Drake postponed sailing against the Spanish Armada till his game of bowls was over, Nero preferred his lyre to ARP duty, Belshazzar's feast was rudely interrupted. In that appealing branch of mythology which counterpoints the trivial with the catastrophic, the cooks on HMS Sheffield deserve a place, killed while preparing lunch. Few men seem as innocent and apolitical as a chef who is preoccupied with his craft - though an exception might have to be made for the trusty employed by the Borgias. Frenchmen, perhaps, are too realistic, or live too closely to their chefs, to subscribe to this view: it was a Frenchman who reminded the world that an army marches upon its stomach, and another Frenchman who proved it for the English. As Punch wrote after Alexis Soyer's self-imposed slavery in the Crimea on behalf of his adopted country:

LRB 2 September 1982 | PDF Download