I was rewatching José Andrés’ documentary We Feed People (and please consider, if so inclined, a donation to World Central Kitchen) and started thinking about the impact celebrity chefs can have on the world, which sent me wandering down the rabbit holes of connectivity.
We tend to think the celebrity chef is a creature of modern media, but in fact it goes back much earlier. One of the first modern celebrity chefs was Alexis Soyer, a Frenchman who made a name for himself in London high society. After working for a number of aristocratic families, he became head chef at the Reform Club, where his kitchen was famous enough – with innovations like gas cooking and refrigeration – that he conducted tours for the Great and Good.
But the plight of the poor interested him as much as that of the privileged. During the Great Famine in Ireland, he ran a soup kitchen to help feed the starving, wrote a cookbook (proceeds to benefit the poor), and set up other charitable endeavors (proceeds ditto). He later turned his attention to the deplorable state of army cookery during the Crimean War, paying his own way to the war zone to overhaul the army’s entire culinary system (successfully, training and installing regimental cooks and vastly improving rations), reform hospital food (arguably less successful, at least if hospital stay humor is to be believed), and find time to invent a new camp stove, which remained in use until the 1990’s.
One of the members of the Reform Club was author Bram Stoker, known today for his novel Dracula, but better known in his life for his work as the business manager of the Lyceum Theatre, where he worked with Henry Irving, A-list actor of the day. His work with Irving connected him to London society, where he met the glitteratti of the age, making the acquaintance of artists, politicians, and other elites.
During this time he became close friends with Hall Caine (Thomas Henry Hall Caine, in full), one of the best known and celebrated British writers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Hall Caine was immensely popular, with people waiting outside his house just to get a glimpse of him. In one of those quirks of history, Hall Caine, despite being a mega-best-selling novelist, is largely forgotten today outside of academic literary circles, where Stoker is a household name. There is hope for you too, aspiring writers out there, to live on after the likes of Dan Brown have faded into history.
Early in his career, Hall Caine had lived with Dante Gabriel Rossetti at the end of the artist’s life. Rossetti was a central figure in the explosion of new takes on art in the 19th century, being one of the original Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, kicking off the craze of medievalism and the Arthurian legends in arts, and influencing the generation of artists and craftsmen who followed.
One of the artists taking inspiration from Rossetti was William Morris, who pursued an interest in everything from textiles, to literature, decorative arts, and socialism (being a prominent member of various socialist organizations alongside such notables as Eleanor Marx). This wide range aside, Morris is best known for his decorative arts patterns in paper and textiles, especially his wallpaper designs, which can still be bought today.
Morris kicked off the Arts & Crafts movement and created more than 50 influential wallpaper designs at a time when industrial production had made the product cheap and available to the growing middle class who sought to show off their status with the latest in home decor. The wealthy weren’t immune to the craze for the new designs, though, and Morris’ wallpaper graced the rooms of many mansion and town home of the well to do set.
Such as Castle Howard in Yorkshire, where several of the designs were used to “spruce up the old pile” and show that the aristos had their fingers firmly on the pulse of the day when it came to entertaining. The estate is, naturally, a perfect backdrop for film, and has been used as location for not one, but two, versions of Brideshead Revisited, a setting in the steamy period piece Bridgerton, and, somewhat less notably, in the comedy King Ralph.
In King Ralph, if you recall, the entire Royal Family dies, and down on his luck American lounge singer Ralph Jones is found as the last heir. Yes, stick with me here, because we all know for this to happen, everyone with aristocratic title in Europe (and beyond, given the bench depth of royal intermarriage…) would also have had to have dropped dead, but it’s all for a good laugh. Though my British friends tell me that the thought of an American on the throne leaves them, well, “not amused…”
To help Ralph become the king he was never meant to be falls to Assistant Private Secretary Duncan Phipps, played by local-born (to Castle Howard, being a Yorkshire lad from nearby Tornaby-on-Tees) actor Richard Griffiths (probably most widely known for his role as the repellent Vernon Dursley in the Harry Potter films).
Another role (and a much more sympathetic character to be sure) of Griffiths was the role of Henry Crabbe, Detective Inspector and chef, in Pie in the Sky. In the series, Crabbe wants only to be free to pursue his culinary dreams and run his small restaurant, but is prevented from retiring by his boss, who keeps him on because Crabbe is the one who really does all the work.
And who does Crabbe pay homage to in his kitchen, keeping a portrait of and referring to his charitable deeds?
Alexis Beniôt Soyer, the early celebrity chef and humanitarian.
This has been an episode of Connected Points, wherein I wander the Corridors of Connection in search of historical gems and follies.