- Ten London chefs to cook banquet to raise money for Syria
- Unicef UK’s ‘Child of Syria’ project to be supported
It might sound a little incongruous- raising money on a banquet for the hungry, a £150 meal cooked by the rich and famous to support the needy and in danger.
But Ottolenghi and co are standing on the shoulders of giants, and the Irish are no strangers to that kind of paradox. Alexis Soyer, a man whose answer to “you can’t stuff truffles with ortolans” was to just stuff ortolans into truffles, was the somewhat incongruous celebrity chef of the Famine, setting up a model soup kitchen in Dublin and earning himself the derision of the medical men of the day and the gratitude of the poor (there was, apparently, a ballad, fittingly enough for a man who once saved his own life by singing.)
Perhaps Soyer’s receipt for soup (beef leg, celery tops, turnip peelings, green parts of leeks and other assorted sundries) could be revived for the occasion? A quart of soup and a quarter of a pound of bread for a penny might be hard to come across nowadays.
