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

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СКАЧАТЬ Coming of age when she did, in the midst of a long, frantic spree of social mobility generated by the Industrial Revolution, she could see that new money was disrupting many of the verities that had long ruled Britain. People whose parents had never dreamed of such advancement were gaining access to education, opportunity, and wealth; and the most conservative among the old-money classes had to close ranks sternly if they wanted to avoid associating with the wrong sort. Then as now, there was no simple way to define social class in Britain—birth, education, accent, manners, taste, and income all contributed, and only the first of these was immutable. Who belonged? Who didn’t? More nerve-racking still, who might belong next week or next year, given a little luck or the right fiancée? Rosa knew, just as Henry Higgins did, that anybody could slip into the upper ranks by acting the part properly. But she also believed that the true greatness of aristocracy was beyond imitation, a state of grace bestowed only upon the well-bred, and that all others would fall short sooner or later. One of the stories she loved telling about herself was tantamount to her own version of Pygmalion: she described the time she arrived at a country estate to arrange a dinner and decided to go in the front door instead of the back. “I was smartly dressed and very good looking in those days, so the lady of the house was almost kissing my lips when I said—‘Oh, it is only Mrs. Lewis, the cook. I know my way to the kitchen.’ Oh, you should have seen their faces! … Lady Paget or Lady Randolph Churchill would have seen the joke, but these people couldn’t, they not being exactly tip-top. It’s only a thoroughbred that does the right thing instinctively.”

      Rosa believed with all her heart that she had won a special place among the thoroughbreds. “Although I was a servant as you might say, and went out and cooked for them, they didn’t regard it so,” she explained, distancing herself from the word “servant” even as she was forced to use it. “They found other things in me than my capacity to cook. They seemed to enjoy being with me, and I have always associated with them on equal terms.” Her rich clients visited her in the kitchen, she often said, and she in turn dropped into their drawing rooms—their dining rooms, too—whenever she felt like it. “And I was always welcome,” she stressed. “I trotted in to see everybody at these dinners.” Sometimes she borrowed a gown from a Bond Street dressmaker, along with gloves and a fan—“dressed myself up like a Duchess and gone to the dinner. Then between the courses I would slip down into the kitchen if anything was going wrong, and sometimes bring up a dish in my own hands—and why not?”

      One of the photographs she gave Mary Lawton for the book showed the head cook at the Cavendish, “Mrs. Charlotte,” dressed in a simple but beautifully styled evening gown, with her hair piled high in fashionable waves and puffs. She was posed in an upholstered chair, one hand positioned palm-up on her lap, the other holding a book, her gaze off to the side, her expression slightly nervous and frozen into place. “My cook photographed in evening dress looks as good as anybody—as good as a Duchess,” Rosa declared. The occasion for the picture was the annual ball that Rosa staged for her staff and dozens of other cooks, maids, butlers, and doormen from London establishments. She borrowed clothes from shops and from ladies’ maids who passed along gowns from their employers; and she taught the women how to fix their hair and apply a little powder. She hired musicians, she brought in flowers, she put on a splendid supper. “Then I made all the gentry come to these balls and dance with them,” she said. “I made the gentry wait on them, too.” What she wanted to do, she said, was show these servants “the other side of life.” If they could experience it, they would do a better job providing it for others—“with graciousness.”

      Rosa could dress the part, and she had an honorary seat at some of the best tables in town; but she knew very well that a former scullery maid was never going to be accepted as an equal in the highest circles, no matter how cheerily everyone socialized with her. Hence she never tried to pass. Once she went with a party of top-drawer friends to dinner at the Carlton, the finest French restaurant in London. At a table across the room she saw half a dozen gentlemen and a lady (“very ugly”) whom she recognized—they were representatives of Pommery, the champagne house, and quite surprised to see her there. One of them asked, loudly, “Isn’t that Mrs. Lewis, the Cook?” Rosa called back across the room, “Yes, it is Mrs. Lewis. I’ve sold all my cutlets, how are you getting on with your champagne?”

      To get a sense of the full force of this remark, it’s crucial to remember that Rosa made a point of announcing her class identity with a flourish every time she opened her mouth. She never discarded her Cockney accent—precisely because she knew as well as Eliza Doolittle that it was the most damning of all the accidents of birth and upbringing that kept a flower seller on the street in rags. There were a good many disreputable accents strewn across England—indeed, only one was safely beyond criticism, and that was the style of speech known in the mid–nineteenth century as “pure and classical parlance” and later as BBC English. But Cockney had no rival as the most widely despised of the incorrect accents. Phonetics experts ruled it ugly, offensive, and “insufferably vulgar,” and women in particular were warned to take strict care of their h’s, for ladylike speech was perceived as the outward manifestation of both status and virtue. Manuals on correct pronunciation were popular among those who hoped to climb the ladder, and it was widely believed that a diligent student could shake off poor habits of speech just as he or she could learn from an etiquette manual not to slurp the soup. Rosa could have cleaned up her accent, but she made a choice to retain the speech she had been raised with and deliberately lavished it with slang and profanity. A barrage of impassioned Cockney became her trademark, and everybody who encountered her received a direct hit. American reporters loved to quote her in full color, with every lurid expression intact. In the British press, however, she was invariably quoted in standard English. It would have been impossible for print to convey the impression of a respectable woman if the reporter had ladled a Cockney accent over everything she said.

      To be treated with respect, to be treated exactly as one would treat a lady—despite the apron, despite the accent—was what she demanded of the world. When she chose cooking as her life’s work, she made a point of choosing haute cuisine, the most expensive and socially competitive cooking of its time. If food was going to be her shield and her weapon, she would deploy it at such an exalted level that nobody could look down on her. It was a smart choice for a young cook of that era, because wealthy British families were preoccupied not only with setting a fine table, but with using that table to reflect their own rarefied place in society. If Rosa had indeed been in the audience at Pygmalion, she would have scoffed at Shaw’s decision to send Eliza Doolittle to a garden party to test her skills. What a paltry victory! The truly treacherous social occasion of her time was a formal dinner. Rosa, whose longtime vantage point from behind a full-length apron gave her a perspective that Shaw lacked, would have sent Eliza straightaway to the dining room.

      “Nothing more plainly shows the well-bred man than his manners at table,” wrote the anonymous author of How to Dine, or Etiquette of the Dinner Table. “A man may be well dressed, may converse well … but if he is, after all, unrefined, his manners at table will be sure to expose him.” And if his manners passed scrutiny, his conversation might trip him up. One reason a dinner party was “one of the severest tests of good breeding” was that a proper host would have made sure that all his guests came from similar backgrounds. “They need not necessarily be friends, or all of the same absolute rank,” explained Lady Colin Campbell in The Etiquette of Good Society, “but as at a dinner people come into closer contact one with the other than at a dance or any other kind of party, those only should be invited to meet one another who move in the same class or circle.” In other words, an upstart СКАЧАТЬ