The French chef Alexis Soyer (1810–58) was perhaps the first ‘celebrity chef’ in Britain.

After working in private kitchens, he was Head chef at the Reform Club from 1837 to 1850 where he designed and installed what was arguably the most innovative and technologically advanced kitchen in the world. During the 1851 Great Exhibition, he prepared culinary extravaganzas based on the exhibition’s themes and displays at his nearby restaurant ‘the Gastronomic Symposium of All Nations’.

Alongside his work for wealthy patrons, he organised food provisions for London’s impoverished Huguenot silk weavers, opened mobile soup kitchens in Dublin at the height of the Irish Famine, and travelled to the Crimea in 1855 to cook for the soldiers on the field. This book, published in 1857, describes his efforts to prepare nutritious meals for the troops based on their rations using his portable field stove, known as the Soyer stove. Soyer first marketed his stove in 1849 and it remained in military use well into the following century.

Soyer also lent his name to several mass-produced foods including ‘Soyer’s Sauces’ and a sparkling drink known as 'Soyer’s Nectar'.