Alexis Soyer's army stove

This "Soyer Field Stove" can be seen in the Florence Nightingale Museum in London.

"Alexis Soyer, a celebrated French chef living in England, volunteered to go the Crimea[n war] when he read how soldiers were suffering from hunger. Soyer was famous for designing a state-of-the-art kitchen at the Reform Club in London with temperature-controlled gas ovens. He also wrote many books and set up soup kitchens during the Irish Famine in the late 1840s. First he helped Florence Nightingale in Scutari to improve the kitchens in the military hospitals. Then they sailed together in May 1855 for the Crimea. There he improved army rations, trained army cooks, and introduced the portable "Soyer Field Stove" and "Scutari Teapot". The British army cooked with Soyer's stoves for the next 120 years"¹.

• Photo by Luca Borghi ti.supmacinu|ihgrob.l#| (August 2011), courtesy of the Florence Nightingale Museum

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Footnotes

1. K.Nixon and K.Worthington, Florence Nightingale Museum, The Florence Nightingale Museum, London 2010, p. 33.