He undertook to supply the whole poor of Ireland, at one meal for each person each day.  This meal with a biscuit, he assured the Executive, would be more than sufficient to sustain the strength of a strong and healthy man.  One hundred gallons of the soup was to be produced for L1.  And M. Soyer had satisfied the Government, that he would furnish enough and to spare of most nourishing food “for the poor of these realms;” and it was confidently anticipated that there would be no more deaths from starvation in Ireland.[248]

M. Soyer arrived in Dublin on the 1st of March, bringing with him his model kitchen and apparatus, and a building to receive them was erected on the ground in front of the Royal Barracks, and not far from the principal entrance to the Phoenix Park.  Before leaving London he had published some of the receipts according to which he intended to make various kinds of soups for the starving Irish.  Objections were raised in the columns of the Times against the small quantity of meat he used in making some of those soups.  “A brother artiste,” as M. Soyer calls him, maintained that a quarter of a pound of meat, allowed in making two gallons of his soup No. 1, was not at all enough.  M. Soyer rather jauntily replies that he had made two gallons of excellent soup without any meat, and that he had, at the moment, three soups “on taste,” two with meat and one without, and he defied the “scientific palate” of his brother artiste “to tell which was which.”  “The meat,” says M. Soyer, “I consider of no more value than the other ingredients, but to give a flavour by properly blending the gelatine and the osmazome, for,” he adds with complacent self-reliance, “in compounding the richest soup, the balance of it is the great art.”

His brother artiste, M. Jaquet, of Johnson’s tavern, Clare Court, rejoins that he never questioned M. Soyer’s ability to make a palatable and pleasing soup with little or no meat, but that he himself had not acquired the valuable art of making nutritious and useful soup without meat, and that he would not like to make the experiment of doing so, “for the use of the destitute poor.”  He expressed the hope that receipt No. 1 might be analyzed, and if it had all things necessary for nourishment, he, of course, was silenced.

M. Jaquet had his wish.  Scientific people took up M. Soyer’s receipts, and dealt with them,—­correctly and justly, no doubt, but in a manner that must have been anything but agreeable to the great artiste of the Reform Club, who seems to have had very exalted ideas of the importance of the mission on which he was sent to Ireland.