Charles Dickens Cookbook

Author's note The recipes in this book are intended for those who take pleasure both in food and in the writings of Charles Dickens. Nearly all the dishes described here, although they belonged to the nineteenth-century table, can be cooked and enjoyed today, although some of the recipes have been given for their idiosyncratic and informative value alone. Sometimes ingredients and quantities have been change, although the occasion for alteration rarely arose, in spite of the myth that recipes in the past have called for extraordinary feats on the parts of cooks and household economies. Those oddities that do appear usually do so because of the difference between then and today in what was readily available. I am extremely grateful to the cooks and writers of the last century who troubled to record their recipes, and on whose works I have draw.