lent. 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 a