the two agreed not to publicise their relationship. After the closure of the Symposium, Soyer began to restore his reputation by undertaking another pro bono publico assignment. A scandal developed about supplies of canned meat to the Royal Navy. The Admiralty accepted Soyer's offer to examine some of the cans. He endorsed the findings of other examiners that the supplier was using meat unfit for human consumption, and found that the methods of canning were inadequate, allowing even good meat to decompose within the tin. The navy adopted his recommendations that meat should be supplied by supervised suppliers, and – after some official resistance on grounds of cost – that smaller cans should be used, ensuring that the meat was adequately cooked to the centre. At around the same time Soyer was working on another book. This was a scholarly work, The Pantropheon: History of Food, and Its Preparation (1853). It was in a completely different style from his previous books, and was almost entirely based on a French manuscript he had acquired from its author, Adolphe Duhart-Fauvet, a fact he concealed at the time. Soyer removed some of Duhart-Fauvet's drier academic passages; the book was favourably reviewed but it did not sell well. Soyer followed The Pantropheon with a work in his own, livelier style: A Shilling Cookery for the People (1854), aimed at a working-class readership. It opened with 37 soup recipes, and went on to cover topics ranging from the techniques of griddling, boiling and roasting to fish cookery, "important remarks on steak and rumpsteak", meat puddings and pies, a "general lesson on the cooking of vegetables", and sweet pies and puddings. Bell's Weekly Messenger asked, "Where is the housewife who will be satisfied without a copy?". Crimea In 1855 reports of the conditions, described by the historian Roger Swift as "appalling privations", endured by British soldiers in the Crimean War were causing outrage in the press. Having read in The Times of what Cowen calls "the privations being suffered by the troops", who were "racked by disease and near-starvation", Soyer offered the government his services, at his own expense. The offer was accepted and he went out to Scutari and Constantinople, reforming the catering in the hospitals there. He then went with Florence Nightingale to Balaklava and Sevastopol and reorganised the provisioning of the field hospitals, in addition to undertaking the cooking for the Fourth Division