During the first half of the nineteenth century, the most famous cook - and one of the most famous men in London - was Alexis Soyer. In her new biography, Ruth Brandon explores this bon vivant with a social conscience whose epic career spanned the worlds of high society and ordinary men and women, and who embodied all the contradictions of the Victorian age. Born in France, Soyer moved to England in his teens and rose to early fame as head chef at London's Reform Club, where he designed a kitchen so innovative that it became a tourist attraction. He opened London's first Parisian-style restaurant in connection with the Great Exhibition in 1851, and marketed a line of best-selling sauces and cookbooks that made him a household name. Yet 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. Throughout, Brandon weaves details of nineteenth-century life, from the differences between French and English food at the time to why the French favored restaurants while the English preferred to what the very poor ate and why the Irish starved rather than eat the fish that teemed all around them.

Soyer's influence remains today, a century after his death, with three of his books still in print. The People's Chef at long last pays tribute to this remarkable man who had such a profound effect on nineteenth-century society. Book jacket.