A CHEF IN CRIMEA
On February 2, 1855, Alexis Soyer, Britain’s most famous chef, left a London theater to join friends at a nearby restaurant. A waiter showed him to the wrong room, and while waiting in vain for his fellow diners, he picked up a copy of the London Times newspaper and read the latest distressing report from the front line of the Crimean War. The Times had sent its reporter William Howard Russell to the war-ravaged peninsula, and taking advantage of the newly invented telegraph, he sent back the first eyewitness reports from a battleground. Russell is widely regarded as the first serious war correspondent. His chronicles described the dreadful conditions facing British soldiers on the battlefield and in hospitals, which shocked the British public and forced the government to change the way it supplied and treated its fighting forces.
Soyer offered to travel to the war zone at his own expense to feed the troops there.
Russell wrote about incompetent British military commanders, of soldiers dying in filthy hospitals, and of poor food supply. He described men “enfeebled by sickness” and “hungry and wet and half-famished.”
Deeply moved by what he had read, the tender-hearted chef asked for a pen and paper and wrote a letter to the editor of the Times. Soyer offered to travel to the war zone at his own expense to ensure that the troops received properly prepared and nutritious food, acting, he said, “according to my knowledge and experience in such matters.” Russell’s dispatches about woefully poor medical care in Crimea had already inspired the Times’s readers to start a fund that sent Florence Nightingale and a team of nurses to the area.
The Crimean War that aroused such strong feelings in Soyer and others began in
