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

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СКАЧАТЬ fire in the kitchen stove, cleaning the hearth in the dining room, dusting the dining room, cleaning the front hall, cleaning the boots, preparing the family’s breakfast—“if cold meat is to be served, she must always send it to table on a clean dish, and nicely garnished with tufts of parsley”—and then quickly eating her own breakfast so that she could run upstairs and air out the bedrooms while the family was still at table. She then cleaned the house, prepared and served dinner, cleaned up after the meal, ate her own dinner, cleaned the scullery, prepared and served tea, cleaned up after tea, and finally sat down to “a little needlework for herself,” spending two or three hours making and repairing her clothes before bed.

      It’s not clear how long Rosa lasted in this situation. She told Lawton that at the age of thirteen—that is, around 1880—she took a job at Sheen House, in Richmond, where the Comte de Paris, an heir to the French throne whose succession had been halted by the revolution of 1848, was living in exile with his family. Hired as a lowly “washer-up” in the comte’s kitchen, she said she began helping his French chef and was soon assisting at dinners served to visiting royalty from all over Europe. The chef put her in charge of the kitchen when he was away, and other family members borrowed her to cook in their various houses in England and in France. “I worked in their family for many years,” she asserted, and gave notice at the end of 1887 only because it had become so difficult for her to share the kitchen with an increasingly jealous French chef. (“For an Englishwoman to try to be their equal—it was impossible for me.”)

      Unfortunately this chronology makes no sense. The date of her departure in 1887 can be verified, for Rosa showed Lawton a note written by the comte’s secretary acknowledging Rosa’s decision to leave and offering a reference if she needed one. But records indicate that the comte didn’t move to Sheen House until 1886. Rosa would have had less than two years to transform herself from … a thirteen-year-old scullery maid to a twenty-year-old master chef? One of her biographers, Daphne Fielding, who came to know Rosa in the 1920s, says that she went to work for the comte at sixteen; but that would still put her in Sheen House three years before the comte leased it. (There’s never been a lot of fact-checking when the subject is Rosa, and having tried with little success to track her through libraries and archives, I can understand why.) Nonetheless, there’s truth in the big picture: Rosa did find work in one or more French-run kitchens in the 1880s, which made it possible for her to learn the principles and techniques of the most exalted cuisine in high-society England.

      High-society England was what she wanted. Throughout her life she talked jubilantly about her friendships in the aristocracy, and she tried hard to keep a supporting cast of the rich and titled within reach at all times. As a girl working at Sheen House, she told Mary Lawton, “I learnt to think … that it was not a stupid thing to cook. I saw that the aristocracy took an interest in it, and that you came under the notice of someone that really mattered.” Other girls her age chose factory work, but what was a factory girl? “Just one of a number of sausages!” Cooking offered a way to stand out, to win the attention of the sort of people who counted. “My family did not know what Lords or Ladies or Earls or Dukes meant,” she said. “I knew it by being a Cook.”

      So it was as a cook that she made her way to the most fashionable dinners in London and the countryside. One of her first employers after Sheen House was Lady Randolph Churchill, the American-born mother of Winston. How she and Rosa connected is unknown, but Rosa’s culinary training at Sheen House would have made her an excellent candidate for a job in a high-class kitchen, and Lady Randolph’s kitchen was among the highest. Her in-laws were the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough; with that flawless credential, as well as the fortune she brought from America, she had become one of the leading hostesses of an obsessively social era. The most important of her dinner guests was the Prince of Wales, who would become King Edward VII after Victoria’s death in 1901. A warm friend and admirer of Lady Randolph’s, rumored to be her lover as well, the prince was also a prodigious eater who genuinely appreciated fine food. Rosa’s cooking pleased him, and from the moment he first complimented one of her dinners, her future was assured. (There are many anecdotes describing this turning point, mostly along the lines of “And the Prince was so impressed by the food that he asked to meet the chef, whereupon a slim young girl dressed in white appeared at the door and hesitantly …” etc., etc.) No matter how the prince and the cook discovered each other, Rosa’s career soon flowered. Society ladies who were distinguished enough to entertain the prince but nervous about whether their kitchens were up to the task hired Rosa for the evening. Other ladies, who couldn’t hope to bring the prince to their tables but aspired to put on luncheons and dinners and late suppers in the best style of the time, hired her as well. Abundant gossip suggesting that Rosa was one of the prince’s many lovers—she never confirmed or denied—did its own part to heighten her desirability as a caterer.

      In 1893, just six years into her career as an independent caterer, Rosa married a butler named Excelsior Lewis. She told Lawton she cared nothing for him and married only because her family insisted; but since her parents barely register in her life story apart from this sudden spark of influence, she very likely had other reasons. Describing the wedding to Lawton, she made it sound like a comic song in a music hall: “I went off to church, and we were married. I had nothing on but a common frock. I told the parson to be quick, and get it over with, and he said—‘Why, what a funny woman you are. I’d like to know where you live.’ So we were married, then I threw the ring at him at the church door and left him flat.” But she didn’t leave him flat, not yet. Though she showed no interest at all in children or a conventional domestic life, marriage moved Rosa into a zone of respectability that was very useful to her: with her own home, and a husband attached to her name, she could go from mansion to mansion working wherever she pleased. After the wedding the two of them lived together for nearly a decade while she went right on with her cooking.

      Over the next twenty years, Rosa built up her catering until she was managing a staff of six, eight, sometimes twelve women, all uniformed in white, who accompanied her to one wealthy home or another to stage the glamorous luncheons and dinners that were her specialty. “I took full charge,” Rosa told Lawton. “I had complete authority—as though it were my own house, like a general in command.” England had a profligate upper class in the decades preceding World War I, and lavish entertainments were at the center of the London season, which ran from May through July. At a time when a High Court judge was earning £5,000 a year, Rosa said she used to make more than £6,000 during the three-month season alone. She loved talking about her glory years. “I used to go down to Mr. Waldorf Astor’s place, Hever Castle, nearly every week-end … I did dinners for Lady Millicent, Duchess of Sutherland … I did the Ascot Races and the Goodwood Races … Everybody of any note, politicians and famous people, Lords and Ladies, everybody in the aristocracy and in the great London world, had me for their dinners and luncheons.” Sometimes, for families living in the country who wished to entertain in London, she not only prepared the food but rented and decorated an entire house—a service nobody else in the catering business could match, she emphasized. “I furnished the linen and silver and everything and my linen had no names on, silver had no names and my muslin curtains came from the Maison de Blanc in Paris. I would get all the curtains and new carpets from Paris, and then I would go and hire all the best rugs I could find, and all the best furniture I could find, and the whole house would then look as though it were lived in, and not a rented place.” According to Rosa, the other caterers were left in the dust, teeming with jealousy.

      Although Edward officially became king in January СКАЧАТЬ