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| The People's Chef |
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| Published by Wiley March 2004, ISBN 0470869917 |
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| The Menu |
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| ‘Tell me what you eat: I will tell you
what you are.’ - Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin |
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| If we knew nothing else about this mot we might
guess that its author must have been French; and it is to a Frenchman
- albeit a different Frenchman - that I propose to apply it. |
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| Some people, in their selves and their doings, seem particularly
to embody their time; Alexis Soyer was one such. In 1841 The Globe newspaper
said of him, without irony, ‘The impression grows on us that the
man of his age is neither Sir Robert Peel, nor Lord John Russell, or even
Ibrahim Pasha, but Alexis Soyer.’ This was of course hyperbole.
But it is nonetheless an extraordinary description of a thirty-year-old
French cook. |
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| Soyer started out as an unusually talented chef to the
upper crust, experiencing in that capacity the 1830 Revolution in Paris,
the riot-torn English countryside, and the cavernous luxury of the Reform
Club, where he held court in kitchens he had himself designed. He might
have confined himself, as did most grand cooks, to the comfortable milieu
of the rich who so eagerly sought his services; an easy life, and one
of comparatively little interest, at least to future generations. But
his restless curiosity and democratic spirit impelled him constantly to
explore new possibilities. He entered the world of the starving and destitute,
running soup-kitchens during the Irish famine and in London’s teeming
rookeries. He became a man of business, marketing an endless stream of
kitchen gadgets and patent drinks and sauces. Through his wife, and after
her death his lover, he maintained a foothold in London’s artistic
life. He wrote three popular and influential recipe books - The Gastronomic
Regenerator, The Modern Housewife, or Ménagère, and Soyer’s
Shilling Cookery for the People, each of which sold hundreds of thousands
of copies. He entered a scheme for the competition to design the 1851
Great Exhibition, and when this failed to win declined the official catering
contract, preferring instead to open the first truly universal restaurant
in Britain, in Kensington Gore just opposite Paxton’s Crystal Palace. |
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| Unlike his employers he had grown up in hardship and knew
all about poverty. But, perhaps for this very reason, financial risk held
no fears for him. Time and again, having accumulated some cash, he laid
it out and lost it, often on ventures designed to improve the lot of the
unfortunate. He personally subsidised his model soup-kitchens, even when
his own finances were far from healthy. And in 1855, after reading W.H.Russell’s
horrific despatches to The Times, he volunteered his services in the Crimean
War, revolutionising cooking in the hospitals and army camps (and not
missing the opportunity to sample exotic oriental dishes) while establishing
one of the world’s most improbable friendships, with Florence Nightingale.
He recounted those strange, interesting and horrendous months with characteristic
idiosyncrasy in a memoir, Soyer’s Culinary Campaign, written on
his return to London; at the time of his death he was collaborating with
Miss Nightingale in the reform of British army catering. He died before
their plans could be implemented, his health fatally undermined by Crimean
hardships. |
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| It is an extraordinary life, and one that offers a unique
snapshot of its time; but not easy to access, at least by conventional
means. Of course such a well-known figure leaves tracks. There are squibs,
stories and letters in the public prints, and vignettes in other people’s
memoirs. Soyer’s own account of the Crimea and the biography which
appeared the year after he died are full of anecdotes. But all these give
us only the view from outside. Even Thackeray, who was a friend and in
whose novels he appears, presents only an affectionate caricature. |
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| There is little of a more intimate nature. Like most poor
children, Soyer had little formal education. He left school at eleven
and spent most of his time thereafter in the kitchen. He could read and
write French, though his spelling was shaky and his orthography laborious.
But he never learned to write English, though he spoke it, and may have
been able to read it. He kept a daily ‘tablet’ in which he
recorded his doings and possibly his feelings, but this, along with all
his other papers, disappeared on his death. The few letters that survive
are business correspondence, mostly written for him by others. |
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| This uneasy semi-literacy was neither unusual nor, in many
cases, particularly disabling. Soyer was only a cook, and lived at a time
when more than half the inhabitants of both England and France could neither
read nor write. But his adult life took him into sophisticated circles,
where he keenly wished to be considered an equal and where most communication
was by letter. And he ended up producing books in English: a situation
in which difficulty with writing might be thought the ultimate inconvenience.
He was therefore forced to rely upon amanuenses, in both English (for
obvious reasons) and (for convenience, if not absolute necessity) French.
While she lived, this role was filled by his wife, who although she was
English, spoke good French; and after her death by a series of secretaries
– Soyer preferred, when he could afford it, to employ one for each
language. Most of his surviving correspondence is therefore written in
a variety of hands, the laboured signature being its one common feature. |
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| This was an expensive and cumbersome situation –
and, from the biographer’s standpoint, highly inconvenient. You
don’t dictate intimate letters to a secretary; indeed, given Soyer’s
uncomfortable relationship with the pen, it is unlikely that even his
daily ‘tablet’ was more than a bare note of meetings and expenditures.
However, for someone as creative, intelligent and energetic as he was,
this verbal awkwardness simply meant that he must find other channels
to express himself. As a result cookery became not just his living but
his medium: his natural means of communication, whether emotional, artistic
or political. |
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| In this situation the biographer’s course is clear.
Where the subject leads, she must follow. Directly and indirectly, it
is his recipe-books that contain the essence of Soyer’s world; and
it is there that I have not only sought it, but cooked it. In this diner
à la Soyer, each dish - produced, of course, from one of Soyer’s
recipes - is appropriate both to its position in the meal and to the topics
raised by that particular stage of the story. Here is history, quite literally,
on a plate: the first half of the nineteenth century as viewed through
the bottom of a saucepan. ‘Tell me what you eat: I will tell you
what you are’. |
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| As it happens, Soyer and Brillat-Savarin were Parisian
contemporaries, and Soyer in every molecule a product of the civilisation
Brillat-Savarin expounded. When Brillat-Savarin’s great work, The
Philosopher in the Kitchen, was published in 1825, Soyer, then fifteen,
was learning cookery, and much else, in the city’s restaurants.
Gastronomy, for both the Philosopher and his acolyte, includes conversation,
flirtation, jokes, anecdotes: everything that transforms a meal into a
long-remembered pleasure - some might say, everything that makes life
worth living. Brillat-Savarin points out, not without pride, that certain
French words - la gourmandise, la coquetterie - express concepts so particularly
Gallic as to be virtually untranslatable: other languages, possessing
no direct equivalent, simply adopt them. He might have added la gastronomie.
This was the sensibility Soyer brought to his life in England. |
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| By the time he arrived there, the shape of
the day’s main meal had acquired a ritual fixity. The hour of dinner
had moved, as the eighteenth century gave place to the nineteenth, from
mid-afternoon to evening, and the table was no longer loaded with different
and disparate dishes all offered simultaneously. Instead one course followed
another in the French manner: soup, then fish, hors d’oeuvres, meat,
fowl, game or savoury, dessert. For a grand dinner this was the minimum;
it might be expanded by removes, flancs, relevés, entremets –
words could be conjured up to legitimize an almost infinite number of
dishes - but at least the diner’s taste-buds faced only one assault
at a time. Our dinner comprises only the basic seven courses: short as
lives go, but densely packed. |
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| With one obvious exception, this is a menu Soyer’s
paying clients might have consumed at any time during his career. In their
lives, famine was a rarity. One of the things that made Soyer unusual
was that he also turned his attention to those for whom it was the rule. |
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Menu |
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New spring and autumn soup |
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Fish: Salmon with shrimp sauce |
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Hors d’oeuvres variés |
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Relevé: Mutton cutlets Reform |
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Entrée chaude: Famine Soup |
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Roast quails à la Symposium |
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Dessert: Turkish delights |
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Coffee |
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