Alexis Soyer was Britain’s first celebrity chef, and the catalogue of his achievements dwarfs that of Delia or Jamie. He made his name providing banquets for the richest Victorians, including Prince Albert and half the Cabinet, yet he also designed a soup kitchen for victims of the Irish famine, which fed 8,750 people daily in Dublin (the ingredients of the soups supplied included turnip peelings and leek leaves). He wrote a ballet, and also invented relishes for Mr Crosse and Mr Blackwell. He was satirised, as M. Mirabolant, by Thackeray in Pendennis, but was a friend of Florence Nightingale, whose hospital kitchens at Scutari he re-designed and ran. He opened London’s first restaurant, the Symposium in Kensington, which featured spectacular special effects including the Grotto of Eternal Snows (with icicles renewed daily, and a model arctic fox), and also published Britain’s first cookery book for the labouring classes — the entire print run of 10,000 sold out in a day.
He was born poor in 1810, his father a labourer in Meaux-en-Brie. After a desultory education which ended at the age of 11, he left for Paris to find work as a cook’s apprentice. Paris at that time was a wonderful place for cooking; chefs were making their reputations in the newly invented restaurants, then uniquely Parisian institutions, where customers could for the first time choose their own meals from a varied menu. In 1831 Soyer followed some of his fellow cooks to London and the kitchens of the British aristocracy. He first became widely known as the chef at the Reform Club, his fame as much a result of assiduous self-publicity as of his fine cooking. Throughout his life he never missed an opportunity to flatter aristocratic patrons or court the press.
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