During the first half of the 19th century, the most famous cook -- and one of the most famous men in London -- was Alexis Soyer. This biography explores this bon vivant with a social conscience whose career spanned the worlds of high society and ordinary men and women. Soyer¿s fame lay in his extraordinary success wielding food as a tool of social reform. He wrote cookbooks for the poor and designed a model soup kitchen during the Irish famine. He traveled to the Crimea to reform the kitchens in Florence Nightingale¿s hospital and invented a battlefield stove that remained in use as recently as the Gulf War. This biography pays tribute to this remarkable man who had such a profound effect on 19th-century society. Illustrations.