Alexis Soyer
Alexis Benoît Soyer was a French chef, writer and inventor, who made his reputation in Victorian England.
Born in north-east France, Soyer trained as a chef in Paris, and quickly built a career that was brought to a halt by the July Revolution of 1830. Moving to England he worked in the kitchens of royalty, the aristocracy and the landed gentry until 1837. He was then appointed head chef of the Reform Club in London, where he designed the kitchens on radical modern lines and became celebrated for the range and excellence of his cooking. His best-known dish, lamb cutlets Reform, has remained on the club's menu since the 1840s and has been taken up by later chefs from Auguste Escoffier to Prue Leith.
Soyer became a well-known author of cookery books, aimed variously at the grand kitchens of the aristocracy, at middle-class households, and at the poorest families, whose diet he strove to improve. He took a keen interest in public health, and when the Irish potato famine struck in the 1840s he went to Dublin and set up a soup kitchen that could feed 1,000 people an hour; he published recipes for inexpensive and nutritious food and developed cheaper alternatives to bread. He left the Reform in 1850 and tried to establish himself independently, but his venture failed and lost him a great deal of money.
During the Crimean War, reports reached London of the appalling privations endured by British soldiers, with disease rife and food inadequate. At the request of the British government Soyer travelled to the Crimea in 1855 and worked with the nursing pioneer Florence Nightingale to improve conditions for the troops. He ensured that in all parts of the army there were nominated cooks, useful recipes, and the means to cook food properly − in particular, the portable Soyer stove which he invented and which remained in army use, with modifications, for more than a century. In the Crimea, Soyer became seriously ill; he never fully recovered his health. A little over a year after his return to London in 1857 he died of a stroke.
Life and career
Early years
Soyer was born on 4 February 1810 in Meaux-en-Brie in north-eastern France. He was the youngest of the five children, all boys, of Emery Roche Soyer and his wife, Marie Madeleine Françoise, née Chamberlan. Meaux had been a Huguenot stronghold and retained a reputation for religious toleration. Emery Soyer and his wife, who are thought to have been Protestants, settled in the town in 1799. Emery had several jobs, one of them as a grocer, and scraped a modest living.Soyer's early life is not well documented. According to his first biographers, François Volant and J. R. Warren, the boy was destined by his parents for the Protestant ministry and was sent to a local seminary at the age of nine. In Volant and Warren's account, Soyer rebelled against the claustrophobic environment of the seminary and deliberately contrived his expulsion by ringing the church bell at midnight, causing general alarm in the town. Later biographers differ about the plausibility of this account: Ruth Brandon finds the story improbable; Ruth Cowen does not discount it, but notes that there are no surviving school records for Soyer; Elizabeth Ray, in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, treats the story as true.
In 1821 Soyer was sent to Paris to live with his eldest brother, Philippe, who was a cook. Philippe arranged an apprenticeship for him at a restaurant run by a friend, Georg Rignon, first in the Rue Vivienne, near the Bourse, and later relocated to the Boulevard des Italiens. In 1826 Soyer left to become second chef at Maison Douix, a large restaurant further along the Boulevard des Italiens. Within a year he was promoted to chef de cuisine with a team of twelve chefs beneath him.
By the end of the decade Soyer had struck out on his own, providing grand and high-profile banquets in aristocratic households. His career in Paris was halted by the July Revolution in 1830. Sources differ as to whether it was in a freelance capacity or as a newly appointed full-time chef to the French foreign ministry that he was cooking for a banquet given by the French chief minister, Jules de Polignac, when an armed mob broke in. Soyer was unharmed, but in the aftermath of the revolution his association with the fallen Bourbon aristocracy made him persona non grata and unemployable. At the suggestion of his brother Philippe he moved to England. He left behind him a young woman, Adelaide Lamain, and the baby son recently born to them.
London
By the time of the 1830 revolution in France, Philippe Soyer had been living and working in London for several years. There was a long tradition of French chefs working in the houses of Britain's rich and powerful; among the celebrated chefs to move from France to England in the early 19th century were Louis Eustache Ude and Antonin Carême. Philippe was head chef to the Duke of Cambridge, a son of George III, at Cambridge House, the duke's mansion in Piccadilly. In early 1831 Philippe secured a junior post for his brother in the kitchens of Cambridge House.File:Emma-Soyer-self-portrait.png|thumb|left|Emma Soyer: self-portrait drawing, engraved by H. B. Hall |alt=young white woman in semi-profile looking towards the artist
Over the next six years Soyer moved upwards from post to post. He became sous-chef to the 2nd Marquess of Waterford, and then, in 1833, to the 1st Duke of Sutherland, whose London residence, Stafford House, was widely considered to be the grandest in the capital. The duke died in July of that year and Stafford House passed to his son. The latter's wife, Harriet, was a Whig hostess and promoter of liberal causes; she remained a friend and supporter of Soyer throughout his life.
Soyer gained his first appointment as a head chef in a British establishment in the household of William Lloyd, a rich landowner, who maintained a town house in Upper Brook Street, Mayfair but whose main residence was at Aston Hall in Shropshire. Soyer worked for the Lloyd family for more than three years, becoming well known among the Shropshire landed gentry, who vied to lure him away from the Lloyds but had to content themselves with borrowing his services for important occasions. During his employment with the Lloyds he decided to have his portrait painted by François Simonau, a Belgian painter and teacher based in London. By some accounts he intended to send the portrait to Adelaide Lamain in Paris, but at Simonau's studio he met the artist's stepdaughter and pupil Emma Jones, with whom he fell in love. Simonau was not pleased – "A mere chef!" – but the romance flourished.
Soyer left the Lloyds in early 1836 to take over the kitchens of the 1st Marquess of Ailsa at St Margaret's House near Twickenham, a large riverside residence. Ailsa also had a central London house at the Privy Garden in Whitehall. He was a gourmet, a prominent Whig and a freemason; it is possible that it was he who introduced Soyer to freemasonry, of which he became a lifelong member. Ailsa took a very active interest in the kitchen, discussing menus in detail with Soyer, and was to remain a friend and supporter when Soyer moved on after a year.
Reform Club
On 12 April 1837 Soyer and Emma Jones were married in St George's, Hanover Square. One of the witnesses was Soyer's friend Ude, then London's most celebrated chef. Soyer encouraged his wife's burgeoning artistic career, and she continued to exhibit and sell her paintings.At around the same time Soyer was appointed head chef of the recently-founded Reform Club, a liberal-minded rival to the right-wing Carlton Club, situated nearby. The Reform was temporarily based in Pall Mall while purpose-built permanent premises were built further along the same street. Elizabeth David comments that Soyer's appointment:
On 28 June 1838 Queen Victoria was crowned; on the day of the coronation the Reform Club put on a grand breakfast for 2,000 members and guests. Soyer served "déjeuner à la fourchette" – a buffet – featuring among other dishes:
Other dishes in the buffet, as recorded by Cowen, were "delicate fish in clear aspics, succulent pigeons wrapped in vine leaves, salmon in pastry cases and tiny butter croustades filled with lobster, oysters and carefully blended pâtés".
Soyer's kitchens at the Reform were the most talked-of in the country, and became a tourist attraction. The Morning Chronicle commented that
the British Museum, Westminster Abbey and other tourist attractions were outshone by Soyer's kitchens at the Reform Club.
The kitchens used a variety of fuels: coal, charcoal, and gas − the last a major innovation. Meat and game were kept in a larder fitted with slate tabletops and lead-lined ice-drawers, keeping the temperature cool and constant. Fish was kept fresh on a marble slab under a constant stream of iced water. The main kitchen table was large and twelve-sided; at its centre was a steam-heated metal cupboard in which delicate dishes could be kept hot. The table was built around the kitchen's four central columns, to which Soyer had small cupboards attached, holding spices, salt, fresh herbs, breadcrumbs and bottled sauces, conveniently to hand for the chef and his juniors. David notes that, unusually, several of Soyer's junior chefs were women.
In 1842, at the invitation of Leopold I, King of the Belgians, Soyer travelled to Brussels. During his absence his wife had a miscarriage and died. He was distraught and, according to Ray, "never fully recovered from his grief and guilt at having left his wife alone". He commissioned a memorial statue, and threw himself into his work, becoming even busier. In 1844 he fell in love again, this time with the ballet dancer Fanny Cerrito, with whom he began an amitié amoureuse that lasted the rest of his life.
Soyer's best-known dish, still on the club's menu in 2023, is côtelette d'agneau Réforme – lamb cutlets Reform – fried breaded lamb cutlets served with the piquant Reform sauce. His original recipe, published in 1846, runs to more than 500 words. Later chefs, including Auguste Escoffier and more recently Victor Ceserani, Mark Hix and Prue Leith, have featured the dish in their repertoires. Escoffier's recipe is considerably shorter than Soyer's but both contain the same essential ingredients, although Escoffier specifies truffles in addition.
Among the most celebrated of the banquets that Soyer provided for the Reform Club was one given in honour of the visiting Ibrahim Pasha of Egypt in July 1846. There were four kinds of soup; four of fish ; thirteen different entrées, including spring chicken, mutton cutlets, hot quail terrine, young hare and vol-au-vents of mackerel's roe; eight roasts ; and then a course that in the manner of the time offered choices of both savoury and sweet dishes: among others, curried lobster, chicken salad or game galantines, and crisp cakes of almonds and cherries, praline tarts with apricots, or pineapple crystallised jellies. The climax of the menu was the dessert, named La Crème d'Egypte à l'Ibrahim Pacha: a huge pyramid of meringue and cake, filled with pineapple cream and topped with a portrait of the chief guest's father, Muhammad Ali Pasha.
In 1846 Soyer published The Gastronomic Regenerator − "a simplified and entirely new system of cookery with nearly two thousand practical receipts ... illustrated with numerous engravings" − a work of well over 700 pages; according to the historian Eric Quayle the book had "a profound effect on the cooking and eating habits of several generations of Britons". The Times reported that the book had taken the author ten months to prepare, and during that time, as well as writing it, the chef had "furnished 25,000 dinners, 38 banquets of importance, comprising above 70,000 dishes, besides providing daily for 60 servants, and receiving the visits of 15,000 strangers, all too eager to inspect the renowned altar of a great Apician temple".