“You reproach me for not sending you one earlier,” Alexis Soyer wrote
in the introduction to the 1851 edition of his book of recipes The Modern Housewife.
“That which I intended for you has been taken by the Marquis of N.
[Normanby] and party to Egypt, with the view of having a dinner cooked
on the top of the Pyramids.”1 The Marquis of Normanby was an
eccentric, somewhat Jules Vernesque aristocrat to whom Soyer apparently
had lent his latest culinary invention: a proto-camping gas cooker
called the Magic Stove.
Undoubtedly, Normanby’s choice of location was audacious and original. Picnicking, that unique Victorian jumble of high-class formality and bucolic joviality, relied in large part on spectacular locations. The fun of the picnic was not so much about eating and drinking in the outdoors, but about moving the whole formal dining experience—complete with cutlery, wine cellar, servants, and appropriate attire—to the countryside. An abrupt contrast between formal interior and informal exterior, between civilization and nature, was essential; the more contrast, the more fun. In that respect, the pyramids could not have been better chosen. Another obvious contrast was that a well-appointed picnic basket typically held only cold food: smoked salmon, cold cuts, biscuits, fruits, cakes. Cooking on the spot was not (yet) in fashion. Soyer’s Magic Stove was to change all that. Exactly what made the picnic on the pyramid so utterly exciting was that the meal was cooked and served hot. Not only the dining room but also the kitchen was transported to this improbable and truly inaccessible location. In the history of the picnic, the experience of dining atop a pyramid could merely be regarded as the gradual, if daring, evolution of an already established theme, whereas the portable cooker heralded a total revolution.
