Weidenfeld £18.99 pp342
There is a lesson here for today’s celebrity chefs. When Alexis Soyer died in 1858 at the age of 48, he was famous not only in Britain and Ireland, but in France, the country of his birth, in America, where according to the American Whig Review his name on a book was enough to ensure its instant popularity, and wherever in the world the British army had troops stationed. He was known for his sumptuous banquets with their extravagant trompe l’oeil dishes and 10ft-high desserts; for his pioneering stoves and kitchen gadgets; for his cookery books, complete with advice for the thrifty housewife; for his sauces and relishes made by Mr Crosse and Mr Blackwell; and for his flamboyant, bias-cut clothes (à la zoug-zoug, he called it). He was admired for his achievements in the Crimean war, where, unpaid, he reformed army and hospital catering, and for the sincerity and generosity of his philanthropic endeavours elsewhere.
Yet after his death his name slipped from the public consciousness and even from the archives. Far from being forever associated with the Crimean war, as General Vivian predicted at the time, his contribution was largely wiped from the records within a generation, in contrast to that of Florence Nightingale, his fellow toiler.
How many people today know much about Soyer other than that he was a chef whose signature dish, Lamb Cutlets Reform, continues on the eponymous club’s daily menu 160 years on? Who, outside the military, knows about Soyer’s stoves, which were in standard use until most of the British army’s stock of them went down with a supply vessel in the Falklands war, and which are still kept on standby today by disaster relief agencies in Canada and Australia?
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Ruth Cowen suggests, in this excellent, entertaining and vivid biography, that Soyer’s fame faded so quickly because he “was never regarded as truly respectable” by the Victorians. To be French and working-class were handicaps enough, but he compounded them by his attention-seeking sartorial style and inexhaustible ebullience. I cannot help feeling, however, that a large part of the problem was that Soyer was his own publicity machine, assiduously and successfully generating newspaper coverage throughout his career. It wasn’t always favourable, but it was never far away. With his death, there was nobody to do it for him.
In the absence of his energy and enthusiasm, even his funeral was a low-key, almost apologetic affair. No senior member of the military or government attended in recognition of either his contribution to the Crimean war or his famine-relief effort in Ireland. Nobody came from his London soup kitchen committees and nobody represented the Reform Club, where his reign as chef de cuisine had lasted 13 years. He had had his run-ins with the committee, culminating in his resignation in 1850, but he was the most famous and fêted chef any London club had ever seen and he brought, through the extraordinarily advanced kitchens that he designed, through his culinary prowess and his personality, a prominence to the club that it would not otherwise have had.
Although his closest friends were with him in his final illness, “things seem to have fallen apart after his death, and his affairs were strangely neglected”, says Cowen. It was five days until his death was registered, and then it was by an illiterate maid who had Soyer’s occupation recorded as “formerly a cook” and his age as 50. His will was annexed within months of his death and all his possessions disappeared, including his personal papers and the paintings by his beloved late wife, Emma, one of which had accompanied him to the Crimea and back. It was a damp-squid of a farewell to a life that had been packed with fireworks.
Most of these fireworks had been spectacularly successful, but one of them was as spectacular a failure. Soyer’s Universal Symposium to All Nations (he never gave any of his creations or books a snappy name where a long-winded one would do) was designed to cash in on the Great Exhibition of 1851. It was, says Cowen, to be an “absolutely vast . . . culinary pleasure garden . . . a melting pot of cuisines”, with bars and restaurants for all tastes and purses. As well as sustenance, it was to include art, sculpture, music, special effects and mechanical inventions. And it did. The symposium, in and around Gore House in Hyde Park, had London’s first American-style cocktail bar, a Moorish room where gold and silver teardrops appeared to fall down the walls, a grotto with real stalactites and a barmaid dressed as Ondine, a moonlit Peruvian forest with real palm trees, fireworks, hot-air balloon rides and much more. What it didn’t have was visitors. Instead of the 5,000-6,000 a day envisaged by Soyer, they averaged 1,000.
The symposium folded with a deficit of £7,000, a huge sum which, incredibly, Soyer eventually repaid, aided by the publication of an immensely successful book, his Shilling Cookery, and a few more gadgets, but with no help from his most famous invention, the army field stove. This he “gave to the nation” instead of registering or patenting it. Soyer was an exceptional man — colourful, compassionate, generous inventive, indefatigable. Now at last he has the biography he deserves.
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