The people's chef - Ruth Brandon

During the first half of the nineteenth century, Alexis Soyer, a Frenchman, was the most famous cook and one of the most famous men in London. A combination of chance, talent and energetic social conscience took him into many of the great events of his times. He cooked his way through the Paris July Days in 1830; saw the Captain Swing riots in the English countryside in 1832, when he was cook in a great country house; oversaw the building of London's most modern kitchen at the Reform Club, where he was chief cook from 1837 to 1850; designed a model soup–kitchen which he took to Ireland during the 1847 famine; opened London's first Parisian–type restaurant in conjunction with the Great Exhibition in 1851; and in 1855 went to the Crimea to take over the running of the kitchens in Florence Nightingale's hospital at Scutari.

The People's Chef,
part cookbook, part biography and part history, is worthy of its charming and highly original hero.