A Culinary Campaign

This is the first reprint of Soyer’s extremely rare book, first published in 1857, about his time in the Crimean War. His witty first-hand account is informative and vivid and conveys the conviction and diplomatic skills that enabled him to get things done.

By 1855, reports of the appalling conditions being dured by British soldiers at the front had reached Britain and Soyer, reading about them in The Times offered to go to Scutari and Constantinople. He then went with Florence Nightingale to Balaklava and Sevastopol and reorganised the provisioning of the field hospitals, in addition to undertaking the cooking for the Fourth Division of the army.

Soldiers on active duty had until then been allocated a daily allowance of a pound of meat and a pound of bread, and were expected to carry and cook their own food. Ignorance and inexperience often led to food poisoning. Soyer's recommendations that each regiment should have a trained cook. These were recruited from the regiments and trained by a small team of professionals that Soyer had bought with him. He also wrote a cookbook for their use, The army adopted his arrangements permanently, giving rise to the appointment of regimental cooks and eventually, in 1941, the creation of the Army Catering Corps.

Soyer had taken with him a stove he had designed especially for camp conditions. They were horse-drawn boilers that could cook whether the army was stationary or moving. They proved so efficient and economical that the army used them, with later modifications, for more than a century. 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".

In May 1857 Soyer returned to London where he published A Culinary Campaign. His contributions to the health of the ordinary soldier compounded the fame he had earned earlier for his humanitarian efforts to feed starving Irish during Great Famine of the 1940s.