SNIPPET: Per, "Paddy's Lament," by Thomas GALLAGHER (1982), a well-researched book with extensive bibliography about the famine in Ireland, perhaps nothing during the famine years more appropriately symbolized England's "helping hand" to Ireland than SOYER's Dublin soup kitchen. Monsieur SOYER was England's favorite chef de cuisine of the Reform Club of London. Since millions were to be fed, cost was uppermost in the minds of those in the exchequer, soup was naturally chosen over a bulky and substantial stew, the latter of course being what the people really needed to survive. SOYER took it upon himself, with the British government's blessing, to "feed and keep alive all the starving in Ireland" with one serving of his soup each day. On hundred gallons of it was to cost only one pound sterling, and yet it was to supply, according to Soyer, enough nourishment "for the poor of those realms" to assure that in Ireland there would be no more deaths from starvation. SOYER concocted soup recipes with and without meat that were deemed to be "tasty;" for the former, every two gallons of soup was to include four ounces of beef, two ounces of dripping fat, eight ounces of flour, and one-half ounce of brown sugar with a few onions, turnip parings, and celery tops thrown in to help flavor and color the water. Broken down it would contain the essence of one-half ounce of meat, amounting to only one of the many morsels of meat eaten by British lawmakers at the Reform Club every day in London. On April 5, 1847, fully eight months after the blight had destroyed Ireland's entire potato crop, a model kitchen and food distribution center built according to Soyer's specifications opened its door in Dublin. The wood-framed canvas building, erected near the main entrance to Phoenix Park, was 48 x 48, with an entrance at one end, an exit at the other. Iin the main apartment were a 300-gallon steam boiler and an oven capable of baking one hundredweight of bread at a time, both heated by the same fire. In front of this equipment were rows of tables 18 inches wide, in which holes were cut to hold a white-enameled quart basin to which a metal spoon was attached by a chain. SOYER planned for the people in need of his soup to file into a zigzag open-air passageway capable of holding 100 persons outside the tent. When a bell rang, these first 100 would enter the main apartment and occupy benches at the 100 bowls of soup set in the tables. Grace being said, they would use the chained spoons to consume the soup (the "Poor Man's Regenerator," SOYER called it), until another bell signaled that their soup time was over, whereupon, as they filed out the exit in the rear, they would each be given one-quarter pound of bread or savory biscuit. About a minute later, or just as the bowls and spoons had been swabbed with a sponge and another quart of soup poured into each bowl, the bell at the entrance would invite another 100 people in from the zigzag passageway. Soyer estimate that each cycle would take six minutes, allowing him to feed 1,000 people every hour. But opening day was a special event not so much for the hungry, who were impatient to be fed, but for the gentry, who had come for a wee nip of the famous soup and to watch the hungry fed. "His Excellency the Lord Lieutenant was there," reported the 'Dublin Evening Packet,' "the ladies PONSONBY and many other fair and delicate creatures assembled; there were earls and countesses, and lords and generals, and colonels and commissioners, and clergymen and doctors; it was a gala day, a grand gala." For the privilege of watching the hungry eat, the gentry were expected to donate five shillings each, which was to be distributed by the lord mayor in charity. "Five shillings each to see paupers feed!" wrote one reporter, "Five shillings each! To watch the burning blush of shame chasing pallidness from poverty's wane cheek! Five shillings each! When the animals in Zoological Gardens can be inspected at feeding time for sixpence!" Hence, with the beating of drums and the sounding of horns, with the Union Jack proudly flying from the kitchen's smoking chimney and a splendidly attired gentry nodding its approval, the British government fed the Irish a soup incapable of keeping a newborn cat alive. When copies of "The Lancet's" criticism of the soup was distributed and QUEEN VICTORIA's own physician's opinion of watery soup got abroad, Soyer decided to resign as "head cook to the people of Ireland" and return to England. After being given a dinner and a snuff box by the Dublin gentry who had watched the hungry fed on the "gala day," he boarded the first outgoing ship, never to return to the country he had vowed to save. Just before leaving, he published a sixpenny cookbook called "Charitable Cooking or The Poor Man's Regenerator," in which he said: "It requires more science to produce a good dish at trifling expense than a superior one with unlimited means." One week after opening his soup kitchen in Dublin, he was back in the more congenial atmosphere of the Reform Club in London, where he continued to delight his English patrons with "superior dishes made with unlimited means" - that is, with beef, veal, lamb, and pork brought over from Ireland on the same Liverpool steamers whose upper decks were jammed with Irish emigrants!. Appearing on the verge of perishing from hunger was not enough; recipients of outdoor relief had to be certified by the commissioner of the district as having no means of support, no animals to eat or sell, and a potato patch utterly laid to waste by the blight. They had to give up all but a quarter acre of their land. Since there were no strict nutritional standards set up, the soup often turned out to be worse than SOYER's, depending on who was in charge at any given location. At one center it might be wholesome, with chunks of meat, vegetables and rice, and Indian meal from America, and at another, thin, almost worthless gruel, at still another, nothing more than greasy water. Many persons waiting in line to receive rations were literally dying of starvation and had walked great distances. In some areas, where guardians struck the poor off the lists for the least reason, it was necessary to appear that starved in order to receive. At Ennistymon (Co. Clare), for example, anyone imprudent enough to look healthy was refused and had his ticket taken from him. In one documented case there a woman was struck off the list for giving a few spoonfuls of her ration to the children of her starved brother who had been struck off the list. She was reinstated only after the magistrate presiding at her dead brother's inquest intervened on her behalf.