Blue cloth binding with gilt title on the spine.

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For conditions, please view our photographs. A very rare and favourite book from the library gathered by the famous Cambridge Don, computer scientist, food and wine connoisseur, Jack Arnold LANG. 

Jack founded the Michelin Guide ‘Midsummer House’- Cambridge’s paramount restaurant. This dining experience is hidden amongst the grassy pastures and grazing cattle of Midsummer Common and perched on the banks of the River Cam. 

Perhaps the first celebrity chef, Alexis Soyer (1810–58) was a flamboyant, larger-than-life character who nonetheless took his profession very seriously. As the chef of the Reform Club, he modernised its kitchens, installing refrigerators and gas cookers. In 1851, during the Great Exhibition, he prepared spectacular (but financially ruinous) culinary extravaganzas at his restaurant, the Gastronomic Symposium of All Nations. In stark contrast, he organised soup kitchens during the Great Famine in Ireland and volunteered his services in the Crimea in 1855 to improve military catering. He was also a prolific inventor of kitchen gadgets, notably promoting the Magic Stove, used for cooking food at the table. First published in 1938, this biography by Helen Soutar Morris (1909–95) is based on François Volant and James Warren’s anecdotal account of 1859 (also reissued in this series), and it faithfully conveys the adulation that Soyer engendered in his lifetime.

(Cambridge: At the University Press 1938). First UK Edition. 221 pages. 22 x 14.5 cm. Publisher’s blue boards with gilt lettering to the spine. Title-vignette and indexed, illustrated with b/w plates and text figures. Boards bright and clean. No inscriptions. 

Alexis Soyer was a chef and entrepreneur, originally from France, whose life was filled with some pretty extraordinary twists and turns. Soyer was a prolific inventor, creating devices such as the “Soyer Stove” – a portable cooking stove that became widely used by the British Army during the Crimean War alongside Florence Nightingale. He also developed field kitchens that improved the quality and safety of soldiers’ meals. During the Irish Potato Famine (1845-1852), Soyer travelled to Ireland to establish soup kitchens and became the first “celebrity chef” to use his fame for social good. Soyer took a deep interest in the history of food, particularly the way ancient cultures approached cooking, eating, and food preservation.