Books & Poetry

Imagine Jamie Oliver in a war zone and you have Alexis Soyer, Victorian super chef. The flamboyant Frenchman made his reputation producing sumptuous and sometimes obscenely expensive dinners at The Reform Club on Pall Mall in the 1840s. He went on to write bestselling cookery books, invent the gas cooker, design soup kitchens for the Irish potato famine, lose his fortune opening a themed restaurant aimed at all classes, create the army’s field kitchen and join Florence Nightingale and Mary Seacole in Crimea where ‘in a clear parallel with Oliver and school dinners’ he forced the government to reform the terrible army cooking that was killing countless soldiers. Oh, and he invented the potato crisp too.

In Ruth Cowen’s excellent biography it’s easy to feel the manic, inventive energy of the man, to share his pain after his artist wife Emma died in childbirth, and to picture Soyer in trademark red beret and dandyish clothes cut in a bizarre zig-zag style, dashing off dinners and then heading for boozy and bawdy nights at the theatres of Drury Lane and Sadler’s Wells.

Through numerous puffs in the likes of Punch, Cowen reveals how Soyer was a master of PR. He even appeared in the Victorian equivalent of Hello!, a weekly instalment of the novel ‘Pendennis’, written by his great mate William Thackeray. But thankfully Cowen is not afraid to expose Soyer’s sycophancy, bad taste, insecurity, shameless social climbing, drink problem and late bigamous marriage alongside his genius.

‘Relish’ is a riveting story of how a working-class Frenchman came to influence governments and become one of the most famous men of his time. It’s also a marvellous portrait of the early Victorian age, where 100 guinea puddings existed alongside a million people dying of famine, and aristos and generals patronised the brilliant Soyer as ‘a mere cook’. We should thank Ruth Cowen for finally rendering Soyer protein palatable.