by M. J. Carter
“When I was a boy, I dreamed of running off to the fair,” I said wistfully.
“I would have been the one who took your sixpence and knocked you into the mud. On a good day, I might have taken your boots.”
We stood and looked at each other.
“Well,” I said, “What’s it to be? America? The Marshalsea? Groveling to Collinson? Sleeping for a hundred hours?”
“Breakfast,” he said.
Historical Afterword
Alexis Soyer (1810–1858) deserves to be far better known than he is. The second of the three great French chefs who came to Britain in the nineteenth century and became giants in the history of food (the other two were Marie-Antoine Carême and Auguste Escoffier), Soyer is perhaps the least well known, but he is, I think, the most fun, the most modern and, arguably, the most influential beyond the confines of the grand kitchen.
He was the first real celebrity chef, a brilliant, inventive cook and a shameless self-publicist. In style, one might describe him as part Heston Blumenthal, part Jamie Oliver. He had a line in crazy (and, to our palates, probably slightly disgusting) fantasy dishes (for example, desserts made to look like roast lamb with all the trimmings) and, at the same time, a genuine mission to educate the British—the British poor, in particular—to eat better and more nutritiously. From his early thirties, he was in London and involved in improving the food in hospitals and workhouses. He published a series of best-selling cookery books, from impossibly complicated recipes for other professionals (The Gastronomic Regulator, from which many of the dishes in this book come) through a household-management manual for middle-class women that predated Mrs. Beeton by twelve years (The Modern Housewife), to his highly influential A Shilling Cookery for the People.
He was a champion of seasonal and simple dishes: the energetically sociable writer W. M. Thackeray would cancel prior arrangements in order to eat his bacon and beans. (Thackeray also endlessly ribbed him in the pages of Punch magazine and portrayed him in his novel Pendennis in the guise of the ridiculous Frenchman Mirobolant.) Soyer was also, for his time, unusually generous to female cooks. He said he liked having them in his kitchen; they were better tempered and less dramatic than men. We know that he credited one of the Reform’s kitchen maids with helping him turn his ideas into recipes that ordinary people could use, and he admired a cook at the Russian Embassy called Miss Frederick, who helped him with big catering jobs on several occasions.
He comes over as an irrepressible, joyous, sometimes ridiculous figure, manically energetic, dreadfully sycophantic to the rich and titled (who were often unpleasantly snooty in return), appallingly pretentious (he called the gas stove he invented the Phidomageireion—apparently, Greek for “thrifty kitchen”) and barely literate—in English, at least, relying on a series of secretaries to transcribe his words. He seems to have been terrible with money.
He was also a brilliant logistician, inventor and innovator on a grand scale. In 1855, he went out to the Crimean War at his own expense to overhaul the desperate state of army catering, and ended up completely reorganizing the entire provisioning of the British Army. In the course of this, he invented a portable army stove that used a tenth of the fuel of the army’s previous arrangements, and which it continued to use until the 1950s. It is, perhaps, not surprising that he died aged only forty-eight, in 1858.
• • •
ALTHOUGH THIS BOOK is entirely fictional, many of the events described did actually take place, though I have played about with the dates. For example, the Reform Club did hold a fabulously grand and complicated banquet for Ibrahim Pasha, conqueror of Syria and son of the elderly ruler of Egypt, Mehmet Pasha (who was regarded by the British as a dangerous troublemaker), but it took place in 1846, not 1842. The menu included the dishes I describe, and the papers went mad for it, the Globe writing, “The impression grows on us that the man of his age is neither Sir Robert Peel . . . nor even Ibrahim Pasha, but Alexis Soyer.”
Soyer did reinvent the soup kitchen, but in 1847. He came up with a thirteen-foot, three-hundred-gallon soup boiler on wheels, and a steam bread oven that could bake nine thousand four-pound loaves in twelve hours, both of which could be heated by one fire. He set up a prototype in Spitalfields for the local silk weavers made destitute by cheap, mass-produced silk, then took it to Ireland during the famine, where it served nine thousand meals a day. In 1850, he prepared the Royal Agricultural Society’s annual banquet, feeding a thousand hungry farmers in Exeter. There was so much food left over that Soyer arranged a second dinner the next day for the town’s poor.
The Reform Club, with which Soyer’s reputation was so deeply intertwined (he spent thirteen years there), was set up in 1837 by a group of radical MPs, including William Molesworth, very much as described in this book. The radicals had by now combined with the more conservative Whigs and were informally known as the liberal party, but they were outnumbered and outgunned by the Whigs, who kept control of the party for another twenty years. Although some of the radicals strained against their collaboration with the Whigs, nothing as dramatic as the events recounted in this book ever took place. Molesworth remained a radical all his life and was the only one to serve in the liberal government of 1853.
When the Reform Club’s grand new building opened in Pall Mall in 1841, its kitchens were quickly dubbed “the Eighth Wonder of the World,” the most modern, the most advanced of their kind, and thousands turned up to take tours of them. They were full of practical, ingenious ideas invented and designed by Soyer himself, and were the first large kitchens to use gas ovens in which the temperature could be adjusted. Soyer was a great advocate of gas, which was far cleaner, safer and cheaper than wood and charcoal, and predicted that, one day, the whole world would cook with it. The Reform soon became better known for its delicious dinners than its politics.
Throughout his time at the Reform Club, Soyer had a stormy relationship with its committee. He was censured for insolence and, in 1844, for financial dishonesty, when he was accused, along with the butler and the kitchen clerk, of having falsified the butcher’s account. Some accounts suggest that he was covering for his staff. A vote to sack him was defeated by seven votes to six, and he resigned in outrage. It was only through the careful management of Lord Marcus Hill, the club chairman, that he got his job back. The matter left a permanent bitterness in his relations with the club.
Incidentally, the club’s first secretary was called Walter Scott, and he was sacked within months of taking the job, for incompetence and for “entertaining” housemaids in his rooms.
• • •
EVEN FOR THE VICTORIANS, poisoning was the quintessential Victorian crime, although it’s likely that poisonings were just as prevalent during the decades before Victoria came to the throne. Arsenic (the doyen of domestic poisons) and strychnine had been cheap and easily available—used largely for killing vermin—for decades. What changed in the Victorian era was that chemists began to come up with tests which proved the presence of poison. English chemist James Marsh devised the first test to reliably prove the presence of arsenic in 1836.
Trials involving poisoners reached their height in the 1840s, when there were ninety-eight poisoning trials in Britain; virtually all were domestic crimes. Many of the defendants—though by no means all—were women, and poor working-class women at that. In 1843, Elizabeth Eccles and Sarah Dazley were both executed for poisoning: Eccles killed five of her children and a stepson (though she was also suspected of having poisoned at least five other, earlier children); Dazley poisoned her first and second husbands, and her son. Poisoning might be used as a means to collect on that marvelous new invention, life insurance (which one could take out on a family member without them knowing), to knock off a difficult spouse or get rid of expensive extra mouths to feed.
I have to confess that I have found no cases of deliberate mass poisonings such as the book describes but, in 1858 in Bradford, two hundred people w
ere poisoned, of whom twenty-one died, after eating sweets accidentally made with arsenic. The confectioner had intended to bulk out his sweets with plaster of Paris but mistakenly bought arsenic.
Food contamination, food adulteration and food scares are subjects which return again and again, as the 2013 horse-meat scandal reminds us. Food adulteration was a massive issue in Victorian Britain, where food was unregulated and frequently mixed with all kinds of horrible things in order to make it cheaper, or go further, or look more attractive. Bee Wilson, in her history of food scares and adulteration, Swindled, gives a terrific account of this. The first great public health and anti-adulteration food campaigner was Thomas Wakley, founding editor of The Lancet, still one of the world’s leading medical journals. Week after week, he exposed evidence of food swindling. Legislation didn’t arrive until 1860. For years, his stories were received with apathy, and often opposition; plenty of free traders reckoned that a bit of harmless adulteration was OK, it was simply a profitable form of competition.
In the early 1850s, incidentally, Wakley and his researcher Arthur Hassall discovered that Crosse & Blackwell were putting “a very considerable amount of COPPER” in their bottled gooseberries and pickled gherkins, and lead oxide in their tinned anchovies, to turn them red.
In 1851, a Swiss doctor called Johann Jakob von Tschudi published a scientific paper about a group of peasants of the Lower Austrian Alps who had been taking normally lethal doses of arsenic for generations because they claimed it gave women a rosy complexion and men more energy, that it helped digestion, prevented disease and increased sexual potency. When they stopped taking it, they experienced withdrawal symptoms. There had been rumors about these Styrian peasants for decades, but now the story became a sensation around the world, and for a while there was a fad among fashionable Londoners for consuming neat arsenic.
Acknowledgments
I’d like to acknowledge—and recommend—a few of the books I consulted and read during the writing of this book, and from which I have stolen brazenly. There are a number of biographies of Alexis Soyer. In my opinion, the best and most enjoyable by far is Ruth Cowen’s Relish. For Victorian food scares, I plundered Swindled: The Dark History of Food Fraud, by the excellent food writer Bee Wilson. Rather to my surprise, there really are a lot of good books about poison! I’d recommend John Emsley’s The Elements of Murder: A History of Poison and, even more highly, Gail Bell’s terrific The Poison Principle, a book that takes in family memoir, the history of poisons and her own career as a chemist. For the Reform Club, I relied on George Woodbridge’s The Reform Club, 1836–1978, and Reformed Characters: The Reform Club in History and Literature, edited by Russell Burlingham and Roger Billis.
• • •
I’d like to say a big thank-you to the people who have so helped me on this book over a difficult time: my long-serving (and probably long-suffering) U.K. editor, Juliet Annan; assistant editor Anna Steadman; and my U.S. editor, Sara Minnich—all three completely invaluable. Thanks also to my excellent copyeditors Sarah Day and Dorian Hastings, the always indefatiguable Caroline Pretty, and my U.K. and U.S. publicists, the lovely Sara D’Arcy and Katie McKee. And, of course, my agent of twenty-two years, Bill Hamilton. Finally, thanks to John Lanchester. He knows what for.
About the Author
M. J. Carter is a former journalist and the author of The Strangler Vine, which was longlisted for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction and was an Edgar finalist for Best Novel, and The Infidel Stain. She is also the author of two acclaimed works of nonfiction: Anthony Blunt: His Lives and George, Nicholas and Wilhelm: Three Royal Cousins and the Road to World War I. Carter, who is married and has two sons, lives in London.
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