in use in restaurants. At his office he exhibited to aristocratic crowds his skill in cooking with this stove, which had a large sale. As well as the stove, Soyer produced a series of kitchen gadgets that were the forerunners of many modern utensils, and sold a range of patent sauces and relishes. In David's words, "Whatever novelty he produced, from a new bottled sauce to a pair of poultry dissectors, from a six-inch portable table cooker to a gas-fired apparatus for roasting a whole ox, every London newspaper, a good many provincial ones, and often a few Paris journals thrown in, had their say." Soyer never patented his inventions, and therefore made little money from them. His next book, The Modern Housewife (1849), written with a middle-class readership in mind, was in the form of letters between two housewives, and in Ray's view now gives an interesting insight into domestic life of the time. Symposium to Pantropheon In 1850 Soyer resigned from the Reform Club. He was invited to tender for the catering at the Great Exhibition being planned for the following year, but he found the brief too restrictive. Instead he took a lease of Gore House, Kensington, opposite the site of the exhibition, and there he created the Gastronomic Symposium of All Nations. It was not only a restaurant but, in Ray's words, "a place of magical entertainment, the gardens being filled with fountains, statues, and replicas of the seven wonders of the world, and offering much else, including fireworks, music for dancing, and other noisy frolics". The Symposium was well attended, but Soyer was not as good a businessman as he was a chef and had aimed at the wrong public. When he left the Reform a friend there had recommended him to set himself up in an exclusive establishment, catering to an elite clientele. Instead, his customers at Gore House were mostly from lower down the social scale, and noise and drunken behaviour caused the local magistrates to withdraw Soyer's licence, forcing him to close the Symposium with a loss of £7,000. In the last days of the Symposium, Soyer was contacted by Jean Alexis Lamain, his son with Adelaide Lamain. She had died in 1836, and Jean had only recently learned who his father was. The two men met in London and the father acknowledged his son (and later made him his heir) though