cupboards attached, holding spices, salt, fresh herbs, breadcrumbs and bottled sauces, conveniently to hand for the chef and his juniors. David notes that, unusually, several of Soyer's junior chefs were women. In 1842, at the invitation of Leopold I, King of the Belgians, Soyer travelled to Brussels. During his absence his wife had a miscarriage and died. He was distraught and, according to Ray, "never fully recovered from his grief and guilt at having left his wife alone". He commissioned a memorial statue, and threw himself into his work, becoming even busier. In 1844 he fell in love again, this time with the ballet dancer Fanny Cerrito, with whom he began an amitié amoureuse that lasted the rest of his life. Soyer's best-known dish, still on the club's menu in 2023, is – lamb cutlets Reform – fried breaded lamb cutlets served with the piquant Reform sauce. His original recipe, published in 1846, runs to more than 500 words. Later chefs, including Auguste Escoffier and more recently Victor Ceserani, Mark Hix and Prue Leith, have featured the dish in their repertoires. Escoffier's recipe is considerably shorter than Soyer's but both contain the same essential ingredients, although Escoffier specifies truffles in addition. Among the most celebrated of the banquets that Soyer provided for the Reform Club was one given in honour of the visiting Ibrahim Pasha of Egypt in July 1846. There were four kinds of soup; four of fish (salmon, trout, turbot and whiting); thirteen different entrées, including spring chicken, mutton cutlets, hot quail terrine, young hare and vol-au-vents of mackerel's roe; eight roasts (among them capon, duck, turkey and saddle of mutton); and then a course that in the manner of the time offered choices of both savoury and sweet dishes: among others, curried lobster, chicken salad or game galantines, and crisp cakes of almonds and cherries, praline tarts with apricots, or pineapple crystallised jellies. The climax of the menu was the dessert, named La Crème d'Egypte à l'Ibrahim Pacha: a huge pyramid of meringue and cake, filled with pineapple cream and topped with a portrait of the chief guest's father, Muhammad Ali Pasha. In 1846 Soyer published The Gastronomic Regenerator − "a simplified and entirely new system of cookery with nearly two thousand practical receipts ... illustrated with numerous engravings" − a work of well over 700 pages; according to the historian Eric Quayle the book had "a