The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
Tasting notes
His books detailed plentiful feasts and poverty. Now an exhibition shows how Charles Dickens ate at home
A seat at Charles Dickens’ table
THIS WEDNESDAY marks the 175th anniversary of the publication of A Christmas Carol, in which Charles Dickens depicts the most heart-warming meal of all, a table set with ‘hissing hot’ gravy and a goose so keenly anticipated that the young Cratchits stuff spoons in their mouths to stifle excited shrieks. After the bird, a small but ‘wonderful pudding’, before drinks around the hearth while ‘the chestnuts on the fire sputtered and cracked noisily’. As finely as the gruel-rationed misery caused by poverty, he conjured the comfort of feasts (from the ‘substantial supper, and a mighty bowl of wassail’ enjoyed in The Pickwick Papers, to the ‘ruby, strawcoloured, and golden drinks, which … danced out gaily’ from their cellared bottles in The Mystery of Edwin Drood). And he experienced both in his lifetime, a subject explored in a new exhibition at the Charles Dickens Museum, in the very London town house to which the author moved with his family in 1837.
Drawing on letters and first-hand accounts, Food Glorious Food: Dinner with Dickens plays out the family’s parties (as well as key culinary scenes from his novels) throughout the rooms, using fish knives, punch ladles and a wooden lemon squeezer owned by the author to add colour. On display, too, is a rare early edition of the cookbook written by his wife Catherine, which lists her own ‘bills of fare’ for hosting between two and 20 guests, along with recipes – leg of mutton with oysters; asparagus soup; salmon curry. Titled What Shall We Have for Dinner?, its contents seek to answer a question as pertinent today as it was in the 1850s, when food was never far from the Dickens’ thoughts. Food Glorious Food: Dinner with Dickens runs until 22 April, with special Christmas events throughout December (dickensmuseum.com)