Fact Check 2: The Lying Chef

The pioneering 19th Century chef Alexis Soyer made his fame in England, as chef at the elite Reform Club, as the author of cookbooks aimed across the social spectrum, and as a culinary inventor who turned his talents to addressing disasters such as the Irish Potato Famine and the Crimean War. But Soyer was born in France, and it was in France that his dynamic career began.

Right: Emma Soyer, portrait of Alexis Soyer, before 1842. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Soyer’s own memoirs, and biographies across the past centuries, tell the dramatic story of a boy who rose from the lower-middle-class to the prestigious position of deputy chef for the French Foreign Ministry at the precocious age of just 20 years old. There were, however, two problems with this meteoric rise: Soyer was appointed chef at the French Foreign Ministry in June 1830, and the French Foreign Minister in June 1830 was Jules de Polignac.

By the end of July 1830, Polignac would work with King Charles X to issue the Four Ordinances, a coup d’état that imposed press censorship and unilaterally rewrote French election law to benefit Polignac’s faction, the ultraroyalists. And that takes us to July 26, 1830, the day the Four Ordinances were published, a day in which the young chef Alexis Soyer would acquire a personal connection to France’s 1830 revolution.

As Soyer tells it, Polignac hosted a grand party that night to celebrate the Four Ordinances — the long-awaited blow against the terrible liberal revolutionaries who had been challenging the power of the crown. Soyer was hard at work in the kitchens when an angry mob “forced the gates of the [palace]” and “massacred many persons.” Two of Soyer’s fellow cooks were shot before his eyes by the revolutionary mob, and he himself only escaped because he had the presence of mind to begin singing the banned revolutionary anthem, La Marseillaise. Instead of being massacred, Soyer was “carried off amid the cheers of the mob,” though he soon thought it wiser for the former chef to Jules de Polignac to make himself scarce, and left for England.¹

It was dramatic, emblematic of the quick-thinking Soyer, and absolutely 100 percent made up.

This is The Siècle, Fact Check 2: The Lying Chef.

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Welcome back everyone! This episode is the latest in an occasional series devoted to correcting myths about 19th Century France that have entered into the popular consciousness.

This is a slight detour from our regular episodes, which are currently in the middle of France’s July 1830 revolution. But as you could tell from the cold open, it’s not much of a detour. When I found out that about Alexis Soyer and his story of the allegedly sacked banquet, I knew there was an episode here, and I’d already done most of the research. Well, except for the two biographies of Soyer that I then had to read. But: here we are! This is a fun exploration of a larger-than-life 19th Century figure, one of the original celebrity chefs. It’s also a demonstration of the dangers of historical myths, and how easily even well-informed readers can unwittingly pass on lies as truth.

I’ll save most of my normal intro chatter for the next regular episode. My thanks to my podcast network, Evergreen Podcasts, and to Hala Nasr for sending me down this rabbit hole of culinary history. Be sure to visit thesiecle.com/factcheck2 for a full annotated transcript of this episode. Now, let’s get back to our lying chef.

Fact and fiction

Here’s what we do know for sure: Alexis Soyer — spelled S-O-Y-E-R — was born in the French city of Meaux on Feb. 4, 1810. He was the son of Emery and Madeleine Soyer, former shopkeepers who had come down in the world. And in 1831, Soyer relocated to England, where he would before too long establish himself as a pioneering celebrity chef.²

The 21 years in between are much harder to pin down. Soyer himself told stories of his youth, but his modern biographers are clear that Soyer liked to tell stories — whether or not they were true. Ruth Cowen says Soyer was eventually “known all over England for being garrulous to the point of exasperation,” while Ruth Brandon notes that “everyone who knew Soyer remarked on his easy charm… he was the life and soul of the party, entertaining the company with his songs, his uninhibited stories, and his quaint accent.”³ And while Soyer was an undisputed genius in the kitchen, he appears to have been semi-literate at best, and wrote almost nothing in his own hand over the course of a too-short life. Instead, he employed secretaries to write down his thoughts. Even Soyer’s “memoirs” were published after his death by one of these secretaries and two other friends — not his own writings, but their account based on the stories Soyer had told about his life.⁴

But even biographers who note the unreliability of Soyer as narrator of his own life, and cast doubt on other elements of Soyer’s memoirs, tend to recount his story of the banquet as fact. Despite my telling you that this banquet story is total fiction, I am sympathetic to these too-credulous biographers. The bulk of Soyer’s story — the part that makes him interesting — takes place in England; the Polignac banquet is mere prologue. And it seems at a first glance to accord with the rough facts of France’s July 1830 revolution — Polignac issuing the Four Ordinances, the people rising up, innocent Parisians caught in between having to fend for themselves.

But as someone who given the July Revolution more than a quick glance, I can tell you this story does not pass the smell test. Let’s break it down.

First, there is the very suspicious fact that none of my regular sources about the 1830 revolution, neither contemporary accounts nor modern scholarly works, mention Polignac holding a banquet — let alone it being dramatically stormed by a mob and the deputy chef saving his own life by singing La Marseillaise. The only works I’ve found that mention this event are books about Soyer himself. It is hard to believe that all these sources would simply neglect to mention such a dramatic and richly symbolic story as this.

Second, in its broad strokes, Soyer’s story of the Polignac banquet doesn’t match up with the flow of the July Revolution. As I related in Episode 41, the revolution began on the evening of Monday July 26 as protests and scattered rioting, which escalated on Tuesday July 27 before turning into street fighting at barricades that night, as well as some looting of stores selling arms and provisions. Wednesday July 28 was preoccupied with intense fighting on the streets from noon until midnight. And while I can mildly spoil the next episode by saying that Thursday July 29 does include mobs sacking palaces, Jules de Polignac was definitely not in Paris that night, and definitely wasn’t celebrating anything by then.

Which takes us to my third point: the details we do know about what Polignac and other leading French men and women were doing on all the days in question don’t just neglect to mention the sacked banquet — they actively contradict Soyer’s account.

So let’s get into the details. I’ll lay out the alleged events, working mostly from Ruth Cowen’s biography, Relish: The Extraordinary Life of Alexis Soyer, Victorian Celebrity Chef. Cowen provides by far the most detail of this event of any source I’ve come across, including Soyer’s own memoirs. Where she got this detail I unfortunately cannot say — Cowen’s book does not have footnotes or endnotes, so I don’t know what books or articles she was drawing on; her selected bibliography contains no works directly about the 1830 revolution and only one book — Roger Price’s high-level A Social History of Nineteenth-Century France — whose title touches even a little on these specific events. (As a general note, a lack of sourcing like this should be a red flag in reading any history — while poorly sourced books can be accurate, reliable second-hand accounts usually show their work.)

The alleged banquet

Our story begins immediately after the release of the Four Ordinances on the morning of July 26, 1830. As Cowen describes it, “to mark this historic triumph over the threatening forces of republicanism, Polignac was determined to celebrate in style.” So he scheduled a party for the night of July 26, “possibly the grandest political dinner to be held in Paris for some years.” The party was hosted at the French foreign ministry, which was then located not at its present location on the Quai d’Orsay, but on the Boulevard des Capucines.⁵ Throughout the day, Cowen relates, “the Foreign Office was decorated with a profusion of flowers” and “several tons of silver had been polished.” Soyer was hard at work in the kitchens, helping to oversee a first course of “carefully blended soups” and “light, elegantly sauced fish dishes”; followed by a second course with mutton and turkey, cutlets and sweetbreads, mixed with hors d’oeuvres of crab rissoles, oyster vol-au-vents and lobster croquettes. Finally the dishes were cleared, the tablecloths changed, and the main dishes were brought in: beef with lamb haunches, vegetables, salads, and sweets.⁶

“By now,” Cowen continues, “it was getting dark,” but the people inside the Foreign Ministry were “oblivious to the increasingly angry crowds that had been gathering for some time outside the palace railings.” Suddenly the mob forced their way through the gates. “Several of Polignac’s guards were killed as the shouting rioters rushed the palace,” Cowen describes. Some forced their way into the kitchen, where they began looting the luxurious food and assaulting the staff. “The chefs themselves were next in the line of fire — to be beaten as traitors working for the enemy,” she writes. “During the fighting two of them were shot.” It’s at this point that “a lone voice rose above the racket, clear and strong,” singing the Marseillaise. It was, of course, Soyer, who “ripped off his splattered aprons to join the throng, carried upstairs until he could find a way to slip away.⁷

The next day, Cowen writes, “the riot fanned out across the capital”; “three newspapers defied the ordinances and published as usual, with the result that the king ordered the immediate closure of the presses.”⁸

Unfortunately, this account is riddled with inaccuracies. For example, Cowen is right that July 27 saw newspapers defy the ordinances and publish, though it was four defiant newspapers and not three.⁹ She is wrong that these newspapers’ defiance was what led King Charles X to close the presses — the order to close all unauthorized presses had come the day before, and was in fact what the four newspapers were defying.

But even setting aside these details, this account also gets the big things wrong. Here’s what historical sources unrelated to Soyer describe happening on the evening of July 26.

The truth

Paris opinion was stunned on the morning of July 26 by the appearance of the Four Ordinances in the official Moniteur universel newspaper. These were royal decrees that imposed censorship, dissolved the newly elected Chamber of Deputies before it could meet, and rewrote the French electoral laws to shrink the electorate and boost ultraroyalist candidates. The streets that day were calm, as word slowly spread and people tried to decide what it meant. That calmness included Jules de Polignac and other top ministers, who went about their daily work with fairly shocking nonchalance. Polignac spent the day at the French foreign ministry, but the sources say nothing about him preparing for a banquet there. Instead he signed orders to government functionaries and met with foreign ambassadors to assure them he had everything under control.¹⁰

Likewise, we know where Polignac was on the evening of the 26th, and it wasn’t attending the banquet to end all banquets. He was still working, meeting with other ministers to discuss the situation. We have memoirs from one of those men, the naval minister Baron d’Haussez. Haussez describes that between 7 and 8 p.m., as the first signs of disorder began to appear around the Palais-Royal in central Paris, he and several other ministers were in Polignac’s office at the foreign ministry, giving him advice. Eventually, they relocated to the offices of the Minister of Justice, who was unwell and couldn’t come to them.¹¹ This move was likely made after dark, since sunset in Paris on July 26 was 7:47 p.m.¹² Around 9 p.m., the ministers could hear the rioting in the streets, and Polignac set off with Haussez to make sure the foreign ministry was secure.

This trip, by carriage, turned into an adventure. Polignac was recognized by rioting Parisians, who began hurling rocks at his carriage. One broke the window, cutting Haussez. Polignac’s coachman whipped the horses forward and managed to drive into the courtyard of the foreign ministry, whose gates were safely shut behind them. At this point, the rioters began throwing stones at the ministry. But — and this is a key bit — at no point on the night of July 26, 1830, did rioters actually make it inside the French foreign ministry. After some time throwing rocks at the building with little effect, the rioters gradually dispersed. Before too long, Polignac and Haussez were out on the streets again, walking on foot to inspect a nearby guard post.¹³

I have the memoirs of Haussez and of the finance minister Baron Montbel, who were both with Polignac that night. Neither one mentions a banquet, and both line up with the events I discussed. Polignac’s own memoirs refer only to “some gatherings, at first harmless, then a little tumultuous,” in the streets.¹⁴ Neither do memoirs of elite Parisians who were aligned with the opposition. The liberal Duc de Broglie describes the action on that first night as being “only” a “hand-to-hand struggle” between the gendarmes and rioters, “where a few fisticuffs were returned for a few sword-cuts.”¹⁵ The Comtesse de Boigne does describe a party, but not one at the Foreign Ministry. Instead she describes socializing with other elites in what might be called the loyal opposition — men and women who opposed Polignac in particular but not the Restoration overall. These were probably not the kind of people who would be invited to a banquet to celebrate the Four Ordinances, had one existed, but Boigne — who does not shy away from sharing gossip about Polginac in her memoirs — makes no mention of a sacked banquet. She does mention the carriage incident: “in the evening some stones were thrown… the carriage returned to the residence, the gates of which were closed; the band in pursuit dispersed.”¹⁶

Finally, I want to note that elaborate multi-course banquets for dozens or hundreds of attendees are logistically complex endeavors. They are typically the sort of things planned days, weeks or even months in advance. And the one thing we know absolutely for certain about the Four Ordinances is that they were kept a secret until the moment of their publication on the morning of July 26. Even close friends of Polignac and Charles weren’t told.¹⁷ Boigne relates a story that on the night of July 25 — when the Ordinances had been signed and sent off to be printed, but had not yet been published — Polignac spent an hour and a half with close friends going over the text for the royal speech that was set to open the new session of the parliament in a few days. If true, this represents extreme commitment to the ruse on Polignac’s part: he knew that the King had already dissolved the Chambers, and that the royal speech would never be given, but still kept this a secret from these close friends.¹⁸ If Polignac was capable of arranging the party of the year in just a few hours while also going about daily work — well, let’s just say that would have shown initiative and organizational abilities that history has not generally attributed to Jules de Polignac in the week of July 26, 1830.

Other possible explanations

Let’s consider another angle: could the banquet story have been true, just garbled a little bit in its facts? For example, could the banquet have taken place on July 27 or July 28, rather than on July 26?

The answer here is again almost certainly not. On the evening of July 27, central Paris was in an uproar. That afternoon, soldiers had opened fire on rioters, who had in turn begun to build barricades. The streets of Paris were still passable, and Boigne describes her friends gathering again at her house — trickling in on foot, “one after the other,” each bearing disturbing news of the escalating violence on the streets. Boigne’s home was on the Rue d’Anjou, just a few blocks away from the Foreign Ministry on the Boulevard des Capucines.¹⁹ This account doesn’t match Soyer’s descriptions of aristocratic guests completely oblivious to the disorder on the streets outside. That kind of obliviousness might have been possible on the evening of July 26, when there was only scattered rioting, and this not until late in the evening. By the evening of July 27, everyone in the city knew Paris was in disorder.

And on July 28, well, it was open war. Not even the most oblivious hard-of-hearing aristocrat could ignore that. As Marshal Marmont’s soldiers flung themselves against urban barricades, and Parisians fought back with stones and looted guns, the city was afire with noise — cannon blasts and volleys of musketry, cries of war and cries of the wounded, and the maddening, ceaseless cacophony of the city’s church bells ringing the alarm.²⁰ Polignac spent the day at the Tuileries Palace, not the Foreign Ministry. He was still there sometime around 9 p.m. when Marshal Marmont gave the ministers an update on the day’s fighting, which had gone poorly for the government.²¹ At no point in this intense urban warfare did Polignac nip away to host the party of the century.

Hopefully you see now that Alexis Soyer’s story of being in Jules de Polignac’s kitchens when an angry mob sacked the place just isn’t true in any meaningful way. It’s not mentioned in sources that absolutely would have mentioned an important and thematically rich event like the sacking of the Foreign Ministry during a premature victory celebration. And key players like Polignac himself are otherwise accounted for.

The People’s Chef

But we shouldn’t let this little tall tale dominate your view of Alexis Soyer, who was a genuinely impressive fellow. Most of Soyer’s life is outside the scope of this podcast, since the Frenchman achieved his fame and success in Britain. But I think it’s worth it to give you a few highlights of his illustrious career.

Given what I’ve already told you, you might be justified in being skeptical that the life story I’m about to sketch out is accurate. And some skepticism is probably warranted! Soyer remained a fast-talking self-promoter his entire life, and his own unreliable accounts form the backbone of most biographies. But unlike his early days in France, Soyer’s career in England took place in the public eye, and can be mostly backed up by letters, newspaper articles, and legal documents.

I’ll start with a loose end. While the banquet never happened, it’s entirely possible Soyer did actually work as a chef for Polignac. Or maybe he didn’t — unlike the easily falsifiable banquet story, I didn’t find any firm evidence either way outside of Soyer’s own accounts. He might have had reason to make it up — after moving to England in 1831, Soyer worked for a number of years as a private chef for British aristocrats of a strikingly conservative streak, who were terrified of the prospects of a popular uprising and spoke contemptuously about the “revolutionary gang” in Paris. Working for Polignac might not have made Soyer popular in Paris, but it was practically an endorsement in the kitchens of a British manor.²²

Before too long, though, Soyer had a better calling card than this possibly questionable resumé line. He had his food. Because Soyer was a wizard in the kitchen. “No one could cook like Soyer could,” recalled one aristocrat, who tried unsuccessfully to hire the Frenchman away.²³ Soyer whipped up dishes from the beef, game, pheasants, crops and fruits grown on his employers’ estates, and from the estates of those friends his employers loaned him out to.²⁴

After spending the bulk of the 1830s working for several different manors, Soyer then found the job where he would become a national and not merely neighborhood celebrity: chef at London’s famed Reform Club. This was a private club for gentlemen associated with the liberal faction of the Whig Party, as well as radical independents. It was named after their great triumph: the Reform Act of 1832 that significantly expanded the British electorate. While cuisine in Paris was dominated by the restaurant, which was open to all who were willing to pay, in London the culinary heights were member-only clubs, and no club’s cuisine reached a greater height than the Reform Club under Soyer. As Ruth Brandon notes, “The Club made his name, and he put it on the map.” Contemporary humorists quipped that the liberal faction was held together more by a desire to keep enjoying Soyer’s cooking than by any particular dogmas.²⁵

Above: Upper level of the saloon of London’s Reform Club, 1841. Unknown artist. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

At the Reform Club, Soyer whipped up ostentatious banquets, like one in 1846 for the son of the Egyptian ruler Muhammad Ali with 44 different dishes in seven courses. The spread was so elaborate that members of the Reform Club who weren’t invited to the banquet showed up just to watch the spectacle. The pièce de la résistance was one of the six desserts: a meringue pyramid two-and-a-half feet tall, filled with pineapple cream and surrounded by fruit, and topped by a detailed portrait of Muhammad Ali on a sheet of jelly. It was so impressive a piece of culinary art that none of the guests had the guts to actually eat it.²⁶

But Soyer was more than just an artist of the kitchen. He was also an engineer. The Reform Club’s kitchens were built under his supervision to incorporate the latest technology, including the just-invented gas stove, as well as a steam engine to power the roasting spits and dumbwaiters. Instead of the normal Upstairs-Downstairs division of British manors, Soyer’s kitchen became a spectacle that wealthy men and women would visit for tours — tours conducted, of course, by the ebullient Soyer himself.²⁷

And while access to the Reform Club’s kitchens was limited by social class, Soyer’s cooking wasn’t. He was also a pioneer in publishing cookbooks such as The Gastronomic Regenerator of 1846 and A Shilling Cookery Book for the People of 1854. When Ireland was suffering from the great Potato Famine in the 1840s, Soyer sampled the soup being offered at charity kitchens and found it nearly inedible. So he experimented to come up with a soup recipe that could be made cheaply but actually taste good — or at least decent — and then developed a high-tech mobile kitchen that could serve thousands of people per day. He didn’t solve the Great Famine, of course — that was beyond the talents of even the greatest cook — but his efforts presage the charity works of modern celebrity chefs like José Andrés.²⁸

Below: Alexis Soyer, sketched at Balaclava in 1858, after Robert Landells. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Skipping over other innovations, such as Soyer’s semi-successful 1851 invention of what we today would recognize as the theme restaurant,²⁹ his final claim to immortality came in the 1850s. That’s when Soyer brought his talents to rescue another nutritional disaster: the British invasion of Crimea. The 1853-56 Crimean War saw Britain, France, and the Ottoman Empire go to war against Russia; much of the fighting was on the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea. The war was a deadly slog marred by logistical bungling, especially on the British side.³⁰

Alexis Soyer could do nothing about the incompetence that left vitally needed supplies rotting on the Crimean docks while just a few miles away soldiers suffered and died in the siege trenches, largely from disease. But when he read reports of the atrocious food being fed to sick and wounded soldiers, Soyer saw a problem he could solve. Drawing on his political contacts from the Reform Club days, Soyer got the government to send him to Constantinople, where he teamed up with the famed nurse Florence Nightingale to work wonders.³¹

Some problems were simple: after tasting the disgusting soup served to patients in the military hospital, Soyer took the same basic rations and whipped up a much more palatable alternative recipe. Other problems were deeper-rooted, such as the British army’s deeply ingrained cultural indifference to cooking — each soldier was expected to cook his own rations, with the result that many “would almost prefer eating meat raw to having the trouble of cooking it,” as one observer noted. Soyer printed detailed step-by-step recipes, then set about demonstrating them to one group of soldiers at a time, who could in turn pass their new knowledge on to other soldiers.³² “The fact of the abominable cooking… existed… till the arrival of M. Soyer,” Nightingale wrote in a formal report to the British army.³³

Soyer the tinkerer also invented a new type of field stove: a metal cylinder with an enclosed heating area in the bottom half, and a pot on the top. Because the fire in “Soyer stove” was enclosed, it had a few huge benefits over the old method of cooking over a campfire: they wasted less heat and thus less precious fuel, and they also didn’t give away a soldier’s position at night with visible flames. The first Soyer stoves only arrived at the very end of the Crimean War, but they continued to be used in the British army as recently as the 1991 Gulf War.³⁴

“A cup of coffee for the wounded,” unknown photographer, 1918. This photo shows a member of the Army Medical Corps handing a cup of coffee to a wounded soldier as they stand around a Soyer stove on the Western Front of World War I. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Unfortunately, Soyer would not follow up his triumphs in Crimea. He returned from the war physically weakened by infections he had suffered there, and never truly recovered. On August 5, 1858, Alexis Soyer died of a stroke. He was just 48 years old.³⁵ After his death, some of his former friends would publish his memoirs, helping to cement Soyer’s image for posterity — the truth and the fiction.

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Thank you all for listening! Be sure to join me next time for Episode 44: Bourbons on the Rocks.