Alexis Soyer – Victorian Kitchen Genius and Chef

Alexis Soyer was chef to the aristocracy of Victorian London. But he also set up soup kitchens during the Irish Famine and organised the hospital kitchens of the Crimea.

Here, Aveling, interviews Alexis, about the class system and its relation to the sandwich:

Aveling: Is it true Alexis that although your culinary expertise is wide and unending, you are also a keen sandwich maker?

Alexis: Yes.

Aveling: You are French but you have worked in London and married an English woman and I believe this gives you the objectiveness, which I am looking for as I am particularly interested in the fact that you have dealt in close quarters with both aristocracy and serfs in equal measures. Furthermore, the French class system is much like our own and it is both this and your culinary skills, along with your altruistic concern for other peoples need for sustenance that I would like to put to you an idea of our own English class system, in the topic of a ham sandwich, in your case a jambon sandwich or baguette.

Alexis: Yes.

Aveling: I will now define our English class system -not as a simple analogy- but on a factual basis, with the makings of a sandwich. I shall begin...

Working class sandwich = Bread, butter (thinly spread) and ham.
Lower Middle class sandwich = Bread, butter, lettuce and ham.
Middle class sandwich = Bread, (No Butter but oil as a lubricant) tomato and ham.
Upper middle class sandwich = Bread, thickly spread butter and ham. (And would never consider anything else, especially tomato)
Upper, Aristocracy or Toff class sandwich = Bites of bread and then ham eaten alternately with absolutely nothing else. (A sandwich of the mouth rather than the hand)

...You will notice the lower middle and middle classes step away from the triangular way of seeing things of the start, middle and end structures, as Aristotle wrote his plays and Hollywood, to this day, still uses as its template, but for now this is not our main concern. You will further notice Alexis that the working class, though poles apart in the class system to the upper middle and upper classes, have almost the same appetite, (as though in being so opposite they stand side by side of the start/finish line. Did you find this to be the case when cooking for both classes yourself?

Alexis: Yes.

Aveling: Do you think this idea half-baked?

Alexis: No.

Aveling: If you are wondering where the nouveau riche fit into this, they don't eat sandwiches, they eat risotto. In France could you tell a persons class by the way they apply the ingredients of their sandwich, or is this too much of a generalization?

Alexis: No it is not and Yes you can.

Aveling: Thank you, Alexis.

                      THE SANDWICH IN THE HEART OF DARKNESS

                                        


As a species of seemingly feeble, naked apes, we humans are unlikely candidates for power in a natural world where dominant adaptations can boil down to speed, agility, jaws and claws. Why we rose to rule, while our hominin relatives died out, has long been a curiosity for scientists.

The beginning of human cognition, for example, is the result of the development of a larger brain, which can be represented by artifacts—stone tools, weapons—or productions that signify greater abilities for thinking and innovation.

Although the adaptation of a larger brain may separate humans from their primate relatives, it also came at a cost of increased fuel requirements. A human brain uses at least 20 percent of an individual's resting metabolism.

Evidence of early humans use of fire could be used to mark how they overcame their energy needs. Heat helps free up energy by softening foods, denaturing their proteins and breaking down toxins, which is why cooking can explain one fundamental reason for human brain size as well as small canine teeth and small guts in comparison to other primates.

Just as revelationary for us at sandwich HQ, is the finding of starch grains on 30,000-year-old grinding stones, which suggest that prehistoric man may have dined on an early form of flat bread, contrary to his popular image as primarily a meat-eater.

The findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) journal, indicate that Palaeolithic Europeans ground down plant roots similar to potatoes to make flour, which was later whisked into dough.

We at sandwich theories are not emphatically suggesting cavemen sat around campfires, cutting up baked dough into slices with their stone tools and making Mammoth sandwiches as pack lunch in preparation for the following day's hunt, but the importance of storing food for leaner times, must have been a regular concern and it would be reasonable to suggest cold meats and bread where indeed stored for long hunting trips, as the Arctic Inuit have been found to store Auk birds in seal skin in preparation for winter.

In this instance the Arctic is perfect for cold storage, unlike the plains of Africa. Furthermore, meat is a highly perishable product but it can be cured by smoking and salting as Cro-Magnon Man had found out 35,000 years ago.

We could look back even further for origins but this would require a much bigger leap of the imagination. It is fair to say that the less aggressive, up-right walking, sophisticated Bonobo chimps, are not given to further hyperlect in the throwing of tea parties in front of their slightly bemused cousins -to say we'd be drawing inferences from too small examples would be a massive understatement, but whether you believe in Savannah theory or Aquatic ape theory, (escaping the jungles or the sea) the retreat back into the interior for answers, as colonel Kurtz and Captain Nemo found to their respective nadirs, are in the same sense, the great pioneering costs, which have to be paid, to further contribute to the sum of human knowledge.  

This is why for the less adventurous amongst us it took the likes of modern man, such as John Montagu to happen on a possibly age-old practice by mere chance. Though he lived in the age of enlightenment, societies capacity for forensics in his time were nothing compared with the speed at which it answers -or throws up more questions- in discoveries evident today.

Who could now deny the possible supremacy of bread and meat being eaten together? Whether it is eaten cold or not or even in the same mouthful I believe we have already convincingly covered.