Recipes from Disaster - Conclusion
The achievements of Alexis Soyer in the development of British Army catering were hugely significant. Perhaps his most important success, and also his first priority, was that he converted senior military thinking to the belief that the British soldier would stay far healthier and fight better if he was well fed. Soyer understood the character of the average squaddie enough to know that to guarantee this, his rations needed both to be palatable and to be prepared for him. The methods required to achieve this - the establishment and training of specialist cooks, and the provision of practical, efficient, and soldier-proof cooking equipment - followed on from there. To that extent he is arguably the founder of modern military catering; the fact that an Army Catering Corps was not founded as such until 1941 is unimportant in this context - ACC personnel were always attached to the units of Arms and other Services, and fully integrated into the activities of these units, as Soyer's cooks were.
How did he achieve this, in the ultra conservative strongly change-resistant military climate of the time? Certainly not be sheer force of personality alone, although this definitely helped. But additionally Alexis had credibility. He had an inventive mind, and he kept coming up with ingenious yet simple devices which did what he said they would do - the Soyer stove remained the staple equipment for battalion cooking throughout both World Wars and beyond until well into the 1980s. He had an established prior reputation for effective emergency cooking, acquired through the successful operation of his Dublin soup kitchen. Perhaps most importantly, he was an expert at networking - the fact that he had previously established amicable relationships with many people in key positions in the war zone was an enormous advantage to him over other campaigning innovaters like Florence Nightingale or James Beatty. Finally he was a stickler for detail, and the time he took in England before embarking on his mission to prepare himself for potential pitfalls,and to think through and obtain the references and recommendations that he would need in order to unlock important doors, paid enormous dividends when he arrived on the ground.
It was sad, and unexplained, that for one who knew so many people, his funeral passed largely unheralded and unattended. Perhaps, in
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