The People's Chef: The Culinary Revolution of Alexis Soyer

by Ruth Brandon

During the first half of the 19th century, Alexis Soyer became the most famous cook -and man-in London. In addition to his kitchen inventions and best-selling cookbooks, Soyer was part of many of the great events and social changes of his time. In her exciting biography of a culinary giant, Ruth Brandon uses each phase of his legendary career to explore a different aspect of 19th-century life, including the destruction of the English peasantry, the Irish potato famine, and Britain's disastrous involvement in the Crimea. Born in France, Soyer moved to England in his teens and rose to early fame as head chef at London's Reform Club, where he designed a kitchen so innovative that it became a tourist attraction. He opened London's first French restaurant, and was linked to some of the most famous actresses and dancers of the day. Yet for all his flamboyance, Soyer's fame lies in the work he did for those in need. He wrote cookbooks for the poor and designed a model soup-kitchen during the Irish famine. He traveled to the Crimea to manage the kitchens in Florence Nightingale's hospital, and invented a battlefield cook-stove that remained in use as recently as the Gulf War. Soyer's influence remains today with three of his books still in print. The People's Chef at long last pays tribute to this remarkable man who had such a profound effect on 19thcentury society.

Genres: Food History, Biography, Food

336 pages, Hardcover

Published March 1, 2005

Reviews

[Len · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ah! Alexis Soyer, Victorian Britain's celebrity chef. If he had been alive in today's world what a fortune he would have made on television and as a restauranteur. Apart from being a brilliant and inventive cook, he was theatrical and, basically, a show-off by nature. He was flamboyant, he dressed to be noticed - even in the kitchen - always with a floppy cap set at an angle "a la zoug-zoug", and he could sing. Stardom would have been his. As it was, as an emigrant from France to England in the 1830s, he didn't do badly for a poor boy made good.

The book follows Soyer's life in the form of a dinner party in which, chapter by chapter, the author works through his career and then includes a dish or dishes she has attempted to recreate herself from Soyer's repertoire. It's a cheery way of compiling a biography, though some readers may think it is a means of hiding a shortage of biographical material. Soyer was not a completely literate man in English and left little in the form of letters, diaries or journals. I found it quite pleasing, in fact I felt that the recipes could have been expanded without harming the life story. Not being much in the way of an ambitious cook, my favourite dish was a modest beetroot salad with red onion.

The author does all she can to bring out Soyer's talent and originality, his interest in caring about those confined to a lower income bracket than himself, and his preparedness to put even his life at risk in order to help the soldiers of the British army during the Crimean War. It was an enjoyable book and very easy to read, though one may come away feeling that a biography really needs more than basic facts to become useful or enlightening. The recipes were fine and may tempt more dedicated epicures to explore Soyer's own books.

[Nightwitch · Rating 2 out of 5]

Decent, but kind of a disappointment. Brandon had enough actual information on Soyer for maybe a long article, so she padded it out with her own cooking experiments with Soyer's recipes - in which she made each recipe all of once, and maybe switched it up as necessary depending on what she had available to her. Those parts are kind of like reading a food blog, except that even food blogs don't really get away with making a recipe once and then passing judgment on it these days. There are also a lot of aside references that seem to depend on knowledge the reader may or may not have (e.g. a reference to "Terry Pratchett's distinction between named and unnamed meat" - yeah, I have in fact read that, but it was years ago and a little more detail would be helpful to understanding what I am supposed to remember about it). I didn't leave with a good understanding of Soyer, and Brandon didn't really explore his times or milieu (which is another favorite biographers' tactic for dealing with insufficient information about the subject), which I would have preferred to all the cooking stuff (since she didn't come off as an expert chef or a food historian).

[David Montgomery · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fun exploration of an overlooked 19th Century figure, the pioneering Franco-British chef Alexis Soyer. Brandon intersperses recipes with her historical narrative of Soyer's life. The early period of Soyer's life, when he lived in France and was a figure of no renown, is more of a stretch, and on at least one occasion Brandon repeats one of the tall tales Soyer told about his youth as fact. (He was not, in fact, intimately tied up in France's 1830 July Revolution.) But the bulk of the book, concerning the period where Soyer made his mark on English cuisine, is much more thoroughly researched and engaging.

[marz · Rating 5 out of 5]

wait i loved this… brb gonna go make some very “palatable” soup

[Sephie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Picked up for a quid at a library sale, this must be one of the most interesting books I've read.

I confess I'd never heard of this amazing Frenchman who did so many interesting things in his short life.

Arriving in England in 1830, where, unlike France, the status of a cook was a lowly servant, he eventually became (arguably) the first celebrity chef. A man of huge resiliance, talent and inventiveness, he designed and managed the kitchens of London's Reform Club for many years. He then took on the task of revolutionising soup kitchens in Ireland during the famine, creating palatable and nourishing food, a role he was later to reprise when volunteering to oversee the feeding of the troops and the injured with Florence Nightingale in Scutari during the Crimean War. An unsuccessful venture during the time of the Great Exhibition almost broke him, but his inventions and recipe books kept him afloat. Apart from Florence Nightingale, he befriended I. K. Brunel (A local railway star here) when he was designing his field-cooker, a portable oven which was still in use by the forces up to the Gulf War and a host of other famous people. The cook, Alcide Mirobolant in Thackeray's 'Pendennis' was wholly based on Soyer.

Although enjoying a 'celebrity status' Alexis Soyer never forgot that he came from an impoverished background and always strove to improve nutrition for the poor.

The book is set out as seven courses and has many links for further reading, and lots of recipes.