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

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СКАЧАТЬ the references that bubbled along in the conversation and even contribute a few. (It may not have occurred to Shaw that there was a more exacting test for Eliza’s initial outing than a garden party. He was a vegetarian and also hated getting dressed up, so he made a point of refusing most invitations to formal meals.)

      But Rosa understood what was at stake at the dinner table. She knew why people anxiously studied books like How to Dine, which was published in 1879, around the time she first went out to work. “Soup will constitute the first course, which must be noiselessly sipped from the side of a spoon,” counseled the author. “Fish usually follows soup. It is helped with a silver fork, and eaten with a silver fork, assisted by a piece of bread held in the left hand.” Less than a decade later, “Fish should be eaten with a silver fish knife and fork,” ruled the handbook Manners and Tone of Good Society. “Two forks are not used for eating fish, and one fork and a crust of bread is now an unheard-of way of eating fish in polite society.” Only the cognoscenti could hope to make their way through a fashionable meal flawlessly. When Rosa chose high-class cookery as her future, she was gaining access not only to a cuisine, but to all the social behaviors associated with it. She was learning the secret handshake.

      Rosa’s remarkable ascent took place at a time when wealth, fashion, and ambition were making extraordinary demands not only upon manners but upon food, which was constantly radiating signals that confirmed or dispelled the status of the householder. The human appetite itself had to be retrained to accommodate the stress. “No age, since that of Nero, can show such unlimited addiction to food,” recalled Harold Nicolson, the diplomat and writer, who was obliged to attend innumerable weekend house parties during the Edwardian era. Four massive meals a day were the rule, he wrote, with a fifth, slightly less massive, at midnight. The author of Party-Giving on Every Scale, published in the 1880s for the benefit of hosts and hostesses who were rightly nervous about this challenge, set out in detail what guests expected to be served at a top-of-the-line dinner. Two soups, to start, one clear and one thick; and the guests would choose whichever they preferred. Two kinds of fish came next, and again the guests made their choices, although there was an important nuance here—“A guest never eats but of one fish, with the exception of whitebait.” Whitebait, a tiny fish caught in the Thames amid much seasonal acclaim, was so definitively British and celebratory that it was the moral equivalent of a separate course and did not have to compete with the other fish on the menu. Then came at least three entrées, a term that did not yet mean “main course” but suggested more of a side attraction, sometimes called a “made dish.” These could be cutlets, croquettes, fricassees—lighter than a roast or a joint, often in a sauce. One or two “removes” then appeared, substantial roasts of beef, lamb, or ham. If there were two removes, it was decreed that the second must be chicken. Then two rotis, or game dishes, arrived, followed by a slew of the pretty, sometimes fanciful dishes known as entremets. Again, this was a term difficult to translate, but they could include savory preparations such as aspics or oysters au gratin and sweets such as jellies, creams, and sweet soufflés. Vegetables were served at different stages of the meal; often there was a salad course; occasionally there was a respite for ices; and sometimes one or two “piquant savories” of cheese, anchovies, or caviar were offered after the last of the sweet entremets. Finally the table was cleared for dessert, typically an array of fruits, ices, cakes, and preserves. No wonder there was an occasional voice pleading for restraint. “Ample choice, so as to allow for the differences of taste, is necessary, but there should be a limit,” urged Lady Colin Campbell. “The perpetual repetition of ‘No, thank you,’ to the continuous stream of dishes handed to you becomes wearisome.”

      Just as wearisome were overlong evenings at the table. During the season many of the rich attended formal dinners nearly every night, often sitting next to the same person each time, since places at the table were assigned strictly according to social rank. Depending on one’s regular dinner partner in the course of a particular season, the meals could drag on with excruciating tedium. King Edward was an especially difficult guest in this regard: he got bored very quickly as course after course plodded along. In the royal household he insisted that dinner last no more than an hour, and the new timetable became fashionable across society, at least as an ideal. Hostesses tried their best to keep the courses moving steadily, though having paid huge sums for truffles, foie gras, imported game, and hothouse fruits, they now found themselves nervously watching out for guests who were enjoying a dish so much they threatened to linger over it. “I still remember my intense annoyance with a very greedy man who complained bitterly that both his favourite fish were being served and that he wished to eat both,” recalled Consuelo Vanderbilt Balsan, the American-born wife of the Duke of Marlborough. “I had to keep the service waiting while he consumed first the hot and then the cold, quite unperturbed at the delay he was causing.” Lady Colin Campbell set down the rule: No second helpings of the soup or the fish, ever. Second helpings of the other courses were permissible, but only at a small and forgiving family meal.

      It wasn’t easy to navigate a safe route through British haute cuisine: traps for the unwary were set everywhere. Anthony Trollope, that excellent authority on Victorian class anxiety, made a point of identifying it with culinary anxiety in his novel Miss Mackenzie, published in 1865. As novelists so often do, he sent several characters to a dinner party, this one at the home of the heroine’s sister-in-law, Mrs. Mackenzie. Eager to stage the affair properly, she had hired a butler named Mr. Grandairs to supervise the food and service, and chose the increasingly fashionable service à la Russe—the food to be offered in courses rather than set out on the table all at once. Each course was a disaster. The soup, purchased from a shop and laden with Marsala, arrived at the table cold. The fish, “very ragged in its appearance,” was also cold; and the melted butter had become “thick and clotted.” Then came three ornate little entrées—“so fabricated, that all they who attempted to eat of their contents became at once aware that they had got hold of something very nasty.” While these were under way, champagne went around the table but quickly ran out since Mrs. Mackenzie had economized by ordering only one bottle. “After the little dishes there came, of course, a saddle of mutton, and equally of course, a pair of boiled fowls.” These were badly carved, and nobody got any of the sauces since they didn’t appear until the course was nearly finished. “Why tell of the ruin, of the maccaroni, of the fine-coloured pyramids of shaking sweet things which nobody would eat … the ice-puddings flavoured with onions? It was all misery, wretchedness, and degradation.”

      And yet, as Trollope emphasized, Mrs. Mackenzie was not trying to better herself with that pretentious dinner. This was not an instance of an upstart aiming at a higher class than she deserved. “Her place in the world was fixed, and she made no contest as to the fixing. She hoped for no great change in the direction of society.” She had staged such a dinner simply because that was how well-bred people were supposed to entertain, and since she didn’t have the money or the experience to do it properly, she had done it badly. At this point Trollope, who had clearly eaten more than his share of misbegotten dinners, broke out of his narrative and addressed his readers directly. Why, oh why, he demanded, couldn’t “the ordinary Englishman” with a middle-class income simply offer his friends a little fish and a leg of mutton?

      But such a familiar, comfortable solution was inconceivable for Mrs. Mackenzie, and for hosts and hostesses far more sophisticated than she was. Everyone knew that it was the French who occupied the highest realms of cuisine, while the very notion of traditional СКАЧАТЬ