Brandon serves up the life story of a man who changed the way rich
and poor ate. Alexis Soyer cooked for 19th-century England. Moving
from France to Blighty as a young man, he cooked at Aston Hall and
at London's Reform Club, where his creations-haricot and lentil
salad, truffles stuffed with ortolans, "New Spring and Autumn
Soup"-earned him renown as he transformed the kitchens of the
Reform Club into "one of the sights of London." But, as Brandon's
(Surreal Lives, 1999, etc.) well-chosen title makes clear, Soyer
was no mere servant to English bon vivants. He was also a culinary
innovator and social reformer. In the late 1840s, he became
consumed by the problems of the poor and designed a new soup
kitchen to serve them. Disgusted by what was available at most such
kitchens, he published Soyer's Charitable Cookery: or, The Poor
Man's Regenerator, which spelled out healthy, cheap recipes for the
"poor and labouring classes." When he set up a soup kitchen in
Dublin, he was heralded as a savior. Soyer's final act of service
was to the British in the Crimean War, where he invented an
innovative field stove and oversaw the kitchen at a military
hospital in Constantinople. His 1858 death was mourned throughout
the Empire. As Florence Nightingale commented, Europe boasted
plenty of other gourmands, but there was no one else who had turned
his epicurean skill to the nutritious feeding of the masses.
Brandon tells Soyer's story briskly, though not flawlessly. A
confusing literary device-structuring the book around a menu, and
opening each chapter with a recipe-distracts from the overall fare.
(Do we really need to know that the mention of bones, in a recipe
for soup, reminds Brandon of "my mother's continually simmering
stockpot"?) Quibbles aside, devotees of Ruth Reichl and M.F.K.
Fisher will gobble up this delicious new gastronomic biography.
(Kirkus Reviews)
During the first half of the nineteenth century, Alexis Soyer, a
Frenchman from Meaux, was the most famous cook in London. A
combination of chance, talent and social conscience took him into
many of the great events of his time. Born in 1810, he cooked his
was through the Paris July Days in 1830; he oversaw the building of
Londona s most modern kitchen at the Reform Club, where he ran the
kitchen from 1837--1850; he designed a model soup--kitchen which he
took to Ireland, at the Lord Lieutenanta s request, during the 1847
famine; he opened Londona s first Parisian--type restaurant in
conjunction with the Great Exhibition in 1851; and in 1855, he went
to the Crimea to take over the running of the kitchens in Florence
Nightingalea s hospital at Scutari. When he died in 1858, Soyer was
helping Miss Nightingale reform British army catering.
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