The Guardian:

Catherine Dickens is the patron saint of first wives, everywhere. She was courted young, by a man on the make who used her plump, comfortable ways to win him a wide circle of useful friends. While he wrote and fretted and pushed, she bore him ten children, coped with the death of one and made sure they all stayed quiet while the great man beavered away in his study. And then, just when she was past the age of even average prettiness, he dumped her for a girl as old as their eldest daughter.

Obliged to live with the stigma of separation from the man she still loved, over the last century and a half, Catherine has been obliged to watch while many of her husband’s biographers systematically set about turning her into a dull frump with whom no man of genius could be expected to keep faith. There are many ways of unpicking this damning narrative, but American scholar Susan M Rossi-Wilcox has chosen to do it by means of Catherine’s capacities as a housekeeper. For while Dickens, in that sour, post-separation phase, was apt to imply that she was as bad at this as she was at everything else, Rossi-Wilcox has delved into Catherine’s domestic records to show a woman passionately engaged with the whole business of keeping a good table (and, by implication, a good pantry, still-room and kitchen too). Instead of a domestic dowdy, reliant on a small repertoire of early to mid Victorian staples, Rossi-Wilcox finds a sprightly intelligence keen to graft dishes learned living abroad in France and Italy on to a stock of sturdy “Scotch’’ staples that reflect a much-loved Edinburgh childhood. In 1852 she published a pseudonymous recipe book entitled ‘What Shall We Have for Dinner?’

In some respects the Dickens family table turns out to be typical of its type, that of a metropolitan household leapfrogging several sections of the middle class. There is the usual love of mutton, beef and pork, pork, pork (Catherine is thrifty and anything piggy is cheap) and the instinctive resistance to vegetables and salad, especially the near-diabolic tomato. But in other ways the Dickenses displayed a set of preferences and passions that were entirely their own, born out of personal history and intellectual persuasion.

Fish, for instance, was regarded by most mid-Victorians with a kind of horror. Catherine, by contrast, loved anything with fins and from her kitchen emerged a stream of dishes along the lines of stuffed haddock, codling with oyster sauce and stewed eels. An imaginative attempt to refocus personal, literary, culinary and cultural history through the bottom of a custard cup. (‘Dinner for Dickens: The Culinary History of Mrs Charles Dickens,’ Menu Books by Susan M Rossi-Wilcox, 368pp, Prospect Books)