Alexis Soyer: Victorian Celebrity Chef Alexis Benoist Soyer (1810-1858) was a chef. That statement is on a par with saying that Baron Münchhausen got about a bit. Soyer cooked banquets for the top bananas of european society, saved lives with a soup kitchen in Dublin during the potato famine, invented a portable stove for the public and another for the army, wrote cookbooks for housewives, bottled his own brand of relish, and worked with Florence Nightingale to revolutionize military and hospital kitchens, all seemingly with buckets of flair and chipless shoulders. (While I am typing this very abbreviated list of his accomplishments I am also dithering about cooking an egg for breakfast. Maybe I should just go back to bed.) But my favorite Soyer factoid relates to one of his failed endeavors - and he gets a round of applause for the sheer grandiosity of the enterprise even though it nearly bankrupted him. In 1851, to coincide with the Great Exhibition, Soyer opened a restaurant in Gore House in London, calling it Soyer’s Universal Symposium to All Nations. It offered menus for all means and aimed to turn 5,000 covers a day, and to put the cherry on the bombe, our hero commissioned the journalist George Augustus Sala to paint a mural along the grand staircase, a panoramic cartoon of the big shots of the day. Soyer then insisted on titling this masterpiece (take a deep breath): “The Grand Macédoine of All Nations; being a Demisemimitragicomipanodicosmopolytolyofanofunniosymposiorama, or Suchagettingupstairstothegreatexhibition of 1851” Sala, who had a gentleman’s education and a robust sense of his own significance, was disgusted by this, and wrote in his autobiography “I groaned as I interpolated this hideous rubbish in my manuscript, but it was a case of Ancient Pistol and the leek. I wrote, and eke I swore.” The restaurant only lasted three months, and Gore House was flattened just over a decade later to make way for the fabulous pudding mould that is the Royal Albert Hall. This monument to high Victorian philanthropy seems an appropriate marker for Soyer’s Symposium. If he’d lived to see it he probably would’ve used it to turn out a monster blancmange. __ the content and capital letters of this post have been brought to you by the ever plucky ramona ranchera.

Alexis Soyer: Victorian Celebrity Chef

Alexis Benoist Soyer (1810-1858) was a chef. That statement is on a par with saying that Baron Münchhausen got about a bit. Soyer cooked banquets for the top bananas of european society, saved lives with a soup kitchen in Dublin during the potato famine, invented a portable stove for the public and another for the army, wrote cookbooks for housewives, bottled his own brand of relish, and worked with Florence Nightingale to revolutionize military and hospital kitchens, all seemingly with buckets of flair and chipless shoulders. (While I am typing this very abbreviated list of his accomplishments I am also dithering about cooking an egg for breakfast. Maybe I should just go back to bed.)

But my favorite Soyer factoid relates to one of his failed endeavors - and he gets a round of applause for the sheer grandiosity of the enterprise even though it nearly bankrupted him. In 1851, to coincide with the Great Exhibition, Soyer opened a restaurant in Gore House in London, calling it Soyer’s Universal Symposium to All Nations. It offered menus for all means and aimed to turn 5,000 covers a day, and to put the cherry on the bombe, our hero commissioned the journalist George Augustus Sala to paint a mural along the grand staircase, a panoramic cartoon of the big shots of the day. Soyer then insisted on titling this masterpiece (take a deep breath):

“The Grand Macédoine of All Nations; being a Demisemimitragicomipanodicosmopolytolyofanofunniosymposiorama, or Suchagettingupstairstothegreatexhibition of 1851”

Sala, who had a gentleman’s education and a robust sense of his own significance, was disgusted by this, and wrote in his autobiography “I groaned as I interpolated this hideous rubbish in my manuscript, but it was a case of Ancient Pistol and the leek. I wrote, and eke I swore.” The restaurant only lasted three months, and Gore House was flattened just over a decade later to make way for the fabulous pudding mould that is the Royal Albert Hall. This monument to high Victorian philanthropy seems an appropriate marker for Soyer’s Symposium. If he’d lived to see it he probably would’ve used it to turn out a monster blancmange.

__

the content and capital letters of this post have been brought to you by the ever plucky ramona ranchera.

March 18, 2010
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