Alexis Soyer died August 5, 1858, only 49 years old. At the time he was considered the greatest chef in the world.

He was born in Meaux-in-Brie not far from Paris. His older brother Philippe, worked as a chef in a restaurant in Paris, and Alexis got a job there at a very young age. By the time he was seventeen, he had 12 chefs working under him.

In 1831, he accepted the invitation to join his brother who was now the chef for the Duke of Cambridge in London. In 1837 he was offered the job as Head-Chef at the Reform Club, and helped design the finest kitchen in London, which included many of his own inventions. (The Reform Club is best known for the famous bet in Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days.)

In 1847, during the Irish potato famine, and several poor harvests in England, he invented a new soup-boiler to make soup for the poor. The Irish Government asked him to design a new soup-kitchen in Dublin. The Reform Club granted him a special leave of absence, and he went to Dublin, to supervise the making of his recipes, first in various locations, later in a specially designed building, where at the peak more than five thousand people were served daily.

Alexis Soyer was a productive author and inventor; he wrote eight books including Culinary Recreations, The Gastronomic Regenerator, Soyer’s Shilling Cookery, The Modern Housewife, and Culinary Campaign, plus Instructions for Military Hospital Cooks.

He invented bottled sauces, relishes, mustards and punches, many kitchen gadgets and on a larger scale, a gas stove, a detached kitchen range and a cottager’s stove - most important was the stove he invented for the army. He also designed a miniature marine kitchen for the steamboat ‘Guadalquiver’ and included another innovation, a movable balance grating which prevented pans spilling no matter how much the steamboat rolled. However, the best known invention was his ‘Magic Stove,’ a tiny portable spirit stove.

Then in 1854, came the Crimean war. The first war which was followed by civilian war correspondents, and for the first time the public got reports of the horrors of war and the terrible conditions of the soldiers. It became clear that it was not the enemy that was the biggest problem, but mismanagement, ignorance and inefficiency of the people in charge at the front and at home. The army was left far from home without shelter, fuel, or clothes. They lived on biscuits, rum, and salt pork, but it was often impossible to find fuel and most of the meat was wasted.

Soyer wrote an open letter in The Times offering ‘at my own expense’ his help. The War Office jumped at Soyer’s offer. He first designed a portable cooking stove, to be used in army camps and hospitals. (It was so ingenious that it was still being used by the British army into the late 20 th century.)
Upon his arrival in Scutari, Florence Nightingale herself showed him around the Barrack Hospital where the conditions were horrifying. In less than a month he had organized the kitchens and served palatable, nourishing food to all patients, with the same kind of rations used earlier. Soyer and Miss Nightingale continued to the front at Crimea, where the conditions were even more shocking. Again he organized the hospital and field kitchens, instituted a training program for soldier-cooks, and eventually saved thousands of British soldier’s lives; not from enemy bullets but simply by providing sufficient nutrition.

He became seriously ill with the Crimean fever, but stayed until the end of the war. He returned to England a bigger celebrity than ever, but because of his illness he had lost a lot of weight and was almost unrecognizable. He died the following year.

“His death is a great disaster.” Wrote Florence Nightingale, “Others have studied cooking for the purposes of gormandizing, some for show, but none but he for the purpose of cooking large quantities of food in the most nutritious manner for great numbers of men. He has no successor.”