He was then appointed head chef of the Reform Club in London, where he designed the kitchens on radical modern lines and became celebrated for the range and excellence of his cooking.

Soyer became a well-known author of cookery books, aimed variously at the grand kitchens of the aristocracy, at middle-class households, and at the poorest families, whose diet he strove to improve.

He took a keen interest in public health, and when the Irish potato famine struck in the 1840s he went to Dublin and set up a soup kitchen that could feed 1,000 people an hour; he published recipes for inexpensive and nutritious food and developed cheaper alternatives to bread.

In Volant and Warren's account, Soyer rebelled against the claustrophobic environment of the seminary and deliberately contrived his expulsion by ringing the church bell at midnight, causing general alarm in the town.

Philippe arranged an apprenticeship for him at a restaurant run by a friend, Georg Rignon, first in the Rue Vivienne, near the Bourse, and later relocated to the Boulevard des Italiens.

[18] Soyer gained his first appointment as a head chef in a British establishment in the household of William Lloyd, a rich landowner, who maintained a town house in Upper Brook Street, Mayfair, but whose main residence was at Aston Hall in Shropshire.

By some accounts he intended to send the portrait to Adelaide Lamain in Paris,[21] but at Simonau's studio he met the artist's stepdaughter and pupil (Elizabeth) Emma Jones, with whom he fell in love.

[23] Soyer left the Lloyds in early 1836 to take over the kitchens of the 1st Marquess of Ailsa at St Margaret's House near Twickenham, a large riverside residence.

Elizabeth David comments that Soyer's appointment: On 28 June 1838 Queen Victoria was crowned; on the day of the coronation the Reform Club put on a grand breakfast for 2,000 members and guests.

Other dishes in the buffet, as recorded by Cowen, were "delicate fish in clear aspics, succulent pigeons wrapped in vine leaves, salmon in pastry cases and tiny butter croustades filled with lobster, oysters and carefully blended pâtés".

The table was built around the kitchen's four central columns, to which Soyer had small cupboards attached, holding spices, salt, fresh herbs, breadcrumbs and bottled sauces, conveniently to hand for the chef and his juniors.

There were four kinds of soup; four of fish (salmon, trout, turbot and whiting); thirteen different entrées, including spring chicken, mutton cutlets, hot quail terrine, young hare and vol-au-vents of mackerel's roe; eight roasts (among them capon, duck, turkey and saddle of mutton); and then a course that in the manner of the time offered choices of both savoury and sweet dishes: among others, curried lobster, chicken salad or game galantines, and crisp cakes of almonds and cherries, praline tarts with apricots, or pineapple crystallised jellies.

The climax of the menu was the dessert, named La Crème d'Égypte à l'Ibrahim Pacha: a huge pyramid of meringue and cake, filled with pineapple cream and topped with a portrait of the chief guest's father, Muhammad Ali Pasha.

[41] In 1846 Soyer published The Gastronomic Regenerator − "a simplified and entirely new system of cookery with nearly two thousand practical receipts[n 8] ... illustrated with numerous engravings" − a work of well over 700 pages; according to the historian Eric Quayle, the book had "a profound effect on the cooking and eating habits of several generations of Britons".

[46] At the government's request Soyer sought leave of absence from the committee of the Reform in 1847 and went to Dublin,[47] where he set up a kitchen capable of feeding a thousand people an hour.

[7] Soyer's recipes were attacked by the anonymous "Medicus" of the rival Athenaeum Club, who maintained that "Every physician and physiologist knows that the digestive organs in man are incapable of assimilating sufficient nutriment for health or strength from any liquid diet".

[48] The Queen's doctor, Sir Henry Marsh, stated that although a liquid diet would suffice for children and for adults in sedentary occupations, labourers needed solid food as well.

[49] Soyer responded by providing solid foods such as "pea panada", which an independent report found "only one-fourth the price of bread, while it is fully five times as nutritious".

[51] As well as the stove, Soyer produced a series of kitchen gadgets that were the forerunners of many modern utensils, and sold a range of patent sauces and relishes.

In David's words, "Whatever novelty he produced, from a new bottled sauce to a pair of poultry dissectors, from a six-inch portable table cooker to a gas-fired apparatus for roasting a whole ox, every London newspaper, a good many provincial ones, and often a few Paris journals thrown in, had their say.

[7] His next book, The Modern Housewife (1849), written with a middle-class readership in mind, was in the form of letters between two housewives, and in Ray's view now gives an interesting insight into domestic life of the time.

It was not only a restaurant but, in Ray's words, "a place of magical entertainment, the gardens being filled with fountains, statues, and replicas of the seven wonders of the world, and offering much else, including fireworks, music for dancing, and other noisy frolics".

[55] Instead, his customers at Gore House were mostly from lower down the social scale, and noise and drunken behaviour caused the local magistrates to withdraw Soyer's licence, forcing him to close the Symposium with a loss of £7,000.

It was in a completely different style from his previous books, and was almost entirely based on a French manuscript he had acquired from its author, Adolphe Duhart-Fauvet, a fact he concealed at the time.

"[62] In 1855, reports of the conditions, described by the historian Roger Swift as "appalling privations",[63] endured by British soldiers in the Crimean War were causing outrage in the press.

[63] Having read in The Times of what Cowen calls "the privations being suffered by the troops",[64] who were "racked by disease and near-starvation",[65] Soyer offered the government his services, at his own expense.

[n 11] Nightingale wrote of them, "Soyer's stoves will boil, stew, bake and steam, in short, do everything but grill, ensuring that variety in cooking which is proved essential to health".

[7] In an obituary tribute, The Illustrated London News commented, "There can be no doubt that the seeds of his malady were sown in the Crimea, as ever since he has been ailing, and an overtaxed mind has brought to the grave a man whom the world could ill afford to lose".

[73] Styles of cooking have changed since Soyer's time and, with the exception of his lamb cutlets Reform, his recipes rarely feature in modern menus.