Physically dependent, mentally beyond responsibility, the object of constant and devoted care, the center of attention whenever she chose—Dorothy in illness was reborn. Even during the periods when she felt relatively strong, she never objected to the restrictions on her activity imposed by the doctor and her family, and she calmly accepted the pampering. “I have been perfectly well since the first week in January—but go on in the invalidish style,” she reported to a friend in April 1830, two years after her initial breakdown in Whitwick. “Such moderation I shall continue for another year. . . . My spirits are not at all affected.”
But of course her spirits were affected. They were transformed. She had entered a realm of greed without guilt, insisting on more heat than anyone else could bear, more attention than her weary caregivers could muster, more gestures of love than she had ever received before. And, incessantly, more food. In all the many pages of her diaries and letters over the years, she rarely mentioned an instance of feeling hungry. Now she was never satisfied. One Christmas Jane sent a gift of freshly killed fowl—a turkey and two chickens—and Mary brought them to show Dorothy. “I wish you could have but seen the joy with which that countenance glistened at the sight of your never-to-be-forgotten present,” Mary wrote later. “Every sensation of irritation, or discomfort vanished, and she stroked and hugged the Turkey upon her knee like an overjoyed and happy child—exulting in, and blessing over and over again her dear, dearest friend. . . . The two beautiful lily white Chicken were next the object of her admiration, and when Dora said it was a pity that such lovely creatures should have been killed, she scouted the regret, saying ‘What would they do for her alive . . . and she should eat them every bit herself.’”
William fought desperately with her about food. The Dove Cottage days of quietness and harmony over lovingly prepared bowls of broth were long gone. Dorothy was clamoring for all sorts of rich foods, and her anguished brother was terrified to give them to her, certain they would make her “bilious” and bring on another agonizing attack. “I feel my hand-shaking,” he wrote to Robinson after a bout of her screaming and frustration. “I have had so much agitation to-day, in attempting to quiet my poor Sister. . . . She has a great craving for oatmeal porridge principally for the sake of the butter that she eats along with it and butter is sure to bring on a fit of bile sooner or later.”
“I will not quarrel with myself.” Dorothy held firm to her vow for twenty-nine years, but after her collapse at Whitwick she lost control. Everything came out, unseemly and uncensored. From time to time she experienced intervals of remarkable lucidity, writing letters and remembering her favorite poems in a manner that reminded everyone of the person she used to be. “She is . . . for a short space her own acute self, retains the power over her fine judgment and discrimination—then, at once, relapses,” Mary reported. “But she has no delusions.” Dorothy did retain a grasp of her environment even when her personality disappeared, so in that sense she had no delusions; yet she was meeting the world afresh. She took to singing when she felt like it; she made friends with a bird that flew in her bedroom window. In 1837, amid some of the worst years of her illness, she woke up one day feeling momentarily clearheaded and wrote a letter to her niece Dora. “Wakened from a wilderness of dreams, & rouzed from Fights & Battles, what can I write, do, or think?—To describe the past is impossible—enough to say I am now in my senses & easy in body.” She was in her senses, she was at ease in her body; that was all she could say, and it was enough.
There are different ways to read a life, and Dorothy’s long decline, most often described as tragic, perhaps had moments of triumph as well. Consider, for instance, the image that will serve to conclude her food story—Dorothy in her chair, round and imperious as royalty, demanding porridge so that she could eat the butter.
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 ran her home according to Mrs. Beeton’s rules for proper domestic service, it’s probable that Rosa started her day at dawn by lighting the 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 onl
y 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.
What She Ate Page 5