What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women and the Food That Tells Their Stories. Laura Shapiro

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       Rosa Lewis

       (1867–1952)

       “Do you know King Edward’s favourite meal? Let me whisper. It was boiled bacon and broad beans. He loved them.”

      —Daily Sketch, June 13, 1914

      Of all the women in this book, Rosa Lewis should have been the one whose food story was already right there in full view. She was a cook by profession, her meals were famous in her own time, and she worked for herself. Surely she wrote down recipes, drafted menus, scribbled shopping lists, saved receipts from the fishmonger and the greengrocer, and kept notes on the likes and dislikes of her clients. What’s more, she was a public figure, one of the best-known caterers in Edwardian London, sought out by many of the most revered families in the aristocracy, and a favorite of King Edward himself. Newspapers called her “England’s greatest woman chef” and “the greatest woman cook that the world has ever known” and reported on her death and funeral.

      Yet the written record is mostly scraps and gaps, gossip and anecdotes. We do have the newspaper stories, as well as a sampling of Rosa’s menus and a few recipes. Occasionally she shared culinary home truths with reporters (“When you cook a quail or a plover, make it taste like a quail or a plover, not like something else”). We know when she bought the Cavendish Hotel on Jermyn Street, we know when she died, and we know the impressive size of her estate—£123,000, the equivalent of around $340,000 at the time, not including the Hepplewhite chairs, Regency tables, freestanding marble staircase, and quantities of rugs and pictures, all from the hotel and sold at auction after her death. But for a woman whose life has inspired five books and The Duchess of Duke Street, a thirty-one-episode public television series, there is surprisingly little that can be verified, apart from some of the food that made her famous. The truth and the legends about Rosa Lewis have been intertwined for so long that it’s impossible to separate them. Which was just the way she liked it.

      Plenty of young girls learned to cook professionally in Edwardian England, but Rosa had a more complicated ambition. She wanted great cooking to open the doors of the most exclusive houses in London, and she had her sights on the drawing room as well as the kitchen. It wasn’t about marrying up or discarding her origins; it was about being exactly who she was—“Rosa Lewis, cook!”—whether she was wearing an apron or a Paris gown. There were no role models for such an accomplishment. Auguste Escoffier, the most lionized chef in London, came close, but he was a man, he was French, he ran lavish restaurants, and he hadn’t started out as a Cockney scullery maid.

      Most of what has been written about Rosa has borrowed heavily from the first book published about her, which appeared in 1925. The author, an American journalist named Mary Lawton, had heard about Rosa from the theatrical designer Robert Edmond Jones, who urged her to do a story on a woman he called one of the most extraordinary characters in London. “She began life as a scullery maid and became one of the greatest cooks in England—a friend of the King as well as his cook,” he told Lawton—a capsule biography that would always be the best line in Rosa’s résumé. Lawton persuaded the editor of the popular monthly Pictorial Review to give her an assignment, then traveled to London and asked Rosa if she would consent to a series of interviews. Rosa was in her fifties. She had outlived the grand culinary style that made her famous; indeed, she no longer did much cooking of any sort, and the war had done away with the culture of affluence and entertainment in which she had been something of an adored mascot. Here was an opportunity to resurrect a lost world and give life to memories she treasured. She agreed to talk, according to Lawton, and allowed a stenographer to take down every word. Pictorial Review ran a four-part series based on the interviews in the spring of 1924, under the byline “Recorded by Mary Lawton.” A year later the series was published in book form as The Queen of Cooks—And Some Kings (the Story of Rosa Lewis). Written entirely in the first person, the text conveys the impression of a comfortable, loquacious raconteur looking back on a remarkable life and thoroughly enjoying every moment she pulled from the past. (“Once, when I went out to cook a big dinner in a very smart house, one of the maids said—‘Hello! are you one of Mrs. Lewis’ cooks?’ ‘Yes,’ I replied. Then she said—‘How long have you been with her? Does she still drink?’ I said—‘Yes’m, just a little.’ ‘Does she still use bad language?’ ‘Oh, yes, quite a lot,’ I answered.”) Famous names were scattered liberally across the pages—lords and ladies, politicians and actors, a handful of American millionaires—and although Lawton didn’t attempt to re-create Rosa’s Cockney accent, it practically bounces off the page.

      As soon as she saw the book, Rosa indignantly called it a “travesty” and threatened to sue. She denied that she had participated in the project. Lawton had come to see her, she acknowledged, and eventually she had agreed to a brief interview, but—“only 20 minutes,” she insisted. She accused Lawton of begging “typists, book-keepers and personal servants” for gossip and chasing down “well-known Americans, who are among my friends,” for material. Maybe so, but this long, rambling narrative, with its reminiscences piled haphazardly one on top of the other, does have the sound of a word-for-word transcript that’s been loosely edited for coherence. The tone of voice is consistent, and the anecdotes have the well-worn patina of tales often told—vague chronology, fuzzy details, vivid moments of triumph. For all her outrage at what she claimed were lies and distortions, moreover, Rosa spent the rest of her life telling the same stories in the same raucous, irreverent style. We don’t know if the stories are true, but I’ve drawn on them here because at least we know that Rosa herself was telling them—a degree of credibility missing from some of the later biographies, which tended to bulk up Lawton’s account with occasional helpings of the authors’ own fantasies.

       Rosa Lewis, right, with friends and staff members at the Cavendish Hotel, 1919.

      Rosa Ovenden grew up in the village of Leyton, just outside London, the fifth of nine children born to a watchmaker-turned-undertaker. The family was able to keep Rosa in school until she was twelve, but after that she had to work; and for a girl her age the only choice was the lowest rung of domestic service. She became the “general servant” in a nearby household, a job so grim that even Mrs. Beeton, who published the first edition of her soon-to-be-indispensable Book of Household Management in 1859, felt sorry for anyone forced to take such employment. “Her life is a solitary one, and, in some places, her work is never done,” she wrote with a candor unusual in nineteenth-century domestic manuals. “She is also subject to rougher treatment than either the house or kitchen-maid, especially in her earlier career; she starts in life, probably a girl of thirteen, with some small tradesman’s wife as her mistress, just a step above her in the social scale; and although the class contains among them many excellent, kind-hearted women, it also contains some very rough specimens of the feminine gender.” If Rosa’s mistress СКАЧАТЬ