sainsbury's? "Not Sainsbury's." Who then? "Never you mind. A major supermarket chain. My integrity is worth more to me than the money."

Having claimed the moral high ground, she attacks Jamie's school dinners campaign. "Children don't eat salad! All it succeeded in doing was getting more schools to close down their meal functions."

Oliver has largely refrained from hitting back, but a few months ago his mother Sally did, describing Dickson Wright as "crass beyond measure". "Defending her baby boy, was she? It's ridiculous, like EastEnders, or one of those soaps I don't watch."

So far, so knockabout. But just when I think she's about to let it lie, Clarissa leans forward, as if sharing a secret about the chef, whose endeavours include restaurants set up to help disadvantaged young people. "He is a brilliant cook," she says, "but unfortunately his restaurants are very lacklustre – I'm told. I don't know. I don't eat in them... I don't want to risk being poisoned."

Ouch. And she hasn't even finished her kipper. Now that the bit – and the bones – are between her teeth, what about Delia Smith? "When she started telling people how to open a packet of ready-mix, that was a bridge too far." And The Hairy Bikers? "A direct rip-off."

It's easy to see what she means. Dickson Wright became famous in the mid-Nineties after a producer discovered her working in the Notting Hill shop Books for Cooks. She was paired with the equally larger-than-life writer Jennifer Paterson, and they roared about the country in a motorcycle and sidecar, cooking wherever they went.

Two Fat Ladies was a massive, unexpected hit. "There has not been a day in any year since we finished when someone, somewhere, hasn't been watching us on television," she claims. "People like the anarchy. Two mad, fat old bats on this motorcycle. We were voted number six in the greatest biking icons. Four racers, Steve McQueen, then us! Fantastic!"

The series was cut short in 1999, when Paterson died of lung cancer. Now a couple of men with beards are pulling much the same routine on the BBC. "Actually, my main problem is that they can't cook." The Hairy Bakers (as they are now called) make cakes now, on Monday nights. "Yes," she says with obvious distaste. "Well. Let's just say, with baking, the recipes are all there for you, aren't they?" She reflects for a moment. "I doubt they get 70 million viewers worldwide. And imitation is the sincerest form of flattery."

Trying to imitate her for real would exhaust anyone, and probably drive them to madness. Her autobiography Spilling the Beans, just published in paperback, reveals why. Born to an Australian heiress and a royal doctor, she was named Clarissa Theresa Philomena Aileen Mary Josephine Agnes Elsie Trilby Louise Esmerelda Dickson Wright (Esmerelda being the family pig). Raised in upper-middle-class comfort, she was, however, verbally and physically abused by her father, a man with a foul and violent temper.

Clarissa was the youngest woman ever called to the Bar, at 21. She was later disbarred. By then she had descended into alcoholism, following the deaths of her mother and a married man she still considers the love of her life. Her book describes "sinking into gin", cruising Kilburn for "men with no names" who would take her to bed, and having sex with an MP behind the Speaker's chair. "I really can't remember his name."

She had been left £2.8m by her mother. "In today's terms, that is about £20m. I spent it," she says, so breezily I can't help congratulating her. "Thank you. I had a lovely time. It wasn't bad investments, or Lloyd's. I spent it on yachts. Hiring private planes. The best champagne. I'm very good at spending money."

Sacked from jobs as a housekeeper and cook, she finally checked into a recovery centre in 1987, aged 40. Alcoholics Anonymous saved her life. She still goes, every week or so. "If I don't, it is like the light coming in on the edges of one of those old Box Brownie prints. I wouldn't drink, but I would probably kill somebody at the BBC."

That seems a strange thing to say, since the Corporation gave her fame and another try at fortune. She also believes it treated her badly over Clarissa and the Countryman, a series with her friend Johnny Scott, which was at times like a political broadcast on behalf of the Countryside Alliance. "It was a very emotive time, with the ban on hunting coming in and the huge march on London," she says. "There was a huge clique of fluffy bunnyers within the BBC and we upset them. You know, John Craven, Bill Oddie...."

She believes such opposition has "sunk" her television career. But what about this year's Clarissa and the King's Cookbook, which saw her recreate the banquets of Richard II? "They throw you the odd morsel," she growls. "I do about one show a year." Not reality shows, though. She has been offered the jungle. "It's not eating the kangaroo's penis that one objects to. It's the people I'd have to be on it with."

There are bigger things to be frightened of than bush tucker. Like being named on an animal rights death list. "At the Waterloo Cup after Jennifer died, the antis saw me and were shouting, 'One dead fat lady, one to go.' I was very upset." She still has a Special Branch protection officer available. "I'm supposed to look under my car every day." Does she? "On the basis that I live such a peripatetic life that they would never catch up with me, probably not. I do take it seriously, though. It used to upset my domestic."

She has been home to Inveresk, near Edinburgh, for only 12 weeks in the past 11 months, touring book festivals, food fairs instead. WI meetings and hunt dinners. She says her autobiography sold 267,000 copies in hardback in its first three months – which must help with recovery from a bankruptcy declared in 2003. "I don't charge the hunts."

They all just flout the law now, don't they? "How would I possibly know?" she says, with a mischievous smile. "I'm far too fat to get up on a horse and find out." There's that word again. And hunting brings us back to the Ifaw court case. "I was at an event involving greyhounds, but it was not a hare coursing event."

She will fight all the way, she says. It's in the blood: she is descended from men who tried to blow up Parliament. "The last time I had ancestors tried in Yorkshire, they were hanged, drawn and quartered with Guy Fawkes," says the extraordinary Clarissa Dickson Wright, who has demolished her fish. "Whatever happens to me next, it has to be a better outcome than that, doesn't it?"

Clarissa on kippers

Smoked herrings for breakfast feature in Clarissa's new recipe book – along with pasties, pies and puddings:

"The trick with kippers is to cook them in such a way that the whole house doesn't reek.

I put mine, tails up, in a jug of very, very hot water (not quite boiling) and leave them to stand for five to 10 minutes, depending on size. I then flash them under the grill with a knob of butter (but this last is not strictly necessary).

Alternatively, a friend of mine poaches them in equal parts of milk and water with a little butter for about six minutes."

'Comfort Food' is published by Kyle Cathie this week, just as Hodder releases the paperback of Clarissa's autobiography, 'Spilling the Beans'

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