Alexis Soyer

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Hello, and welcome to You're Dead to Me, the Radio 4 comedy podcast that takes history seriously.

My name is Greg Jenner.

I'm a public historian, author, and broadcaster.

And today, we are tying our aprons and firing up the stove as we learn all about 19th century celebrity chef Alexis Soyer.

And to help us, we have two very special dining companions in History Corner.

She's an author, broadcaster and food historian, specialising in food from 1600 to the present day.

That's a lot of food.

You might have heard her on BBC Radio 4's The Kitchen Cabinet or read one of her many wonderful books, including The Greedy Queen, all about Queen Victoria's food tastes.

And you'll definitely remember her from our delicious episode on the history of ice cream.

It's Dr.

Annie Gray.

Welcome back, Annie.

Thank you for having me.

Lovely to have you back.

And in Comedy Corner, he's a comedian, podcaster, writer, broadcaster.

He's a superstar.

He co-hosts the mega award winning off menu podcast he judges dishes on the great british menu he's done gags on mock the week he's had an existential crisis on taskmaster champion of champions sorry ed i had to mention it you may love his food themed memoir glutton the multi-course life of a very greedy boy and you'll remember him from our episodes on lord byron and gothic vampire literature it's ed gamble welcome back ed thanks for having me back delighted ed you are the foodiest comedian in the uk it's certainly an avenue that i've uh i've pursued i would say you know once you get a thing, you've really got to lock in.

I'm just out there mopping up every single food theme job possible.

And you don't even like food.

You've just found an easy.

What do you know about food history?

Are you happy in the 19th century?

I mean, I can't promise to offer much historically in terms of food history.

I can barely remember what I ate last week.

Well, have you heard of Alexi Soyer?

I have not.

You know what?

I've done obviously no research for this podcast because when I'm told that's not my job to do the research, that someone actually qualified will be here doing it.

If anything, I unlearned things for this podcast.

So, what do you know?

This is where we have a go at guessing what our lovely listener might know about today's subject.

And we all can name a celebrity chef, right?

You've got some of them are so famous they only need one name, Delia, Jamie, Nigella.

But, Alexey Soye, probably not ringing any bells for you.

You might have dined at the fancy reform club in London.

Who hasn't, of course?

You might have eaten one of his delicious creations if you did.

You're probably not going to know about him unless you are a student of 19th-century military history or culinary history or if you were in the British Army in the Falklands War.

That's the kind of the Venn diagram of people who might know.

I'm none of those things.

Okay.

So who was this French celebrity chef who found fame in Britain?

Why is he known to ex-soldiers?

Just what is a magic stove?

Let's find out, right?

Okay, Dr.

Annie, first things first.

Where and when was little Alexi born and to whom?

What's his family situation?

He was born in 1810, so in what to us Brits is the Regency period.

So think about Jane Austen, Colin Firth coming out of the lake, that kind of thing.

Born in France in a town called Meaux Ombri, which was known for its mustard and its cheese.

His parents are called Emery and Marie.

They'd been grocers, but although they always called themselves grocers, they weren't actually very good ones.

And his father, in particular, had gone through lots of different jobs, mainly unemployed.

So I think it would be kind to call Alexei working class.

He was on that sort of liminal zone that you find so often in Victorian period between working class and actually abject poverty.

Something he never forgot about.

He was always desperate for social respectability later on in life.

Normally on this show, it's like princes and kings.

That's a rare star for us.

But also born in Bree.

He was born in the home of Bree.

That's pretty good, isn't it?

Yeah, surrounded by cheese in the labour ward.

Yeah.

So he's born in Bree.

We might say he's destined to work in the food industry because parents are grocers and he ends up as a chef.

But do you want to guess what his childhood professional training was?

Well, you would have thought if you're born in Brie, you're going to be

a cow.

Maybe a cow.

Maybe you work within dairy or cheese, etc.

Or

mustard.

And you mustn't forget the mustard.

No, mu Ta.

So yeah, maybe he's a spicy cow.

Not a spicy cow.

And

he was training for the priesthood.

Yeah, so he was a Protestant, which is relatively rare in France at that point.

So they sent him off to a Protestant seminary because he had a very good singing voice.

So one presumes he could get a scholarship.

And his beginnings are quite kind of murky because there's lots of stories that he told about himself, the truth of which...

Anyway, the story he always told was that he was sent into this seminary and he was a troublemaker.

He didn't really want to be there.

So the story goes that he decided to get expelled by breaking out of his dormitory, climbing up the cathedral tower, and ringing the bells, which, bearing in mind, that was also the signal for Armageddon.

Really just all hell upon the town.

So the local fire brigade came out and the local garrison.

So as you can imagine, he didn't last very long.

Yeah, but what a legend.

It's quite a school prank, isn't it?

The other priests would have been like, man, this is such a bad boy.

Yeah, he is.

Yeah, he is.

He's the bad boy of the Belle Squad.

He's a Belle Ed.

So that's the end.

Well, I mean, that's the end of his priest career.

So it was bye-bye Brie for teenage Alexi.

So what was next for our balshy bell boy?

Well, next he got pushed off to Paris to go and stay with his brother Philippe, who was a chef.

And by all accounts, he sort of decided that, okay, well, yeah, fine, he'd go into chefing, largely because it was a really good excuse to drink a lot and party.

So he became a real party animal.

This is again another period of his life where there's no solid evidence but a lot of stories.

One story involves a grand ball.

It's been held by a wealthy banker and the story involves him, Alexei, expensive china crockery, a pair of missing trousers.

What do you think goes down?

So are his trousers missing?

Yes.

So his trousers go missing.

There's some expensive crockery.

Does he lose his trousers and then attempt to move around the party by covering

covering his private parts with expensive crockery?

Or

steals the crockery, bags them up in the trousers, throws them out into a bush outside, and just leaves completely Winnie the Pooing outside.

That one sounds closer to the truth, I think.

We're not quite sure what happens, Annie.

No,

the way he told it was that there's this party going on.

It's run by a banker, so there was a lot of money there.

And because he was something of a showman, he had sort of thought about going on the stage at one point.

So he ended up inevitably getting tanked on champagne.

Then he started singing.

At some point in the evening, he was tasked with taking this china somewhere in a basket.

So off he went, but he was very, very drunk.

So he decided to stop and have a small sleep to try and recover from the drunkenness.

I mean, when he woke up, he was wandering around with no china and no trousers.

Right.

So this was obviously hugely embarrassing for somebody who was attempting to make his name as an outside caterer who wasn't a complete drunkard.

So there was a sort of furore, and eventually the police did turn up with the basket of china and hurrah!

The missing trousers.

Oh, really?

Yeah, yeah.

They were returned to him, apparently.

So they were together, the trousers and the crockery.

Well, I don't know.

I mean, maybe the police heard about this sort of half-naked man wandering around Paris going, where's my china?

Yeah, I mean, as a student, I used to wear very, very baggy, kind of heavy metal jeans back in the early noughties, sort of, you know, new metal days.

And you could get a couple of pint glasses in there and leave with them.

Maybe he was trying to just walk home with some very valuable china and then had a sleep.

It was quite big at that point.

Dessert China in particular, you're looking at stands with handles and sort of multi-layered garments, you know, all these epiagnes and tatses, and you know, a lot of it was very blingy as well.

A lot of gold going on, a lot of really beautiful.

I mean,

I'm imagining the castle from Beauty and the Beast, by the way.

And maybe they're singing to him.

Maybe it's maybe it's just like the state he was in.

Maybe they probably took his trousers off for you.

BR guys.

Okay, so maybe we don't want to leave this guy in charge of the catering.

Annie, how does this chaotic celebrity singing chef with a sort of bit of a drinking issue, how does he end up in England?

I'm imagining he shows up naked on a boat to Southampton one night, you know, his trousers on his head.

Possibly, but that wasn't the way he told it anyway.

So he worked his way up through Parisian society as a lot of chefs did at that point, and he ended up being a chef at the Foreign Office.

And this is in 1830.

So this is the French government.

This is the French government.

This is a very high-up man in the French government.

And this is France where, throughout the early early part of the 19th century, they didn't really like to go too long without having a revolution because, you know, it was fun.

So 1830, there was another revolution, the July Revolution in this case, which didn't last long, but did topple the monarch at the time.

They stormed the kitchens where Soyer was in the middle of catering a banquet, and this mob broke into the kitchens.

They shot two of the chefs, and all hell broke loose.

And

it was genuinely a very dangerous moment.

But because Soyer was very good at thinking on his feet, he quickly whipped off his apron and possibly his trousers.

I mean there's a running theme of trousers here, and started singing La Marseillaise.

So what actually happened was he was hoisted on the shoulders of the revolutionaries who took him out of the kitchen singing, What a hero, what a patriot, presumably not recognising who he was, and then once he was out of the kitchens he scarpered.

But he then got a reputation as being this sort of shill for the for the monarchists and he was persona non grata, couldn't get a job anywhere in France.

So once again he followed Brother Philippe over to England, which was again a tried and tested route for Parisian chefs.

They all sort of drifted over to England as kind of refugees.

And Philippe set him up with a job with sort of one of the minor royals at the time in Britain, because there were hundreds of them.

So he ended up once again working in Britain, but this time as a chef.

I would like to say chastened, but I don't think he was.

He'd learned nothing.

No, no, no.

Okay, so he saves his life by singing the French national anthem.

What song could you sing to save your life if a crowd broke into well?

It depends.

I mean, obviously, it depends what the crowd are for, right?

Because I'm happy to capitulate to any market.

It's the link.

I just want to save my own skin.

I've got absolutely no ethics whatsoever.

So the crowd are they're angry at the concept of podcasting.

They hate podcasts.

Right, yeah, yeah, yeah.

What are you going to do?

I guess I'm singing the Radio Four Pips just

to let them know I am a traditionalist when it comes to broadcasting.

You're doing the shipping forecast.

I'm doing the shipping forecast.

You know, I like live radio.

That's where, like,

good.

For American listeners, that's a very funny joke.

But

i often have to say that

just to let you know that is a very funny joke

so uh we've got our impromptu karaoke champion alexi soyer fleeing violence going from revolutionary france into britain in 1831 which is during the reign of we're not at victoria yet are we

the sort of most non-entity monarchy no one's no one's favourite king so does he walk into this job and and then starts cooking what what's the problem pretty much i mean the so at the time in england if you were an aristocrat, you wanted a French chef, a French male chef.

They were regarded as the people you wanted in your kitchens.

They were paid more than English male chefs.

They were paid a lot more than women.

So he was in quite a good position anyway, just by dint of being French and having a penis.

So he worked for the Duke of Cambridge, then he went off to go and work for a man called the Mad Marquis of Waterford.

So this was a man who...

That's a black adder character.

Yeah, well, his hobby was getting drunk and beating up the working classes.

So, you know, really good people.

And eventually he broke free of the dross dross and ended up working for extraordinarily wealthy people.

He went to work at Stafford House, which was probably the grandest house in London, over onto the Welsh borders to go and work for a family called the Lloyds, back into London, made lots and lots of connections because he was an absolutely incorrigible networker and eventually networked his way into working as the head chef at the Reform Club, which was a liberal gentleman's club founded by people who had favoured the Reform Act of 1832.

I mean, essentially, it was a dining club, but the previous chef had only lasted three weeks.

So, there was a certain level of pressure.

Soyer decided he was the man for the job, and he was there specifically to cook the best, most fashionable food, which was always called at the time recherche.

And he was the king of the rechercher.

It's a term that's always applied in the 19th century to the most, I would say, the most pretentious cuisine, actually, because it does become a very middle-class sort of veriche term.

But the idea is that it's something never seen before.

Usually, it's the stuff that involves lots of preparations, lots of pounding, lots of moulding.

It's got to look completely and utterly crazy.

Okay.

Okay.

So what kind of fine dining dishes are you imagining in this richer style, Ed?

Well, when I think sort of classic French cuisine, I'm thinking a lot of butter, a lot of cream,

champagne in every sauce,

a lot of verjus, grapes in verjou, that sort of stuff.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's what I'm imagining.

Quite liquidy.

A lot of liquids.

A lot of liquids.

But a lot of liquids, a lot of dairy, a lot of cheese.

The sort of food where you see it and you think, that looks beautiful, that's so wonderfully presented, and then you have two mouthfuls of it and you go, oh, I feel sick.

Annie, what is Alexei Soye cooking at the Reform Club?

Well, first of all, I should say people then had a lot more stamina than we did.

A lot more stamina.

He did actually provide quite a lot of British classics.

He'd fallen in love with kind of almost British street food while working for all these various aristocrats because he had a habit of getting very drunk.

You'll be really surprised to hear.

And then at sort of four in the morning, he'd go off wandering the streets of London eating sort of scram, basically.

So he did do lots of what we would call British classics.

He also invented a thing called reform sauce, which was usually served with mutton cutlets, which is still served at the reform club today.

And that's a really sort of spicy sauce that cuts through the mutton.

Really, really nice.

But his big thing, and the thing he became best known for, was these eye-watering banquets for 2,000 people at a time, that kind of thing.

And then a thing which he did quite a few times, which he also later published a recipe for called Turban of Larks at a Parisienne, which I think sort of exemplifies the just stupidity of Victorian cuisine at that point because the recipe for it starts off by taking larks and then boning them out with a penknife because a chef's knife is too big to bone out a lark because a lark is you know

yeah so you bone out these larks with a penknife and then stuff them and then lard them up and then cook them forever and ever and then you present them almost as a crown of larks

hence the turban and they're quite popular turbans at that point but to go the extra mile and have larks yeah was particularly bonkers.

It is annoying when you get a bone in your lark, though, isn't it?

You've got to take the time.

What's the British equivalent of a turban of larks?

Like a flat cap of pheasants, isn't there?

I don't know.

I don't know.

I mean, I kind of think it should be a bowl of hat, shouldn't it?

It should be non-what's the most British meat?

It has to be beef, doesn't it, really?

But it's some bit of the beef.

Okay.

Like some really minor top hat of street pigeons.

They're bigger than lark.

Bigger than that.

They are too big, aren't they?

They don't really work.

Bees.

Top out of bees.

Is there honey in this?

No, it's just bees.

No, it's bees.

We bone them.

Okay.

We know now that Alexei Soye is a whiz in the kitchen, but he's also a whiz with a kitchen.

Do you know what I mean by that?

What, in terms of running the kitchen?

More than that, in terms of the technology in a kitchen.

Okay, so the equipment as well.

Yeah, he's innovating in that way.

It's quite interesting, Annie.

And I don't know whether whether he's the pioneer, because I know he likes to sort of build his part a little bit.

So I don't know whether he's like really, really inventing or whether he's just sort of popularising, but he brings a lot of stuff into the kitchen.

I think it's a mixture of both.

He was quite well known for finding sort of small-scale inventors and such and then buying out their invention and kind of, you know, popularizing it or building on it.

But he was absolutely an inventor in his own right as well.

He was, he constantly was fiddling.

He was always coming up with ideas.

I think one of the reasons reasons that he's such a fascinating character is because he was so ahead of his time with the technology.

Some of the things that he did, we didn't really start to do for another 80, 90 years after his death.

So, with the reform club, he worked with the architect to put in new kitchens just after he arrived.

And, you know, some of the stuff was fine.

There were separate departments for butchery and for lots of different larders.

And, you know, it was a huge complex of kitchens.

So far, so normal.

But then he did things like install sliding chopping boards and sliding partitions so that everyone could have their own workspaces.

He made sure things were the right heights for shorter people, kitchen maids and people like that.

There were supporting columns in the kitchens that had condiments hidden within them so you always had what you needed to hand.

He had proto-refrigeration, bearing in mind at this point, refrigerated just meant something with lots of ice in.

He had constantly running water pouring over the fish counter to keep his turbo from getting warm.

And then he went all out for steams.

He had a steam table.

It's steam heated so the dishes are staying hot.

There's temperature-controlled ovens, there's a roasting range with a boiler at the back, so you constantly have hot water.

And most of all, he was this huge champion for gas.

So, gas had been in for lighting for quite a long time, but very, very few people have thought about cooking with it, partly because the size of the pipes was too small to get enough supply in.

But because he was building from new, he could make sure the pipes were made bigger so he could get this gas into the kitchens.

And he was this enormous champion for cooking on gas.

So, gas was a big, big theme in his life.

And even more than that, he did all this stuff.

That's what I would expect from a a French chef.

Yes.

They're very rich foods.

Very rich food.

But even more than that, he invited the public to come and see the kitchen.

So the kitchen at the Reform Club very, very quickly became a tourist attraction in London.

And anyone who went there was like, oh, I think I'm going to go and look at Mr.

Soyer's gas.

He was experimenting with kitchen appliances as well.

So he claims we've invented many gadgets.

I'm not sure if he...

invents them or whether he licenses themselves.

I think what I've learned about this guy so far is we can't necessarily trust what he says.

You're definitely getting the hang of this episode.

Thank you, Eddie.

Yeah.

So which of these five gadgets, one of them's not true, did he not invent or at least popularize or claim to invent popularize?

Okay, so mechanical kitchen timer, plug strainer, a tendon separator for meat, an ice cream scoop or a cafeter for coffee.

Which of those five was not an Alexi Soyer original?

Obviously, they're all big in my life.

The tendon separator especially.

I'm going to go with the plug- the plug strainer.

It doesn't feel sort of grand enough.

It doesn't feel old cuisine in that way.

There's not enough flair.

There's not enough flair for the plug strainer.

No, I'm going to go with that.

I mean, huge news, huge news if he really did invent the cafeteria, but

the cafeteria he does invent.

He invented it.

Yeah.

So, no, the one that I, I'm afraid I caught you out there, ice cream scoop, is not his.

It comes later, later in the century.

Thinking about it, the plug strainer is almost the sink cafetiere, isn't it?

And And also, really important because block drains at that point in time are very, very difficult to clean them when you don't have diner rod.

Yeah, yeah, and also all that butter going down the drains, right?

If you're cooking all your lavish dishes, yeah, so it's lark bones.

So many lark bones.

Yes, a cafeteria is one of his.

Wow.

Kitchen timer.

Pretty clever, isn't it?

What is one utensil that you wish someone had invented, or perhaps you could invent right now, that desperately we need in kitchens?

Hey, look, if I could invent a kitchen utensil that we desperately need in kitchens, I wouldn't be here.

I'd be

a dragon's den, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

In Back to the Future 2, they have that sort of rehydrating oven thing where they get a tiny pizza delivered and they put it in the oven and hit it and then five seconds later it's a full-size pizza.

That.

Yes.

I'd like that.

Yes, yes, please.

And I know there are like, you know, dehydrators and whatever and all of that, but I just want something that makes food massive.

I mean, I'm here for it.

Yeah, that's absolutely.

I'd buy it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I would like to propose my wife's ice cream glove, which she invented for me.

I love ice cream.

I'm obsessed with ice cream, and I love eating Ben and Jerry's straight out the tub, but it gets too cold, straight out of the freezer.

So she made me a glove that slides onto it.

It's the salad things I've ever heard, Greg.

It slides onto my hand.

My hands get cold.

It slides onto my hand, and you can hold it, and it's attached to your hand permanently

because it's basically like a mitten with an ice cream tub.

I've got a better invention for you in your house.

Yes.

The bowl.

And I like it.

I like it.

Ice cream glove.

Available in all good shops

from my wife.

Right, okay, let's move on.

So the ice cream scoop comes later in the century.

The others are Alexei Soye, originals, caveat, maybe not originals, but certainly he's popularising them and claiming them.

Yeah, and everyone builds on the shoulders of others.

So I get the feeling he's fun in the kitchen, but 1837 was a spicy year for him romantically as well, because this is where he meets his good lady wife.

Well, he's already met her.

He meets her in 1835, I think.

Okay.

So Soyer, as you might imagine, was something of a flirt, but he doesn't seem to have been a massive ladies' man.

He had sort of quite a few long-term romantic relationships.

He wasn't very good at marrying people, though.

So in Paris, he'd already had a relationship with a lady called Adelaide Le Mans and almost certainly had a son by her, or at least later on, the son called himself Alexei Soyer, and they had some lovely tete-a-tetetes, and then Soy forgot about him in his will, so who knows?

But he, with typical aplom, walked into the studio of a leading artist at one point and said, I want my picture painted because I'm Alexei Soye.

And the chat went, Yeah, right, whatever.

My stepdaughter can paint you.

So in comes the stepdaughter, and by all accounts, it was love at first sight.

So Soye courted this lady who was called Emma, Elizabeth Emma Jones, and she was a very, very good portraitist.

Very few of her works survive, and the catalogue entries suggest they were of that saccharine Victorian type that involved poor people with wood.

But nevertheless, he courted her, and in 1837, they got married.

They had a really interesting marriage because she was a career woman and he was a career man, so they didn't really have what was by Victorian standards a conventional relationship at all.

She would be off travelling quite a lot, he worked quite a lot.

It does seem to have been a really lovely relationship though.

Genuinely, when you read about it, it's gorgeous.

There are stories like she turned up at one point to go and wait for him in his office at the Reform Club and he didn't turn up for an hour.

So she just sketched herself on the wall as a visiting card and left.

And when he got back, he was so entranced by this picture that he had it framed.

And it's just, you know, they genuinely seem to have had this beautiful, beautiful romance.

I think it's better just to be there on time, though.

You could argue that.

That sounds lovely and romantic, but it's a pain, isn't it?

I mean, you could argue that.

It did have a tragic end, though.

Yes, she dies very young.

Very, very young.

So she became pregnant with their first child.

And about, I think it was only a couple of weeks before the child was due, Soye went off to Belgium.

She told him to go.

She was like, don't worry, don't worry, it's going to be absolutely fine.

And then there was this big storm, and her maid said, Well, I'm going to the theatre, but there's a big storm.

And Emma went, Don't worry about it, I'll be fine.

Off the maid goes to the theatre.

There's a huge crash of lightning.

Emma starts to hemorrhage, she miscarries, there's nobody there, she's all alone.

And by the time anybody realises what's going on, it's just too late.

She loses the child, and she herself died as well.

And then he spent really the next two years planning this enormous memorial for her and buying all of her art that had been sold across the capital and kind of buying it back again into a collection.

He built this ginormous monument in Kensal, which cost, I think, £500 and had classic sway.

It had an eternal flame lit by gas.

And it just said to her on it, this is a truly stupendous piece of work.

But it didn't last that long, his mourning period.

He sort of got back on the horse and took up with an Italian ballet dancer who was apparently very voluptuous and called Fanny Torito.

But yeah, so Emma died in 1842, so their romance was quite short, but was very meaningful to me.

It sounds like a Victorian novel, doesn't it?

In the way that all builds.

You're right.

It's quite gothic, isn't it?

Yeah.

Does this sort of grief slow his rise, his culinary quest for stardom?

Because this is a man who's got drive.

Does it

slow him?

What he does instead is he moves in, actually, with Emma's stepfather.

So they share a kind of not quite bachelor pad together with a kind of non-existent kitchen.

But he still craves recognition.

And I think with the death of Emma, that actually becomes a a really big theme for him.

Because she was middle class and he was working class.

So he'd married up.

And now without her, I think he felt that he didn't have this kind of social cachet anymore.

So he started really chasing glory.

And one of the things he did, like all good chefs who really want to make a splash, is he started publishing cookery books.

I always think he needs a hug.

I sort of, at this point in his life, I just wanted to come give him a hug and find him a therapist.

He wasn't particularly literate because of getting expelled from the Protestant seminary rather young.

So he used to dictate his books, but nevertheless, he had a really strong voice.

So when he started to write, he quite quickly discovered it.

And he ended up publishing a series of cookery books along with a couple of other books, of which the three best known are The Gastronomic Regenerator, which was his first one in 1846, then there was The Modern Housewife in 1849, and then there was The Shilling Cookery for the People in 1854, which built on an earlier pamphlet called Sweer's Charitable Cookery.

And I've got copies of all of them here, and you can see that they are they decrease in size, I think it's fair to say.

Yeah, we will be able to do that.

But also, they're all aimed at different income groups.

Book one is an absolute chunk.

Book two is

mid-size.

Book three is like, ah, here's some stuff.

Book three is aimed at the working classes who only have a shilling to spend, so it needs to be small.

Whereas this thing, the gastronomic regenerator, it's not pocket-size, is it?

This is designed for the aristocracy to keep in their libraries and copy out recipes to give to their cooks.

He actually got a kitchen maid to transcribe all of the recipes that he used at the reform club because obviously if you use a lowly paid woman who's never going to make chef, then it makes it a lot easier for you to be a culinary sensation.

And all of his apprentices tested it for him.

So it was delegation, I would say.

The warhole situation there, yeah.

Because you wouldn't catch modern TV chefs doing that.

They cook all of

their stuff and they test it all themselves.

Yeah.

I mean he did make a nod to sort of not just doing restaurant food because most of this is on an enormous scale and you know you could never even think about doing it in a normal home.

Gastronomic Regenerator sounds to me like a crap transformer.

Yeah,

I'm not sure about that as a title.

That's not gonna, that wouldn't stand up today, I don't think.

What would your 19th century cookery book be called if you were appealing to the middle classes of the 1840s?

I mean, it feels like it should be something slightly more fun than Gastronomic Regenerator.

Glutton, the title of my actual book, I think is a lovely, is a love, would be a lovely title for a cookbook as well, you know.

But it needs to be more Victorian.

So Mr.

Gamble's Gluttonous Gallery or something.

Mr.

Gamble's Gluttonous Adventures.

Oh, that's good.

The Gluttonous Adventurer.

So we have Soyer's cookery books in front of you, Annie.

They are lovely things.

The Schilling Cookery book is for the working classes.

So what's in it?

The conceit of Schilling Cookery, it followed A Modern Housewife in that it purports to be a series of conversations between people advising the poor on what they can eat.

Within it, you find a lot of English recipes, a lot.

He doesn't go down the high flut in French route.

Things like sort of fried whitings and loads and loads of things to do with herring

and potatoes and lots and lots of puddings.

He has, I think there's about 10 recipes for Toad in the Hole in this.

Oh, okay.

And one of them is your entire leftover Sunday roast, but put in batter.

Amazing.

And he even tells you: if you can't get hold of any eggs, then you can just put suet into your batter and stuff like that.

So it's a really, really practical book.

And this was ultimately his best-selling book, and it was critically, massively acclaimed.

It's the idea that each recipe costs a shilling to cook.

The book isn't a shilling to buy.

The book was a shilling to buy, so it wasn't aimed at the very poor

because the very poor either would have been illiterate or wouldn't have had access to the wherewithal to cook.

So this was something that was bought by certainly the lower middle classes, but also the working classes.

It was given a lot of the time as well.

It became this kind of real bible for people who were, I suppose, what would have been called at the time the respectable working class.

Sure.

I would say that there are a couple of recipes in there that are a little bit complicated.

I don't know if it's in a different book, but we've got a couple of images to show you, kids.

Oh, yeah.

And I wouldn't say that this is the 19th-century equivalent of cheese on toast.

Do you want to describe what you can see for us?

Yes.

Oh, my goodness.

These are not from the Schilling Cookery.

I should point out.

These are gastronomic regeneration dishes.

Something that appears to look like a sort of a big duck or a swan or a gull.

But is that a natural bird, or are you supposed to form whatever you're cooking into a bird shape?

And then something else which looks like a roast turkey but also a galleon.

Yeah.

With the little birds going all the way around it i mean yeah that's night that's a nightmare to me if i turned up somewhere and someone had done me that i'm like what a total total waste of time

it looks like an ai image that someone has accidentally typed in the wrong thing yeah yeah yeah yeah and instead of turkish battleship it's turkey and battleship and ai has gone oh you want a fur that looks like a boat yeah i can do that annie what what is this well these are

this is rechale cuisine

this is to impress people yeah these are party dishes for all supper they're First of all, they're served cold, I should point that out.

So, the Dan de Neaux à la Nelson, which is the galleon in full sail with the turkey sticking out at its back end, was one of his kind of real signature dishes.

And it's actually a bread galleon.

So, this is a ship, a full ship, made out of bread and baked in the oven.

Some iterations had carrot cannons as well.

And then the thing that looks like a really angry seagull is also turkey.

And this is actually one of my favourite of his dishes because it's just so warped.

I mean, it looks looks like a seagull with kind of wings that have been tied in a knot sticking out of it.

But the tail at the back and the wings are formed out of lobster claws, which have then had turkey meat moulded round them.

I mean, it is so insane.

And yet there's a sort of sly sense of humour that runs through that.

And of course, it's a massive demonstration of wealth because the level of time that must have gone into these dishes.

I mean, I would have...

I would like to see what they actually looked like when they were prepared, though, because that is a drawing.

Yeah.

And you know, you can be kinder in a drawing, can't you?

I can't imagine that you could get that much of a sort of angry look into the seagull's face.

It is, yeah, it does look like it's just been denied a ship.

Reality versus what people are imagining.

I'd imagine there's quite a big gulf between those two.

If you said to me, What's Turkey Ellen Nelson?

In my head, I'm imagining, I don't know, a turkey dish that Lord Nelson liked to eat.

Not a turkey that looks like it's sailing with Lord Nelson, yeah, yeah, yeah, or Lord Nelson's ship where a turkey has crashed and landed on it from outer space, which is

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So, Alexei Soye was releasing cookery books.

He was doing kitchen tours.

He was letting tourists in.

He was cooking these slightly bonkers dishes.

He was cooking for the very, very wealthy in the posh reform club.

And he was cooking for the lower classes.

But he also had other money-making schemes.

Ed, what do you think they might have been?

Deliveroo?

He just pedals around the turkey galleon.

I mean, I wouldn't have put it past him, but I don't think he he did that no lots of people did but not him not him no he went the other way he went very 21st century he went branded merch wow yeah in the 1840s Alexey Soyer is one of the first influencers in the food space and he invents the art formany I'm I'm coming out big for him I'm swinging for the fences with Alexei Soyer I think he's a pioneer in this yeah he is Alexei decided to partner with Cross and Blackwell to produce a range of sauces.

He also did kitchen gadgets.

There was a stewing pan and there was an improved baking dish and all the various bits you've sort of heard about already.

But the big thing was the sauces.

The partnership with Cross and Blackwell was a master stroke because they knew what they were doing in terms of production.

But apparently, he sort of maybe came up with a recipe, but he might not actually have come up with a recipe.

But anyway, glossing over that, Soye's sauce was marketed in two versions.

There was a spicy one for the gentleman and then a milder one for the ladies.

You've always got to think of the ladies thing.

Yeah, yeah, and their soft mouth.

Well, exactly.

Then there was Soyer's Relish, which was for general purposes.

No one knows what was in this, but it seems likely that it was a heavily garlic sauce, so perhaps also not the most sociable of sauces.

And he marketed that as being so perfect it would create a soul under the ribs of death, which is a quote from John Milton.

So, you know, he's aiming high with quotes from masters of the English language and religion from the 17th century.

I always say that when I eat something delicious.

Yeah, yeah, he puts fake soul under the ribs of death.

It's very heavy metal.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, I know you're into your metal.

If you heard an album title called A Soul Under the Ribs of Death and then you saw a ketchup bottle on the front,

what?

I'd love it.

I'd buy that album straight away.

What's the most heavy metal name for a condiment that you can come up with?

I mean, obviously, if

you're looking for blood and you're looking for juts and all of this sort of stuff.

So, yeah, probably some sort of just like thick blood.

I'd go Hellman's mustard, Hellmouth mustard.

Hellmouth mustard is good.

Yeah.

I mean, obviously, there's a...

Most hot sauces have names like that now.

And, you know, I always go and buy hot sauce if I'm in America, go to one of the shops and, you know, they're always called like Bum Explode or something.

There's no subtlety, is there, though?

No, no, no.

No.

So the sauces are called Soyuz Sauce Succulent, succulent, very nice.

And Soyuz Nectar Sauce.

Ah, well, nectar was a fizzy drink.

Oh, was it?

Nectar was a blue fizzy drink.

Oh, nice.

That was, he used to use it for what were really the earliest cocktails in London as well.

So he's in the gin space as well, isn't it?

Yeah, yeah.

He's into everything, this is amazing.

But the people that, I mean, today, blue cocktails are a big thing, and you know, he was there first.

Soye's nectar was, yeah, blue and cinnamon-flavoured.

Sounds gross.

Mouthful.

Yeah.

He's also got his magic stove.

Ed, do you know what this is?

No, I heard you mention the magic stove earlier.

I'm very excited.

Is it a bit like a Dutch oven?

I don't know what that is, so maybe.

It's when you fart and then push someone's head underneath the table.

So there's gas.

Yeah, yeah.

Annie, is it a Dutch oven?

No, actually, although I suspect if he'd been able to invent that one, he would have done it as well and marketed it in farts in a bottle.

But no, the magic stove is basically a camping stove.

So it's a miniature stove.

There was a basic version, which was a spirit burner, a little ring, and then a pan on top.

Then there was a kind of kit version that you could buy, which was a box that had lots of pans and lots.

of gadgets, all of which were invented by him.

Again, it wasn't his invention per se, but he marketed it.

He never took out payments on it, which is a bit of a problem because ultimately he didn't make as much money as he could have done from them.

But he loved this magic stove.

It sold phenomenally well to anyone who was camping or travelling.

He made about six thousand pounds from it in the first year, which was a phenomenal amount of money at the time.

And throughout his life, really, he would whip out his magic stove at every opportunity, including when he really wasn't spaced to.

So, for example, you know, catering a banquet for Prince Albert in York, and then after dinner, when the ladies and gents separated, he was in there with the ladies whipping out his magic stove.

I'm assuming the Reform Club, where he's meant to work, they must be delighted.

No?

Their star chef is a superstar bringing in the cash.

Everyone knows him.

Surely people are queuing to eat at the Reform Club.

This is a win for them.

Well, yeah, but they're a members' club.

You don't want too many people queuing because you don't want the holy ploy to get in, do you?

And also, you know, ultimately, this is a Frenchman who's working class.

So the idea that he's getting all of the kudos versus all of these English male aristocrats, not all of them love it, to be honest.

They think he's getting a bit too big for his boots.

And I will be fair, he was stretching himself a little thin.

Yeah, so there were various attempts really throughout the sort of last few years of his tenure at the Reform Club to try and oust him.

He was prosecuted at one point or charged with financial problem, financial fraud, really, which he wasn't guilty of, except in the way that all chefs were, because everybody took a few kickbacks at the time.

He increasingly didn't love being a subordinate, He wanted to be the person that was the draw because he was.

And it all got a little bit tense, basically.

And then in 1850, they kind of offered him an ultimatum.

They basically said, look, either toe the line, start cooking here and turn up, or, you know, go away and do all your other things.

So he went, turn up,

and left.

Yeah.

So in 1851, have you ever heard of the Great Exhibition?

Yes.

Yeah.

What do you know about it?

I've heard of it.

Thank you for your contribution.

It's sort of this grand, it's meant to be sort of a scientific exhibition, isn't it, in some ways?

It's sort of a...

It's an everything exhibition.

It's a mark of global power for Britain.

It's the finest inventions from across the world.

It's a huge, huge exhibition, but the point is it's in Crystal Palace, in this amazing

design for it.

Exactly, and Prince Albert's there to open it, and

millions of people show up, and he runs a restaurant there.

Well, kind of.

Is it a cafe?

What is it?

So there was a catering contract which he was asked to apply for and he didn't, which in retrospect was, you know, one of the bigger errors of his life, bearing in mind that Schweppes got the contract and they went on to become a giant among fizzy drinks and he had a fizzy drink.

But bummer.

Yeah, but I can't see the blue cinnamon replacing sort of tonic water.

No.

I don't know.

Gin and blue, please.

Oh, now you've said that.

That's quite good.

I could go to a pub and I could, I'm tiptotal and I'm tempted.

But Soyo ran a restaurant outside the great exhibition and it was called the Symposium of All Nations.

Was he supposed to or did he just set one up?

Is it like when you go outside of a gig and they're selling knockoff t-shirts?

Basically that.

Except he took over Gore House which was a palatial house very near the entrance to the Great Exhibition.

He then ripped out all of the tasteful stuff that was in it and replaced it with the world's most awful decor that was sort of giant blue ceilings with stars on.

There was a Romani camp out the back in the garden.

It was mass catering.

And again, there was innovation innovation hidden with all this because effectively he set up what would become the model for diner catering and fast food catering in the future.

The problem was your ticket to the great exhibition only allowed you to go in and out once.

So you couldn't go in, come out, have lunch and go back in again.

So they never got the number of people that they expected to get.

So while lots of people said the food was really, really good, others said it wasn't because Soye wasn't always there.

And lots of people commented on how tasteless it was.

And it made a massive loss.

It lost £7,000 overall so he had to close it early with this enormous £7,000 is basically a lifetime's earnings for a chef.

So he'd made £6,000 with his magic stove and then he lost £7,000.

Blew it all.

And not only that, because he'd brought in lots of backers and some of them were his friends, the fallout for it emotionally and socially from his point of view and from his reputation was really, really damaging.

So one thing that we haven't talked about yet is what Alexey Soyer looked like.

If I introduce him now, if he walks into this room right now, what are you imagining?

Well, there's two classic chef looks, right, that I'm thinking of, chefs from history.

Big fat red man

or little weasel rat boy.

Okay.

Those are the two.

Which one are you going?

You're looking at me right now, at the weasel boy.

That's me.

No, no, I was looking at you anyway because I'm talking to you, bro.

Interesting, because, you know, I'm thinking, yeah, but the French as well.

Maybe I'm thinking, I'm not thinking Big Fat Red Man.

Okay.

I feel like...

He's got so much stuff going on, he doesn't really have time to indulge all of the three.

So I'm thinking

weasered little rat boy.

Okay, here is a portrait done by his wife, Emma.

Okay, right.

So, this is through his wife's eyes.

This is through, yes, exactly.

This is love for you.

Yeah, rap.

I was right.

So, Annie, is he playing up to the Frenchiness here with the beret and the rat boy look?

He's not a rat boy.

This doesn't give you an impression of his height.

He was apparently quite tall and slender and very much in vogue.

The fashionable Victorian gentleman.

He votes to vote for that.

That's back in.

It's a Rat Boy Sam.

It is Rat Boy Sam after.

I like to think of him more as soon as he entered a room, you'd know he was there just because he just must have oozed this energy and this interest.

He did play up on his Frenches, but actually, that's not a beret, that's more like a sort of tamashanta.

So he always wore trousers.

It's a ongoing trouser thing.

Apart from that one, apart from that one, maybe this is why he always went for trousers.

So his trousers were usually striped and often in garish colours, possibly so he could lose them again.

Yes, exactly.

Or recognise them.

Have you seen my trousers?

What colour are they?

Well, actually.

They look like a tech chair.

He also really loved things cut on the bias, so Ala Zugzug or La Zigzag, as he called it.

And it got really obsessive, like his business cards were cut in a zigzag way.

I mean, to be fair, a lot of people did actually take the mick out of what he wore because he did look at it.

He drew attention, didn't he?

He drew attention to himself, and certain people were like, this guy's a bit of a douchebag.

But

still being talked about.

Yeah.

So yeah, Ala Zugzug, I love, is his kind of whole, that's his whole look.

So he didn't have any straight seams on his clothes.

All of his tailoring, everything is, there's no horizontal or vertical lines.

I love

diagonals.

So he's as stylish as Nigella, as French as Raymond Blanc.

And also, Alexei Soye is doing charity work.

He's a man of the people.

Do you know where he did charity work?

In which country?

What?

So he's going outside of

England.

Is he going back to France to do charity work?

It's a good guess, but no.

No.

No?

Think of another country close to France.

Another country.

Think of another country that is not France or England.

Germany?

Nope.

Spain?

No.

It's Ireland.

Oh, I should have guessed it.

So, Ed, have you heard of the Irish potato famine?

I have.

We're a comedy show, but I think for the next two, three minutes, it's a bit of a gear change.

This is a tragedy, right, Annie?

This is a million die.

Probably a million have to emigrate.

It's a devastating, horrible thing.

And he responds to it in quite an interesting way.

Yeah, he does.

So Ireland is in dire, dire straits.

This all happens from 1843 when the potato blight hits Ireland and you have six years of awful harvests where people are digging up the potatoes and they're just turning to sludge in their fingers.

absolutely horrific horrific stories coming out of Ireland and the British frankly do not cover themselves in glory.

The English overlords just go, well they're Irish, their fault they're poor.

They didn't work very hard did they?

And they just leave them to it for a couple of years.

And then eventually the newspapers start saying, oh hang on, you know what?

Maybe it's not actually the poor's fault they're poor.

Maybe the fact that the Irish are all starving is because the English have taken all their crops and sold them abroad.

Oh, do you think you'll do something about this?

And very gradually, this movement builds, which is saying that perhaps some form of poor relief should be offered.

And Sawyer gets to hear about this.

He'd already had some dealings with the idea of feeding the poor and caring for the poor.

He set up soup kitchens in Spitalfields.

So you were partly right when you said France, because Spitalfields was where the Protestant French weavers were, and they were in dire straits at this point because we were starting to import silk from elsewhere.

So he had already kind of dabbled in the idea.

But in 1847, he decided to set up a soup kitchen under new principles, which classic soy

were basically factory feeding principles.

So the idea was that there was this portable soup kitchen and you could feed about 5,000 people, feed 5,000 meals a day.

And you had a bowl in each position, you had a chained-down spoon.

So people came in, they were fed their soup, they ate it, they got out really quickly, you swabbed out the bowls, you wiped down the spoon, the next lot came in.

And he took that out to Ireland and there was a grand opening because because he was never a man to miss up an opportunity for some publicity.

Sure.

And he devised all these recipes, which he said would feed people and be nutritionally, really brilliant.

And they weren't, I think it's fair to say.

It's problematic because I think his heart was really in the right place.

He genuinely wanted to do something.

And I don't think he ever really thought that his soups were nutritionally sound.

What he actually said later was, well, yeah, but they were better than nothing.

When there was nothing on offer, these were better than zero.

The trouble was, you know, the way it worked, this queue of people that went in, sat down, went out.

He was accused of treating the poor like wild animals, which, you know, yes.

He was accused of treating the whole thing like a technical problem to be solved.

Eventually, the tide turned and people started saying that actually the soup kitchen was a bad idea.

You know, when he first went out, everyone was like, great, what an amazing thing.

And the British government went, brilliant, we can blame it all on him.

Yeah, I mean, I was going to say, he did something when the government did nothing.

But it wasn't necessarily the best thing.

So that was his first effort with charity relief.

He did another one.

He went to a war zone.

Wow.

Do you know which war zone this might be?

I can guess.

All of my guesses have been rubbish so far.

You might have heard of this one, the Crimean War.

I have heard of that one.

Yeah, so that's a long way to travel.

This is 1855.

We know about this war because of Mary Seacole and Florence Nightingale.

But for listeners who don't know where Skitari is, which is where he went to, Skitari, weirdly, is in Turkey, a totally different country to where the war was happening.

300 miles away.

Yes, but it was where the British troops who were fighting were taken to,

well, to die.

Let's not be.

They weren't meant to die there, but that's what happened.

But this is a war like every other war up to that point, but even worse, where the vast majority of casualties were from disease, not from fighting in action.

So, what would happen is the British would go out and fight, they'd get wounded, or you know, a bit, they'd be put on a ship and then they'd be brought over to Skitari, and then they would be left on the dock where the rats would eat them as they died.

And eventually, they converted a barracks into a hospital, which is where Florence Nightingale went out and tried desperately to reform.

I mean, there was nothing there.

It was falling down.

There was no furniture.

There were rats everywhere.

There was lice.

It was the conditions were horrific.

And for the first time, the newspapers in Britain reported on this and they reported on it in very critical terms.

So this became a real thing.

The British government was seen to be failing its own.

So it brought down the Prime Ministers.

They did.

Yeah.

And Soye heard about this and he wrote an open letter to the Times saying, I will go out there and I will sort out the catering and I will sort out the nutrition and I will sort out the kitchens.

And that is what he did.

Off he went.

He was told not to as well, because this was a place really well known for its disease where people were going out and even if they weren't fighting, they were coming back with what was called Crimea fever.

So he goes out there and he did a good job.

He did sort out the kitchens.

He did things like, you know, suggesting they tinned the copper rather than poisoning people with untinned copper and stopped boiling their underpants with meat because they were tying underpants to pieces of meat so that when they could take the meat out, out they could recognize which bit of meat was theirs.

So he went why don't you just use a peg with a number on it and they went underpants they're great they add a little bit of flavour.

That is awful.

Yeah

I mean the skitari barracks were disgusting when Florence got there and he he shows up slightly afterwards and he reforms the kitchen and he brings his magic stove.

Of course he does.

Of course you know

it brings it everywhere, but it's really useful for the soldiers.

It's smokeless, which means they can use it in the battlefields because it doesn't show the enemy where you are.

And the British Army carried on using it until the Falklands War.

Apparently, some countries still have Soyer stoves tucked away in case of emergencies.

And the army still celebrate him.

But of course, another book deal was required.

Yeah, so he published the one book I haven't held up yet from my collection here, which is Soyer's Culinary Campaign, which is beautiful.

And this was a book all about his experiences in the Crimea.

It actually reads quite well.

I'm quite fond of that book.

I mean, this is the usual kind of, you know, massive self-aggrandising and lots of sort of tall stories and telling people about how amazing he was.

But it did do quite well and it did, I think, introduce people to the idea of war writing and the idea of the Crimea in a way that wasn't just sort of puffs in the papers or endlessly tedious memoirs.

Yeah, and the tragic thing is you mentioned Crimean fever.

He doesn't come back healthy.

No, he contracted Crimea fever.

Towards the end of his time there, he also got dysentery.

So he was very, very, very ill.

And then when he started to recover, he jumped straight back on his horse and started touring bits of Turkey.

and you know he wanted to go and see lots of it and as as the troops were pulling out he was desperate to stay there I think he didn't didn't think he had much to come back to really so he worked himself to death on top of this illness and then when he got back to the UK he published his book he kept kept working and he had a fall from his horse and he started hemorrhaging and actually reading about his last few weeks is really awful he's coughing blood but he's still desperately trying to work and produce things and then the blood turns to sort of black bile and it's very very clear he's going to die and he he died in 1858 so he was only 48 years old Yeah, he'd achieved an awful lot.

I mean, we've talked quite a lot about Alexei Sawyer and his career.

What are your sort of final thoughts before we do the quiz?

Well, I'm ashamed that I didn't know more about him, to be honest, because it seems like he's sort of the absolute proto-celebrity chef.

I love him.

I've talked about him a lot, but no one knows who he is.

Historians know him and no one else.

So, you know.

But even the marketing of the products and bottling his sauces and doing all of this stuff, just, yeah, it's incredible.

He packed a lot into a relatively short life.

He did.

48 years.

It's not long, but he did achieve a lot.

I mean, certainly in an army context.

When he died, The Times said he deserved a posthumous medal for what he did in Scotari, in particular The Stove, which really did revolutionise army catering.

He also introduced the Army Catering Corps as well.

So thousands of people bought his books.

So, you know, if we're talking about celebrity, it's him.

Alexei Soye, trouser-losing genius,

self-aggrandising short, but man of the people.

You know what?

On the way home, I'm going to buy a turkey.

I'm going to buy some bread and I'm going to make myself a turkey galleon.

Turkey all Nelson.

Turkey Allegamble.

The nuance window!

This is the part of the show where Ed and I sit quietly and sup on our turkey lobster for two minutes while Annie tells us something we need to know about Alexis Soyer.

My stopwatch is ready.

You have two minutes, Annie.

Take it away.

Right, so Alexis Soyer is best known in terms of his books for Shilling Cookery for the People, which was a massive bestseller.

But I am going to talk about this book, The Modern Housewife, which was published in 1849 and then went through subsequent editions.

And the reason I want to go through that is because he's always recognised for the magic stove and for the other book, but this one to me is unique among history books because it is written by a French chef who was almost illiterate, working through a series of secretaries.

And not only is it a brilliant book from a recipe point of view, but the way it is written is just

magic.

So he writes this book from the point of view of two Victorian English housewives writing to each other, Hortense and Héoise.

Hortense is the kind of mother figure who is advising Hélise on how she can run her household and it's not just you know here's a letter about roasts there are you know they chat to each other they they talk about what's going on in their neighbourhood throughout the different editions their story changes so by 1853 Hortense has fallen upon bad times due to her husband speculating unwisely on the railways and had to move from St John's Wood to rugby, where she can now advise on other things involving poor people's food, for example.

You know, you get really invested, you want to buy the different books.

But interspersed with that are things that are brilliant for a food historian because you can study social history through it because of those details.

He has a picture in here which shows you apple pie, one of my favourite pictures in the book, ever, apple pie, as it ought to be, taken from Still Life, followed by apple pie, as they often are.

And you look at that and you think, yes, people in the Victorian times, they cocked cocked up their food as well.

This makes me feel reassured.

But also, and the final thing about it is the recipes are fantastic.

So, I brought in route biscuits.

I've never managed to find a biscuit recipe which satisfyingly molds every single time you make it.

And as you can see from these, they are a little biscuit, a lot like a rich tea biscuit, and I'm like a rich tea, but they take a mold.

You can emboss figures onto them, and then these would have been served at balls.

So, there we go, Alexei Soye.

Fun guy, I think.

You know, normally on the show, it's like, oh, God, here we go, another decade from history.

But this guy's all right.

I think we said that maybe he left his son behind in France.

So not necessarily the best dad, but.

Oh, well, you can't be perfect, can you?

I mean, you know, he had cool clothes.

He did.

I mean, come on.

For a dead white Victorian male,

he's really good.

Yes, he looks.

So what do you know now?

Time now for this.

What do you know now?

This is our quickfire quiz for Ed to see how much he has learned.

Oh, I forgot about this

are you giving me a biscuit now I know sorry

I'm gonna be rubbish previously you've averaged nine out of ten on the quizzes yeah it's not gonna happen this time you're good at the quizzes but um let's see how much you've remembered got ten questions here we go

question one in which french town was soyer born in 1810 brie but is that the name of the town yeah yeah that's it moun brie are it good question two why was a young alexi thrown out of seminary school what crank climbed up the tower and rang the bells he did question three what was the name of the posh london politicians private members' club that Soyer made his name as?

Reform club.

It was.

Question four, what was the name of Soyer's tragically short-lived wife?

Emma.

It was very good.

Elizabeth Emma Jones, but I think we mostly just said Emma on the show.

Question five: What is notable about Soyer's 1849 book, The Modern Housewife, in how it's written?

It's a conversation between two Victorian housewives.

It is Eloise and Hortense.

Very good.

Question six: name two.

Imagine if I've forgotten that.

We literally just heard about that.

Question six: name two kitchen gadgets that Soyer possibly invented.

Cafetiere and

plug drain.

Yeah.

Plug strainer, very good.

Yeah, you get a stewing pan, improved baking dish, kitchen timer, but yeah.

Question seven, how did Alexei Soye try to help during the Great Irish Famine?

The mobile super kitchen.

Yep, absolutely.

Set up in Dublin.

Question eight, what monstrosity is Turkey Alan Nelson?

Well, is it a big old turkey?

No, that's yeah, that's the turkey with the bread galleon.

Yeah, absolutely, yeah.

I saw the other turkey as well.

Question Question nine.

What invention did Soyer take out with him to the Crimean War to help the British troops?

Magic stove.

It was.

And this for a perfect 10 out of 10.

Can he do it?

What was distinctive about Alexei Sawyer's fashion?

Zigzags.

Yeah, the zigzags.

Yeah, 10 out of 10, Ed Gambo.

Remember that.

It all went in.

It all went in.

Well, something's got food involved.

It will.

There we go.

There we go.

You're on brand age.

Amazing.

Thank you, Annie.

We had an absolute hoop.

Thank you for the biscuit, too.

It's very tasty.

Thank you, Ed, as well, for coming in.

Thanks for having me.

Always a pleasure.

Well, listener, if you want to learn more about the history of food with Annie, check out our episode on the history of ice cream.

For more quality time with Ed in the 19th century, we've got episodes on Lord Byron and gothic vampire literature.

Those are actually linked because, of course, Byron inspired the vampire.

And remember, if you've enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review, share the show with friends, subscribe to your Dead to Me on BBC Sounds so you never miss an episode.

But I just want to say a huge thank you to our guests.

In History Corner, we had the amazing Dr.

Annie Gray.

Thank you, Annie.

Thank you.

And in Comedy Corner, we had the excellent Ed Gamble.

Thank you, Ed.

Thank you very much.

And to you, lovely listener, join me next time as we cook up another historical feast.

But for now, I'm off to go and invent Turkey a la Wellington.

It's basically turkey in a rubber boot.

Bye!

This episode of Your Dead to Me was researched by Hannah Campbell Hewson.

It was written by Emmy Rose Price Goodfellow, Emma Nagoos and me.

The audio producer was Steve Hankey and our production coordinator was Ben Hollins.

It was produced by Emmy Rose Price Goodfellow, me and senior producer Emma Nagoos and our executive editor was James Cook.

Your Dead to Me is a BBC Studios audio production for Radio 4.

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