Pod Insights You're Dead to Me Alexis Soyer (Radio Edit) About this episode Greg Jenner is joined in the 19th century by Dr Annie Gray and comedian Ed Gamble to learn all about French celebrity chef Alexis Soyer.
Despite being well-known during his lifetime, Soyer is virtually unknown today. His primary legacy was a portable stove, used by the British army until the Falklands War. But Soyer was a prototypical celebrity chef: he opened the Reform Club kitchen to the public so that they could watch him cook, wrote popular cookbooks, sold kitchen gadgets and branded sauces, and even took part in high-profile charity campaigns.
From his birth in France to the success he found in London, via a soup kitchen in Dublin and a hospital during the Crimean War, this episode explores Alexis Soyer’s extraordinary life and culinary innovations.
This is a radio edit of the original podcast episode. For the full-length version, please look further back in the feed.
Hosted by: Greg Jenner
Research by: Hannah Campbell Hewson
Written by: Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow, Emma Nagouse, and Greg Jenner
Produced by: Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow and Greg Jenner
Audio Producer: Steve Hankey
Production Coordinator: Ben Hollands
Senior Producer: Emma Nagouse
Executive Editor: James Cook
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:10 Greg Jenner? 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,
1:54 Greg Jenner? 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.
2:16 Speaker 04 Thanks for having me back.
2:17 Greg Jenner? Delighted. Ed, you are the foodiest comedian in the UK.
2:21 Speaker 04 It's certainly an avenue that 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-themed job possible.
2:33 Greg Jenner? And you don't even like food. You've just found a niche.
2:35 Speaker 04 No, no, no. Barely eat.
2:37 Greg Jenner? What do you know about food history? Are you happy in the 19th century?
2:41 Speaker 04 I mean, I can't promise to offer much historically in terms of food history. I can barely remember what I ate last week.
2:50 Greg Jenner? So what do you know?
2:57 Greg Jenner? This is where I have a go at guessing what our lovely listener might know about today's subject. And we all can name a celebrity chef, right? Some of them are so famous, they only need one name. Delia, Jamie, Nigella. But Alexei Soyer, probably not ringing any bells for you. You're probably not going to know about him unless you are a student of 19th century military history or culinary history. That's the kind of the Venn diagram of people who might know.
3:19 Speaker 04 I'm none of those things.
3:20 Greg Jenner? Okay. So who was this French celebrity chef? He 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 Alexei born? And to whom?
3:38 Speaker 05 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-en-Brie, which was known for its mustard and its cheese. 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.
4:06 Greg Jenner? Born in Brie. He was born in the home of Brie.
4:09 Speaker 04 That's pretty good, isn't it?
4:10 Greg Jenner? Yeah, surrounded by cheese in the labour ward.
4:14 Greg Jenner? Do you want to guess what his childhood professional training was?
4:17 Speaker 04 You would have thought if you're born in Brie, you're going to be a...
4:20 Greg Jenner? A cow?
4:21 Speaker 04 You may be a cow, maybe you work within dairy or cheese, et cetera, or mustard. You mustn't forget the mustard.
4:29 Greg Jenner? No, moutard, yeah.
4:30 Speaker 04 So yeah, maybe he's a spicy cow.
4:34 Greg Jenner? And he was, he was training for the priesthood.
4:36 Speaker 05 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...
4:53 Speaker 05 Anyway, 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, released all hell upon the town. So the, the local fire brigade came out and the local garrison. So as you can imagine, he didn't last very long.
5:12 Speaker 04 The other priests would have been like, man, this is such a bad boy.
5:16 Greg Jenner? Yeah, he is. Yeah, he is. He's the, he's the bad boy of the bell squad. So it was bye bye Brie for teenage Alexei. So what was next for our bolshy bellboy?
5:25 Speaker 05 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. He worked his way up through Parisian society, as a lot of chefs did at that point. And he ended up being the chef at the Foreign Office. And this is in 1830, 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 Swaye 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, it, you know, it was genuinely a very dangerous moment, but because Swaye
6:10 Speaker 05 was very good at thinking on his feet, he quickly whipped off his apron 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 recognised. 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 monarchists. And he was persona non grata, couldn't get a job anywhere in France. 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.
6:41 Greg Jenner? So he saves his life by singing the French National Anthem. What song could you sing to save your life if a crowd broke in?
6:47 Speaker 04 Well, it depends. I mean, obviously, it depends what the crowd are for, right? Because I'm happy to capitulate to any mob.
6:54 Greg Jenner? Instantly.
6:54 Speaker 04 I just want to save my own skin. I've got absolutely no ethics whatsoever, so.
6:58 Greg Jenner? They're angry at the concept of podcasting. They hate podcasts.
7:01 Speaker 04 Right, yeah, yeah.
7:02 Greg Jenner? What are you going to do?
7:03 Speaker 04 I guess I'm singing the Radio 4 pips just to, just to let them know I am a traditionalist when it comes to broadcasting.
7:11 Greg Jenner? You're doing the shipping forecast.
7:12 Speaker 04 Yeah, I'm doing the shipping forecast. You know, I like live radio. That's what I like.
7:17 Greg Jenner? Alexis Swaye, Fleeing Violence, going from revolutionary France into Britain in 1831, which is during the reign of, we're not at Victoria yet, are we?
7:26 Speaker 05 No, we're William IV. The sort of most non-entity monarch in history.
7:30 Greg Jenner? No one's favourite king.
7:31 Speaker 05 So he worked for the Duke of Cambridge. 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. 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. And he was there specifically to cook the best, most fashionable food.
7:54 Greg Jenner? We know now that Alexis Swaye is a, he's a whiz in the kitchen, right? But he's also a whiz with a kitchen. Do you know what I mean by that?
8:01 Speaker 04 In terms of running, running the kitchen?
8:03 Greg Jenner? More than that, in terms of the technology in a kitchen.
8:05 Speaker 04 Okay, so the, the equipment as well.
8:07 Greg Jenner? Yeah, he's innovating in that way. It's quite interesting, Annie. And I don't know 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.
8:22 Speaker 05 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, popularising it or building on it. But he was. Absolutely an inventor in his own right as well. He was always coming up with ideas. With the Reform Club, he worked with the architects to put in new kitchens just after he arrived. And, you know, some of the stuff was 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.
9:02 Speaker 05 And then he went all out for steams. He had a steam table, steam heated, so the dishes are staying hot. There's temperature controlled ovens. 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 had 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.
9:30 Greg Jenner? He was experimenting with kitchen appliances as well. So he claims to have invented many gadgets. I'm not sure if he invents them or whether he licenses them.
9:37 Speaker 04 I think what I've learnt about this guy so far is we can't necessarily trust what he says.
9:42 Greg Jenner? You're definitely getting the hang of this episode. Thank you, Ed. Yeah. So which of these five gadgets, one of them's not true, did he not invent or at least?
9:49 Speaker 04 Or claim to invent.
9:50 Greg Jenner? Or claim to invent, popularise. Okay. So mechanical kitchen timer, plug strainer, a tendon separator for meat, an ice cream scoop, or a cafetiere for coffee. Which of those five was not an Alexis Sawyer original?
10:04 Speaker 04 Obviously, they're all big in my life, the tendon separator especially. I'm going to go with the plug strainer. It doesn't feel sort of grand enough. It doesn't feel, no, I'm going to go with that. I mean, huge news if he really did invent the cafetiere, but.
10:19 Greg Jenner? The cafetiere he does invent.
10:21 Speaker 04 He invented it.
10:22 Greg Jenner? Yeah. So no, the one that I'm afraid I've caught you out there, ice cream scoop is not his. Comes later, later in the century.
10:28 Speaker 04 I was thinking about it, the plug strainer is almost the sink cafetiere, isn't it?
10:34 Speaker 05 And also really important because blocked drains at that point in time, very, very difficult to clean them when you don't have diner rod.
10:40 Greg Jenner? Yeah, so cafetiere is one of his.
10:41 Speaker 04 Wow.
10:42 Greg Jenner? 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?
10:50 Speaker 04 Hey, look, if I could invent a kitchen utensil that we desperately need in kitchens, I wouldn't be here.
10:55 Greg Jenner? You've got Dragon's Den, right?
10:56 Speaker 04 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 sized pizza. That.
11:10 Greg Jenner? Yes.
11:11 Speaker 04 I'd like that.
11:11 Greg Jenner? Yes, yes, please.
11:13 Speaker 04 And I know there are like, you know, dehydrators and whatever and all of that, but I just want something that makes food massive.
11:19 Greg Jenner? I mean, I'm here for it. That's absolutely.
11:21 Speaker 05 I'd buy it.
11:22 Greg Jenner? Yeah. So the ice cream scoop comes later in the century. The others are Alexis Swaye originals, caveat, maybe not originals, but certainly he's popularising them and claiming them.
11:31 Speaker 05 Yeah, and everyone builds on the shoulders of others.
11:33 Greg Jenner? I get the feeling he's fun in a kitchen, but 1837 was a spicy year for him romantically as well, because this is where he meets his good lady wife.
11:41 Speaker 05 Well, he's already met her, meets her in 1835, I think. So in Paris, he'd already had a relationship with a lady called Adelaide Le Maire and almost certainly had a son by her. Or at least later on, the son called himself Alexis Swaye and they had some lovely tete a tete and then Swaye forgot about him in his will. So who knows? But he, with typical aplomb, walked into the studio of a leading artist at one point and said, I want my picture painted because I'm Alexis Swaye. 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 Swaye courted this lady who was called Emma, Elizabeth Emma Jones. And in 1837, they got married.
12:23 Speaker 05 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.
12:53 Speaker 04 I think it's better just to be there on time though.
12:56 Speaker 05 You could argue that.
12:58 Speaker 04 That sounds lovely and romantic, but it's a pain, isn't it?
13:02 Speaker 05 Well, I mean, you could argue that. It did have a tragic end, though.
13:07 Greg Jenner? Yeah, she dies very young, doesn't she?
13:08 Speaker 05 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, Swire 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, oh, 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. But it didn't last that long, his mourning period.
13:47 Speaker 05 He sort of got back on the horse and took up with an Italian ballet dancer who was apparently very voluptuous. And called it Fanny Trito.
13:57 Greg Jenner? But yes, so Emma died in 1842. So their romance was quite short, but was very meaningful to him.
14:02 Speaker 04 And it sounds like a Victorian novel, doesn't it?
14:04 Greg Jenner? It does.
14:05 Speaker 04 The way that all builds.
14:06 Greg Jenner? You're right. It's quite Gothic, isn't it?
14:08 Speaker 04 Yeah, yeah.
14:09 Greg Jenner? Yeah. Does this sort of grief slow his, his rise, his culinary quest for stardom? Because this is a man who's, who's got drive.
14:16 Speaker 05 He started really chasing glory. And, and one of the things he did, like all good chefs who really want to make a splash, is he started publishing cookery books. The three best known are the gastronomic regenerator, which was his first one, 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 Swire's charitable cookery.
14:39 Greg Jenner? I don't know if it's in a different book, but we've got a couple of images to show you, Ed.
14:42 Speaker 04 Oh, yeah.
14:43 Greg Jenner? 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?
14:49 Speaker 04 Yes. Oh, my goodness.
14:50 Speaker 05 These are not from the shilling cookery. I should point out, these are gastronomic regenerator dishes.
14:54 Speaker 04 Something that appears to look like a, a sort of a, a big duck or a swan or a gull. But is that an actual 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.
15:10 Greg Jenner? Yeah.
15:12 Speaker 04 With the little birds going all the way around it. I mean, yeah, that's a nightmare to me. If I turned up somewhere and someone had done me that, I'm like, what? Total waste of time.
15:22 Greg Jenner? So Alexi Soyer was releasing cookery books, but he also had other money-making schemes. Ed, what do you think they might have been?
15:28 Speaker 04 Deliveroo?
15:31 Greg Jenner? I mean, I wouldn't have put it past him, but I don't think he did that.
15:34 Speaker 05 No, lots of people did, but not him.
15:36 Greg Jenner? Not him, no. He went the other way. He went very 21st century. He went branded merch.
15:40 Speaker 04 Wow.
15:41 Greg Jenner? Yeah. In the 1840s, Alexi Soyer is one of the first influencers in the food space. And he invents the art form, Annie. I'm coming out big for him. I'm swinging for the fences with Alexi Soyer. I think he's a pioneer in this.
15:53 Speaker 05 Yeah, he is. Alexi decided to partner with Croton Blackwell to produce a range of sauces. He also did kitchen gadgets. There was a stewing pan and there was improved baking dish and all the various bits you've sort of heard about already. But the big thing was the sauces. Soyer's sauce was marketed in two versions. There was a spicy one for the gentlemen and then a milder one for the ladies.
16:15 Speaker 04 You've always got to think of the ladies.
16:16 Speaker 05 Yeah, yeah.
16:17 Speaker 04 And their soft mouth.
16:19 Speaker 05 Yeah, 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.
16:39 Speaker 04 Wow.
16:39 Speaker 05 He's aiming high with quotes from masters of the English language and religion from the 17th century.
16:44 Speaker 04 I always say that when I eat something delicious.
16:46 Speaker 05 Yeah, yeah.
16:47 Greg Jenner? He's also got his magic stove. Ed, do you know what this is?
16:50 Speaker 04 No, I heard you mention the magic stove earlier. I'm very excited. Is it a bit like a Dutch oven?
16:55 Greg Jenner? I don't know what that is, so maybe.
16:57 Speaker 04 It's when you fart and then push someone's head underneath the diva.
17:02 Greg Jenner? Soyer's gas, is it? Yeah, yeah. Annie, is it a Dutch oven?
17:06 Speaker 05 No, actually, although I suspect if he'd been able to invent that one, he would have done it as well and marketed it as farts in a bottle. But no, the magic stove is basically a camping stove, so it's a miniature stove. Again, it wasn't his invention per se, but he marketed it. He never took out patents 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 £6,000 from it in the first year, which was a phenomenal amount of money at the time.
17:34 Greg Jenner? I'm assuming the Reform Club, where he meant, he's meant to work, they must be delighted, no? Their, 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.
17:48 Speaker 05 Well, yeah, but they're a members' club, you don't want too many people queuing, because you don't want the holly ploy to get in, do you? And I will be fair, he was stretching himself a little thing. 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.
18:18 Greg Jenner? So, one thing that we haven't talked about yet is what Alexey Sawyer looked like. If he walked into this room right now, what are you imagining?
18:24 Speaker 04 Well, there's two classic chef looks, right, that I'm thinking of, chefs from history. Big fat red man, or little weasely rat boy.
18:32 Greg Jenner? Okay.
18:33 Speaker 04 Those are the two.
18:34 Greg Jenner? Which one are you going, you're looking at me right now, at the weasely, um, boy, that's me.
18:37 Speaker 04 No, no, I was looking at you anyway, because I'm talking to you, Greg. Um, I'm not thinking big fat red man.
18:43 Greg Jenner? Okay.
18:43 Speaker 04 I feel like he's got so much stuff going on, he doesn't really have time to indulge all of the time. So I'm thinking more weasely little rat boy.
18:51 Greg Jenner? Okay. Here is a portrait, done by his wife Emma.
18:53 Speaker 04 Okay, right, so this is through his wife's eyes?
18:55 Greg Jenner? This is through, yes, exactly. This is love for you.
18:58 Speaker 04 Yeah, rap!
19:01 Speaker 04 I was right.
19:02 Greg Jenner? So Annie, is he playing up to the Frenchiness here with the beret and the, and the rat boy look?
19:08 Speaker 05 He's not a rat boy. This doesn't give you an impression of his height, he was apparently quite tall and slender and, and very much in, though, the fashionable Victorian gentleman, he, he very much to vote for.
19:19 Speaker 04 That's back in, it's, you know, it's a rat, it's a rat boy summer.
19:21 Greg Jenner? It is rat boy summer, yeah.
19:22 Speaker 05 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, he did play up on his Frenchness, but actually that's not a beret, that's more like a sort of tamashanta. He really loved things cut on the bayous, so à la zook zook, or à la zigzag, as he called it.
19:41 Greg Jenner? Yeah.
19:41 Speaker 05 And like, it got really obsessive, like his business cards. 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.
19:50 Greg Jenner? 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.
19:56 Speaker 04 Still being talked about.
19:57 Greg Jenner? Yeah. Yeah. So he's as stylish as Nigella, as French as Raymond Blanc. And also Alexis Soyer is doing charity work. He's a man of the people. Do you know where he did charity work? In which country?
20:08 Speaker 04 What? So he's going outside of.
20:10 Greg Jenner? Outside of England.
20:11 Speaker 04 Going back to France to do charity work?
20:13 Greg Jenner? It's a good guess, but no.
20:14 Speaker 04 No?
20:15 Greg Jenner? No. Think of another country close to.
20:17 Speaker 04 Another country?
20:18 Greg Jenner? Another, think of another country that is not France or England.
20:21 Speaker 04 Germany?
20:22 Greg Jenner? Nope.
20:22 Speaker 04 Spain?
20:23 Greg Jenner? No.
20:26 Greg Jenner? It's Ireland.
20:27 Speaker 04 Oh, I should have guessed it.
20:28 Greg Jenner? So Ed, have you heard of the Irish potato famine?
20:30 Speaker 04 I have.
20:31 Greg Jenner? We're a comedy show, but I think for the next two, three minutes, 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.
20:45 Speaker 05 Yeah, he does. So Ireland is in dire, dire straits. This all happens from 1843 when potato blight hits Ireland and you have six years of awful harvests. 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, do 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 ought to do something about this? And very gradually this movement builds, which is saying that perhaps some form of poor relief should be offered. And Soyer gets to hear about this. He already had some dealings with the idea of feeding the poor and caring for the poor. He set up soup kitchens in Spitalfields.
21:26 Speaker 05 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 Soyer were basically factory feeding principles. So the ideal, 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 chained down spoons. 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 he was never a man to miss up an opportunity for some publicity.
22:01 Greg Jenner? Sure.
22:02 Speaker 05 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. 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.
22:37 Greg Jenner? Yeah, I mean, I was gonna say, he, he did something.
22:40 Speaker 05 Yeah.
22:41 Greg Jenner? When the government did nothing.
22:42 Speaker 04 Yeah.
22:43 Greg Jenner? 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.
22:49 Speaker 04 Wow.
22:50 Greg Jenner? Do you know which war zone this might be?
22:52 Speaker 04 Couldn't guess. All of my guesses have been rubbish so far.
22:54 Greg Jenner? You might have heard of this one, the Crimean War.
22:57 Speaker 04 I have heard of that one.
22:58 Greg Jenner? Yeah, so that's a long way to travel. This is 1855, this is the, you know, 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.
23:14 Speaker 05 Yes, but it was where the British troops who were fighting were taken to, to, well, to die. Let's not be about the bush.
23:21 Greg Jenner? They weren't meant to die there, but that's what happened to them.
23:22 Speaker 05 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. 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 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, they 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.
24:04 Greg Jenner? The Prime Minister.
24:05 Speaker 05 They did, yeah. And Sawyer 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.
24:18 Greg Jenner? And he brings his magic stove.
24:20 Speaker 04 Of course he does.
24:20 Greg Jenner? Of course, you know.
24:21 Speaker 04 Brings it everywhere.
24:22 Greg Jenner? 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.
24:31 Speaker 05 Apparently some countries still have Sawyer stoves tucked away in case of emergencies. So, and the army still celebrate him.
24:37 Greg Jenner? Yeah, and he doesn't come back healthy.
24:40 Speaker 05 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 got back to the UK, he published his book. He kept, kept working and he'd 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 died in 1858, so he was only 48 years old.
25:08 Greg Jenner? Yeah, he'd achieved an awful lot. I mean, we've talked quite a lot about Alexey Sawyer and his career. What are your sort of final thoughts?
25:13 Speaker 04 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.
25:19 Greg Jenner? I love him. I've talked about him a lot, but no one knows who he is. You have to, you know, historians know him and no one else. So, you know.
25:26 Speaker 04 But even the marketing of the products and bottling his sauces and doing all of this stuff, just, yeah, it's incredible.
25:31 Greg Jenner? Yeah.
25:32 Speaker 04 He packed a lot into a relatively short life. The New Year's Window!
25:40 Greg Jenner? This is the part of the show where Ed and I sit quietly and sup on our turkey lobster for two minutes. Well, Annie, tell us something we need to know about Alexey Sawyer. My stopwatch is ready. You have two minutes. Annie, take it away.
25:53 Speaker 05 Right, so Alexey Sawyer 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 Elouise.
26:36 Speaker 05 Hortense is the kind of mother figure who is advising Elouise on how she can run her household. And it's not just, you know, here's a letter about roasts. You know, they chat to each other, 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're 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
27:18 Speaker 05 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 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 roulue biscuits. I've never managed to find a biscuit recipe which satisfyingly moulds 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 like a rich tea, but they take a mould. You can emboss figures on to them, and then these would have been served at balls.
27:49 Greg Jenner? So there we go, Alexis Swaye, fun guy, I think.
27:52 Speaker 05 Yeah.
27:52 Greg Jenner? 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. And remember, if you've enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review, share the show with friends, subscribe to You're 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.
28:16 Speaker 05 Thank you.
28:17 Greg Jenner? And in comedy corner, we had the excellent Ed Gamble. Thank you, Ed.
28:20 Speaker 04 Thank you very much.
28:21 Greg Jenner? 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 à la Wellington. It's basically turkey in a rubber boot. Bye.
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