A FAMOUS COOK.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXIX, Issue 141, 7 August 1911, Page 7

A FAMOUS COOK.

Paper-bag cookery, which promises to cause a revolution in the kitchen, has revived the fame of one of the greatest cooks in history, Alexis Sorer, tho grandfather of the popidariser of the paper-bag. Soyer was a Napoleon of chefs. Early in life ho leaned towards the stage, for which ho had great aptitude, hut *ie became convinced that “Providence intended tiiat ho should cook.” There was no irrevenco in the statement. “To him cooking was a cult worthy of a life’s devotion,” says a biographer. “The kitchen was his shrine, and he became a zealot, almost a fanatic.” As a young man lie was chef in several restaurants in Paris. On the of .1830, in which he nearly lost his life, he fled to London, where he quickly became famous. For thirteen years he was chef in tho Reform Club, among whose membdrs wore some of the most fastidious epicures of the day. When he established a restaurant of his own, it was thronged by the beauty, fashion, and intellect of tho time.' His fame attracted official notice. and in 1847 he was sent to Ireland to see what could lie done for tho* famine-stricken peasants. In 1855 he was sent to the Crimea, where the commissariat department had broken down, and he showed that ho was not merely a chef for epicures, by recommending methods suite cl to the requirements of large bodies of men on active service in n most t vying climate. .Mo;.;i of dm historians of the

ear nave unused ms .• ■ in ci--aim with the feeding of tho troops. Ti Duke of Argyll writes of the conch

sion 1 of the Crimean campaign being held in remembrance among the youth of England by tho making of “tin soldiers and more elaborate toys, showing the Zouaves, tho Tirailleurs, the (Initios, the Generals St. Arnaud and Pclissier, and their famous cook, Soyer, who could prepare such good dinners in camp. All were household words in the militant schoolboy.” The cookery hooks he wrote had a great vogue, and some of them are now prized by collectors. He died in 1858, and left a number of art treasures to the National Gallery, as a token of gratitude to tho country in which he had found refuge. The curious hope was expressed in Dickens’s “Household Words” that, he was “cooking in. Heaven,” “The new generation, ’ says Lady Dorothy Novill, whose memory goes hack to Soyor’s clay, 1 scarcely remembers tho name of this famous cook, who, nevertheless, deserves to he remembered as one who principally contributed to break down tho absurd and wasteful system so common in English kitchens, and who trained up a class of cooks whose knowledge extends further than the common teat of boiling a thousand pounds of meat a hundred hours to make one basin of broth.”