How did a woman who couldn't cook produce the Victorian world's most famous recipe book?

Just as Nigella Lawson and Martha Stewart have turned Americans and Britons into nations of wannabe domestic goddesses, the Victorians had their own preacher in the shape of Mrs. Isabella Beeton (Anna Madeley, "Inspector Lewis"). How did a woman who couldn't cook produce the world's most famous recipe book? Dead by the age of 28, this cultural icon was not the dumpy, crinolined matron Britons have been led to believe, but instead a sassy, feisty, and very talented journalist and editor with an entrepreneurial husband, Sam (JJ Feild, "To the Ends of the Earth"). Theirs was an extraordinary marriage, the meeting of two creative minds to the enhancement of both. But it was the start of this marriage that led to Isabella's untimely death - and the revelation of a dark secret.