Recipes from Disaster - Part 1

they added a large marquee dubbed the 'Baronial Banqueting Hall'. When they opened in May 1851, Alexis had plans of feeding 5000 clients a day with menus to suit all pockets. Perhaps he reckoned that his customers would feel the same necessity to eat with him as those in his soup kitchen had done; but fashionable though it was, there was no way that the restaurant's sales were ever going to cover the cost of the outlay, and they had to close after three months, nursing a loss of £7000.

Alexis was now forced to rebuild his finances by more conventional means. In 1849 he had invented 'Soyer's Magic Stove for Tabletop Cooking'. This he had demonstrated daily at his London office and for the next four years he engaged in tours throughout the country, promoting the stove and his books. He was also available to organise banquets and special culinary events, on condition that any leftovers were distributed to those in need.

On 2nd February 1855, he happened to go to the pantomime at Drury Lane, and when leaving the theatre, quite by chance bumped into some acquaintances who insisted they dine together at the Albion. Soyer arrived there separately later, and unable to get any information about their whereabouts or arrangements from the overstretched staff,he spent some time kicking his heels in a private room laid for six, which he assumed had been booked for their dinner. Idly browsing through 'The Times' he read with consternation Thomas Chernery's latest article relating the misery at Scutari, and on impulse wrote the letter at the head of this article, despatching it by hand to the Times. Shortly afterwards, enquiring of another waiter if there was any sign of his friends, he was told that they had already dined in the Coffee Room and had been asking after him. Prior to the evening, Soyer had been on the verge of leaving for Paris, where he had been offered the management of a restaurant to be opened for the Paris Exhibition the following year. (Obviously the people who hired him hadn't looked too closely at the books of Gore House!) On such a stupid misadventure was a slice of history spawned.

Tw days later, Alexis received a note from the Duchess of Sutherland requesting he attend a meeting at her home, Stafford House, that afternoon. The Duke of Argyle, a member of the Council of Ministers, was

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