Can Fanny Cradock bring Amy and Blake back together?

And so the tale of Amy Winehouse and Blake Incarcerated grinds on, as grimy and depressing as ever. Drugs, lung disease, prison, violence, mental illness, self-harm, the stomach-churning X-rated letters from Blake to fellow con Melissa Goldstone: there's only so much of it a body can read about before suffering a collapse of the will to live.

Amy Winehouse looks to Fanny Cradock for culinary inspiration. Photographs: Rex Features

So let's turn to the oft-overlooked lighter side of Blake and Amy's saga of sickness and despair. Let's look towards the happy day when the former gets out of stir and how he might celebrate his release. Perhaps, like Paris Hilton, he'll find God and announce that he's going to visit Rwanda. Perhaps not. According to reports in the Daily Star's gossip page - not, I'll grant you, the most veracious news source in journalistic history, but stick with it - Winehouse is planning on welcoming him home by cooking him a celebratory meal.

Let us not doubt this story. Let us ignore the derision of those who suggest that Winehouse gives every impression of subsisting entirely on a diet of drugs, vodka and bits of crisps and fluff she finds when she wakes up face down on the pub carpet; that she's probably never followed a recipe in her life that didn't involve heating up cocaine and baking powder to make crack. Just look at her! What's the word that automatically suggests itself? That's right: "gourmand". Were Clarissa Dickson-Wright looking for someone to replace the late Jennifer Paterson for a TV chef partnership, she could do worse.

Furthermore, the Star's report furnishes us with further details; details that indicate precisely the kind of adventurous gastronomy you would associate with a woman who so perfectly embodies the concept of fine dining. Winehouse has apparently eschewed the drearily commonplace instruction of Jamie Oliver or Delia Smith in favour of "studying the recipes of late cooking legend Fanny Cradock": "I'm all about Fanny Cradock," she is alleged to have told reporters.

You can certainly see the appeal of Cradock's singular take on gastronomy to Britain's most unpredictable R'n'B diva. Like Winehouse, Cradock was outspoken, fell from grace in public, and sported eye makeup that appeared to have been applied while wearing boxing gloves. But a quick perusal of her written oeuvre - including Adventurous Cooking With Fanny Cradock and the unfortunately titled Happy Cooking Children - reveals more than superficial similarities.

Cradock's recipe for green cheese ice cream - that's ice cream mixed with gruyere and green food colouring - provokes the same reaction as Winehouse does: you look at it and think, Jesus Christ, this woman's on crack. Cradock was incapable of seeing a hard-boiled egg without wanting to inject it with blue food dye, wrap it in anchovies and stick a pipe cleaner in it. Hers is food that is, metaphorically speaking, staggering around in a polka-dot mini-dress, sailor's tattoos and an enormous skew-whiff beehive wig with cocktail umbrellas stuck in it. It is cuisine à la Winehouse.

You can also see why Winehouse thinks that she can turn Fielder-Civil's head with the aid of Cradock's recipes. What red-blooded fellow could fail to be stirred by the sight of Winehouse peering coquettishly from behind a table pulsating with veal brains in white sauce, flamed kidneys, dyed hard-boiled eggs and green cheese-flavoured ice cream?

However, if a note of caution may be ventured, Lost in Showbiz advises the singer to steer clear of Cradock's recipe for the Banana Candle: a banana decorated with glacé cherries and angelica. The finished article looks - and there is no polite way of putting this - like an erect penis: not a sight a gentleman recently released from prison may wish to be reminded of.