Gruel, gin and mystery meat: Dickens's Victorian meals in the age of 'clean eating'

Many of Charles Dickens's characters struggle to put food on the table - they certainly wouldn't turn their noses up at a bit of mould on their adulterated breadIf Charles Dickens is thought of as a food writer at all, it is as the Man Who Invented Christmas Dinner. And there is some truth in the idea that he anchored the seasonal food to the day itself; plum pudding was called "Christmas pudding" for the first time by Eliza Acton, shortly after publication of A Christmas Carol; and goose was upgraded to the more expensive turkey by the reformed Scrooge.In terms of what we eat, though, Dickens's most abiding influence is his conviction that everybody has the right to sit down together and enjoy the same food. Crucially, the Cratchits' Christmas was not part of any ecclesiastical or charitable space but enjoyed by a poor family in their own home. Dickens was challenging a culture that regarded food as necessarily exclusive. These are conflicts in a war for status and control, in which food is deployed to show that "you are what you eat". Continue reading...