Soyer's Culinary Campaign: Being Historical Reminiscences of the Late War

Alexis Benoît SoyerProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.6
Word count
1.2M words
Chapters
124

Tags

English Originals Documentary LiteratureFood and Drink Military StrategyEveryday LifeCooking TechniquesPortrait GalleryDocumentary NarrativeSocial Observation

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.Soyer's Culinary Campaign: Being Historical Reminiscences of the Late War. by SoyerAuthor: Soyer, Alexis, 1809-1858,Language: English, Class: UC: Military science: Maintenance and transportation, Release Date: Apr 15, 2013

Editor's review

This book is the personal wartime memoir of the celebrated British chef Alexis Soyer, recounting in the first person his experience of joining the army in the Crimea and working to improve soldiers' food. Its distinctive value lies not in grand war narrative but in a micro perspective where food history meets military logistics: how a chef confronted the constraints of field kitchens, fuel, ingredients and sanitation, and turned culinary knowledge into workable logistical plans. The prose carries the ease and detail of a nineteenth-century memoir, and it suits readers interested in the cultural history of food, military history or narrative nonfiction who wish to read it as a historical source. As the original is an English public-domain work, Chinese readers will find it most useful as a window onto nineteenth-century British society and army life rather than as a tightly plotted war story. Readers are advised to understand the technical conditions and linguistic habits of the period against their historical background.

Who it's for

A good fit for

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Reading tips

  1. Begin with the preface and contents to map the author's timeline with the army, then read the chapters in order.
  2. Note culinary and logistical terms as you go, and consult background sources together afterwards.
  3. Treat it as a historical source rather than a novel; after each chapter, sum up the author's core observations in one or two sentences.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
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  11. 11
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  50. 50
  51. 51
  52. 52
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  70. 70
  71. 71
  72. 72
  73. 73
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  124. 124

FAQ

Is this book mainly about war or about cooking? The two are interwoven. The author records his wartime experience from the standpoint of an army chef, with the focus on soldiers' food, field kitchens and logistical improvements; the course of the war is only the backdrop. Readers seeking a full picture of the battlefield will need to pair it with other military histories.
Is the English public-domain text hard to read? It is a nineteenth-century English memoir, so its syntax and vocabulary are somewhat older than today's, but it is mainly narrative and not especially difficult. Readers with a college-level foundation in English can finish it with a dictionary, and may skip specialized terms at first to grasp the gist.
Is it suitable as reference material for food-history research? It can be used as a primary source, offering a firsthand observer's account of wartime catering conditions and operational details. But it carries a personal perspective and the limitations of its era; when citing it, cross-check against other sources rather than relying on it alone for conclusions.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Alexis Benoît Soyer Author · French · 1809–1858

Alexis Benoît Soyer (1809–1858) was a French chef and food writer born near Meaux. He moved to London in 1830 and became head chef of the Reform Club, where he made his name in British gastronomy. During the Crimean War he worked to improve the diet of British troops and invented a field cooker for military use, extending his culinary practice into army catering. He wrote extensively, with major works including The Gastronomic Regenerator, The Modern Housewife, Soyer's Culinary Campaign and The Pantropheon. These cover cooking techniques, household food management, wartime catering and the history of food, combining practical instruction with historical perspective and giving him a notable place in Victorian food culture. He died in London in 1858. Public sources on his life are limited and centre mainly on these activities and works.