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

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СКАЧАТЬ the time Rosa began catering, thousands of French chefs were working in British homes, clubs, hotels, and royal palaces, drawn across the English Channel by the opportunities beckoning from a prosperous, bustling nation that was ready to enjoy the unexpected laurel of culinary prestige. Escoffier himself moved to London in 1890 and spent the rest of his career there, in charge of renowned restaurants first at the Savoy Hotel and then at the Carlton. In 1913, when he was president of the London branch of the Ligue des Gourmands, an international association of distinguished French chefs, London had sixty members—the largest branch in the world. Paris came in second, with forty-three. London had become one of the great capitals of French cuisine, and British-born chefs needed French training if they hoped to reach the height of their profession.

      Everything about Rosa made her a doomed candidate for advancement in this culinary world. She was British, she lacked formal training in a restaurant kitchen, and worst of all, she was female. The French prejudice against women in professional kitchens had long ago settled over England in a fog of misogyny that wouldn’t lift until decades after her death. For a woman with culinary ambitions there was only the National Training School of Cookery, founded in 1874 to funnel women into careers as cooking teachers and household cooks. Neither of these futures appealed to Rosa, nor was she interested in any of the school’s other diploma programs, which included Housewifery, Needlework, and Laundry. At the time, the most successful woman in the British food world was Agnes Marshall, whose accomplishments would have made her a phenomenon in any age. She ran a cooking school, wrote four successful cookbooks, published a weekly paper called The Table, and sold an extensive line of packaged ingredients, including Marshall’s Curry Powder, Marshall’s Icing Sugar, and Marshall’s Finest Leaf Gelatine. We don’t know whether she and Rosa ever met, or if Rosa saw her as any sort of inspiration, but Rosa chose a very different path. She didn’t teach, she didn’t write, she didn’t sell; she simply cooked, at a professional level that the leaders of her profession refused to recognize. After she bought the Cavendish, she made a point of staffing her kitchens entirely with women and took every opportunity to tell the press why she was doing so: “A good woman cook is better than a man any time.”

      Nonetheless, she was careful to work the way every ambitious male cook in London was working: they all kept an eye on the restaurants run by Escoffier. His innovative techniques and recipes, rooted in classic cuisine but refining and refreshing it, constituted the new gold standard for anyone aspiring to work in the best kitchens. There was no escaping his influence, especially after his comprehensive Guide Culinaire, packed with instructions for every dish in his repertoire, was published in French in 1903 and four years later in English. Escoffier’s best-known principle was “Faites simple”—“Simplify”—but even so, he raised the glamour stakes with every major dinner he created. When a group of Englishmen who had won handsomely at Monte Carlo wanted to celebrate at the Savoy, Escoffier created a red-and-gold dinner dripping with excess, its colors carried out in every course from the smoked salmon and pink champagne to the final “Mousse de Curaçao,” which was covered with strawberries and displayed inside an ice sculpture modeled after the hill of Monte Carlo and decorated with a string of red lights. (Only a chicken stuffed with truffles forced the chef to depart, briefly, from the color scheme.) “M. Escoffier holds that things which are beautiful to the taste should be fair to the eye,” wrote Nathaniel Newnham-Davis, the most prominent restaurant reviewer of the day. He singled out a dessert he called “typical” of the great chef’s work: “Baisers de Vierge,” or “Virgin’s Kisses”—“twin meringues, the cream perfumed with vanilla and holding crystallised white rose leaves and white violets. Over each pair of meringues is a veil of spun sugar.”

      Rosa was acquainted with Escoffier; in fact, she called him “one of the few Frenchmen I ever had any respect for,” which suggests that Escoffier did her the honor of treating her as a professional equal—unlike the other French chefs in town, who would have regarded her with the undisguised contempt they had for all female cooks except their mothers. But what she valued in Escoffier’s work, or perhaps learned in the kitchen of the Comte de Paris, wasn’t so much the color schemes and the spun sugar; it was a very French fixation on ingredients. Quality began with the raw materials, Escoffier emphasized in the Guide Culinaire, and whenever interviewers asked Rosa how she cooked, she liked to tell them how she shopped. “I did the buying myself for all those dinners,” she told Lawton. “I selected everything … I would quarrel with every tradesman in the town … And I would turn over sometimes sixteen legs of mutton until I got just the right one … And I used in those days to go to Covent Garden Market and pick out all my own fruit and game, and wheel it back on a barrow myself.” She bought hundreds of quail at a time, scrutinizing each one; and although even Escoffier approved of buying turtle soup ready-made from a reputable source, Rosa purchased live turtles, killed them, and made the soup from scratch. Once, choosing the woodcocks for a Foreign Office dinner at a time when the game birds were scarce, she stayed in the shop while each one was plucked and trussed, to make sure not a single inferior bird was slipped into the order. “Whatever I got, I paid the top price, but had the best there was,” she told Lawton.

      Rosa didn’t consider her habits extravagant, she considered them essential. No steps in cooking were unimportant; every contribution from every ingredient mattered. “What I have always done (which no other cook ever does) is to cook the potatoes, and the beans, and the asparagus myself,” she told Lawton. “I do not give these to the charwoman or the scullery maid—or a person without brains.” The potatoes were treated “just the same as if they were gold.” And when she had gold, she let it shine unadorned. One of her specialties, the essence of understated luxury, was a whole truffle, boiled in champagne or Madeira and served in a napkin, one truffle per guest. King Edward was fond of this dish, she told a reporter from The New York Times: he hated being served truffles all cut up into little pieces.

      The few existing menus that can be attributed to Rosa are all written in French, and to read them is to envision one classic dish after another parading down the runway: Consommé Princesse, Médaillons de Soles à la Joinville, Suprêmes de Volaille à la Maréchale, Selle d’Agneau à la Chivry. But despite the high-style dinners she turned out for the most impressive names in Britain, she was never invited to join her male colleagues in the Ligue des Gourmands. She wasn’t even invited to join her male colleagues in the Réunion des Gastronomes, a dining club for the owners and managers of London’s leading hotels and restaurants, despite the fact that she owned the Cavendish. This snub from Britain’s French establishment may have been one reason why she refused to swoon over the ineffable glories of French cuisine when she was interviewed. She wouldn’t even admit that French cooking was superior to all other cooking the world had ever known, which was the mildest form of appreciation acceptable in her profession. “Good cooking really came from France,” she conceded, but she made it clear that the French had outlived their own success. “A Frenchman couldn’t make a simple quail pudding, for instance. He would not think it was right. He would want to chop it all up and mess it all over with something.” She thought the French used too much wine in cooking and that they overdid garlic: “You don’t want to know it’s there,” she protested. “When you use it as the French do, it kills the taste of what you are eating.” If you’re cooking for the English palate, she emphasized, beef should taste like beef and mutton should taste like mutton—a degree of simplicity she felt the French would never stand for. “And I don’t like anything to look like something else, either—I don’t believe in covering anything just to change it. If it is a sole, I don’t like it all curled up like a lobster—let it remain in its СКАЧАТЬ