Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-m6dg7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-08T07:55:10.921Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

THE COOKING ANIMAL: ECONOMIC MAN AT THE GREAT EXHIBITION

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 September 2008

Paul Young*
Affiliation:
Centre for Victorian Studies, University of Exeter

Extract

When called upon to host a banquet celebrating the forthcoming Great Exhibition of 1851, the world's first display of international industry, the Mayor of York turned to the period's most renowned chef for the catering. The Frenchman Alexis Soyer, who had recently resigned from his position at the Reform Club in Pall Mall, had made a name for himself in Britain through a combination of extravagant culinary endeavours and popular household cookery books. The banquet at York was an important occasion; joining Prince Albert, Queen Victoria's Consort, was a long list of national luminaries from Victorian high society and the political world. Soyer did not disappoint the Mayor, or his guests. The Times commented that amongst the vast array of international cuisines on offer was featured “one dish, to which turtles, ortolans, and other rich denizens of land and sea had contributed, [which] cost not less than 100l.” The paper noted with satisfaction that the feast was consumed before an “emblematical device representing Britannia in her conventional attire receiving the industrial products of Europe, Asia, Africa, and America” (“The Banquet at York” 5). That this emblem provided the backdrop to such cosmopolitan fare was salient: it spoke to the way in which the production and consumption of food would become a crucial motif in the positive representation of globalisation as it was understood at the Exhibition; it also highlighted the important role that the Victorian metropolis would fulfil in the realisation of this new world order. Certainly, the internationalist bent of Soyer's cooking seemed entirely appropriate to the luminaries gathered at the York banquet, and it was no doubt with the French chef's culinary scope in their minds as well as their stomachs that the Exhibition's organisers invited Soyer to submit a tender to provide refreshments at the display itself (Soyer 197).

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

WORKS CITED

Aguirre, Robert. Informal Empire: Mexico and Central America in Victorian Culture. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2005.Google Scholar
“Articles of Food.” The Crystal Palace and Its Contents; Being An Illustrated Cyclopaedia of the Great Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations. London, 1852. 106–07.Google Scholar
Auerbach, Jeffrey. The Great Exhibition: A Nation on Display. New Haven: Yale UP, 1999.Google Scholar
The Banquet at York.” Times 26 Oct. 1850: 5.Google Scholar
Binney, Thomas. The Royal Exchange and the Palace of Industry; or, The Possible Future of Europe and the World. London: Religious Tracts Society, 1851.Google Scholar
Bolt, Christine. Victorian Attitudes to Race. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971.Google Scholar
Brantlinger, Patrick. “The Famine.Victorian Literature and Culture 32.1 (2004): 193207.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
The Cookery of All Nations.” Punch 18 (1850): 100.Google Scholar
Cowen, Ruth. Relish: The Extraordinary Life of Alexis Soyer, Victorian Celebrity Chef. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2006.Google Scholar
Davis, John. The Great Exhibition. Sutton, Gloucestershire: Stroud, 1999.Google Scholar
Davis, Mike. Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World. London: Verso, 2002.Google Scholar
Dreze, Jean, and Sen, Amartya. “Introduction.” The Political Economy of Hunger. Vol. 1. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990. 133.Google Scholar
Edwards, H. Sutherland. An Authentic Account of the Chinese Commission which Was Sent to Report on the Great Exhibition; Wherein the Opinion of China Is Shown As Not Corresponding at All with Our Own. London: Henry Vizetelly, 1851.Google Scholar
Felkin, William. The Exhibition in 1851, of the Products and Industry of All Nations: Its Probable Influence upon Labour and Commerce. London: Arthur Hall, Virtue, 1851.Google Scholar
Ferguson, Niall. Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World. London: Penguin, 2004.Google Scholar
Foreman-Peck, James. A History of the World Economy: International Relations Since 1850. Totowa: Barnes & Noble, 1983.Google Scholar
Gagnier, Regenia. The Insatiability of Human Wants: Economics and Aesthetics in Market Society. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2000.Google Scholar
The Great Exhibition – We Are Glad to Hear.” Times 18 Mar. 1851: 5.Google Scholar
Greenhalgh, Paul. Emphemeral Vistas: The Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions and World's Fairs, 1851–1939. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1988.Google Scholar
Harvey, David. The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
The Haycocks in 1851.” Punch 20 (1851): n.p. (inset page).Google Scholar
The Illustrated Exhibitor: A Tribute to the World's Industrial Jubilee. London: Cassell, 1851.Google Scholar
Knight, Charles, ed. The Penny Cyclopaedia of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. Vol. 2. London: Charles Knight, 1834.Google Scholar
Lindley, John. “Substances Used As Food, Illustrated by the Great Exhibition.” Lectures on the Results of the Great Exhibition of 1851. Second Series. Vol. 2. London: David Bogue, 1853. 211–42.Google Scholar
London Dining Rooms.” Punch 20 (1851): n.p. (inset page).Google Scholar
Marx, Karl. “The Communist Manifesto.” 1848. Karl Marx: Selected Writings. Ed. McLellan, David. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977. 221–47.Google Scholar
Marx, Karl. Letter to Friedrich Engels. 24 Jan. 1852. Marx-Engels Collected Works. Vol. 39: 20. Marxists.org Internet Archive. 8 Jan. 2008 <http://www.marxists.org./archive/marx/works/1852/letters/52_01_24.htm>..>Google Scholar
Marx, Karl, and Engels, Friedrich. “Review: May-October 1850.” 1 Nov. 1850. Neue Rheinische Zeitung Revue. Marxists.org Internet Archive. 8 Jan. 2008 <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1850/11/01.htm>..>Google Scholar
Mayhew, Henry, and Cruikshank, George. 1851: Or, the Adventures of Mr. And Mrs. Sandboys and Family, Who Came Up to London to ‘Enjoy Themselves’, and to See the Great Exhibition. London: David Bogue, 1851.Google Scholar
McCulloch, J. R.The Principles of Political Economy. 1825. 4th ed.London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1849.Google Scholar
Milton, John. Comus: A Mask. 1637. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998.Google Scholar
Money As an Agent of Civilisation.The Illustrated Exhibitor and Magazine of Art 1 (1852): 410–11.Google Scholar
Norcia, Megan A. “The Imperial Food Chain: Eating as an Interface of Power in Women Writers' Geography Primers.Victorian Literature and Culture 33.1 (2005): 253–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pomeranz, Kenneth. The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
The Prince Consort.” Times 23 Feb. 1850: 4.Google Scholar
Refreshments at the Great Exhibition of 1851.” Punch 20 (1851): 33.Google Scholar
Richards, Thomas. The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851–1914. London: Verso, 1991.Google Scholar
Royal Commission of 1851. Official Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue of the Great Exhibition of 1851. 4 vols. London: Spicer Bros, 1851.Google Scholar
Secundus, Vates. The Great Exhibition: “Wot Is to Be” or Probable Results of the Industry of All Nations in the Year ‘51. Showing What's to Be Exhibited, Who Is to Exhibit It . . . In Short, How Its [sic] All Going to Be Done. London: n.p., 1850.Google Scholar
Smith, Adam. The Wealth of Nations. 1776. Ed. Skinner, Andrew. Vol. 1. London: Penguin, 1999.Google Scholar
Soyer, Alexis. Memoirs of Alexis Soyer. 1859. Ed. Volant, F. and Warren, J. R.. Rottingdean, Sussex: Cooks Books, 1985.Google Scholar
Stocking, George. Victorian Anthropology. London: Macmillan, 1987.Google Scholar
“Substances Used as Food.” Tallis' History and Description of the Crystal Palace, and the Exhibition of the World's Industry in 1851. Ed. Strutt, J. G.. Vol. 2. London: n.p., 1852. 8283.Google Scholar
There is Much Speculation.” Times 3 Jan. 1851: 4.Google Scholar
Too Many Cooks.” Punch 20 (1851): 212.Google Scholar
Whish, J. C.The Great Exhibition Prize Essay. 1851. 4th edition. London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1852.Google Scholar
You Must Translate.” Punch 20 (1851): 126.Google Scholar