What She Ate

by Laura Shapiro

  Although Edward officially became king in January 1901, his formal coronation with its elaborate ceremonies and entertainments didn’t take place until the summer of 1902. So the spring of coronation year, packed with formal dinners, balls, and house parties, was especially lucrative for Rosa. She would have made a fortune from the supper balls alone: multicourse dinners followed by multicourse late suppers verging into breakfast, and she told Lawton she did twenty-nine of them in six weeks. That same year she learned that the Cavendish Hotel on Jermyn Street, a fashionable enclave near Piccadilly, was up for sale. She promptly bought the place.

  The plan was to let her husband run the hotel while she kept on with catering. But Lewis proved inept as a hotel keeper: the hotel deteriorated, guests stopped frequenting it, and the bills went unpaid until he had run up a debt of £5,000. At that point she threw him out of the hotel and out of her life. She called it a divorce, but she may have simply banished him without the trappings of a legal procedure. She told Lawton that once she was rid of him, she took charge of the hotel and was able to restore its former high standard while keeping up the catering business and paying Lewis’s debts in full—all this in sixteen months, by virtue of hard work and scrimping. Rosa was very fond of this story. “So I put my shoulder to the wheel and did everything—only kept a few servants, went to market myself, bought quail at fourpence, and sold them at three shillings, bought my game and vegetables in the open market, loaded them on the wheelbarrow, and pushed the barrow home myself, back to the hotel. . . . I paid that £5,000 on tea and toast, never had anything else to eat, never had a new dress, never even took a bus if I could avoid it. No, I never had a new frock or a stitch of clothing until I had paid every farthing of the £5,000.”

  With the Cavendish as her anchor, Rosa had no need any longer for even a symbolic husband: the hotel became her home, her social life, and the center of her business empire. She gave the place the intimacy of a private club, filling it with the pedigreed furniture she found at auction whenever the contents of a great English estate went up for sale. The hotel had no public restaurant at first: the guests dined at graciously arranged tables in their suites, and she took charge of many private parties at the behest of socialites, politicians, and theater people. In the kitchens, a staff of women whom she selected with care and trained herself were cooking for the hotel and also for her catering business, which was busier than ever once Edward was on the throne. As a favored chef of the king, she was hired to prepare formal dinners at the Foreign Office and the Admiralty; and when the kaiser visited England in 1907, spending three weeks at Highcliffe Castle in Dorset, Edward asked Rosa to take charge of all the cooking for his stay. (“One King leads to another, what? . . . He would eat ham, partridges, very fond of game, and salad, but must always have fruit with everything.”) The Daily Telegraph published an admiring feature on one of the governmental dinners she staged at Downing Street—“Woman Cook’s Triumph”—and her reputation took another leap. “I was at the top of the tree,” she told Lawton, and she stayed at the top until World War I shook the branches.

  George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion opened in London in 1914, the last year of Rosa’s reign. The play, which later became the Broadway musical My Fair Lady, has an obvious overlap with Rosa’s story—so obvious that a bit of gossip flutters through a scene in the television series The Duchess of Duke Street to the effect that Shaw based the character of Eliza Doolittle on Rosa. Perhaps, but the differences were in many ways more striking than the overlap. In the play, the Cockney flower seller Eliza Doolittle decides that in order to get ahead in life, she has to get rid of her accent and learn to speak like a lady. She goes to Henry Higgins, a professor of phonetics, who takes her on as an experiment: can he transform this guttersnipe into someone who can pass as a duchess? Eliza is coached in speech, dress, and deportment; and then Higgins introduces her to society—first at an afternoon garden party and later at a dinner party followed by the opera. Eliza conducts herself perfectly everywhere, never revealing a trace of her origins, and not a soul doubts that she belongs among the well-born.

  It’s tempting to think of Rosa sitting in the audience on opening night. By her own account she was a close friend of the star, the renowned actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell, although “Mrs. Pat” ran off with Lady Randolph’s second husband that same year, which would have tested Rosa’s loyalty since she adored Lady Randolph. At any rate, if Rosa saw the play, she certainly would have deemed herself a greater success than Eliza, whose despairing cry “What is to become of me? What is to become of me?” rings out during the fourth act. After her triumph in society, Eliza realizes that she has been successfully uprooted but now belongs nowhere. She can’t go back to selling flowers in the street, and since she has neither the money nor the family associated with her new class identity, she can’t see a path forward. In the play, Shaw deliberately left her future vague.

  Rosa would have found the whole quandary pathetic. She had conducted her own climb up the ladder very differently, and with a different goal in mind. It was as Rosa herself, Cockney born and kitchen raised, that she demanded to be made welcome in the highest ranks of society—defiantly flaunting her Cockney accent all the way. Back when she was a young servant in the household of the Comte de Paris, she had developed a passion she would nurture for the rest of her life—not for a man, but for an entire class, starting with the comte’s family. “I was overwhelmed with admiration for them,” she told Lawton. He was “marvellous,” his wife “the most interesting woman in the world,” their marriage “the most perfect match in the world.” She had no such language of superlatives for her first employers, an undistinguished family at 3 Myrtle Villas in Leyton, but everything that went on at Sheen House entranced her. All the family members used to visit her in the kitchen, she said. “If you had a round back, when the Comtesse passed through, she would give you a whack and tell you to stand up straight. She told me to keep my back straight just as she told her daughters—with a whip!” To have been disciplined exactly as if she were a noblewoman’s daughter was still making her proud some forty years later.

  Lady Randolph Churchill was a similar paragon in Rosa’s eyes, despite an obvious penchant for awkward marriages. (Randolph reportedly died of syphilis; George Cornwallis-West left her for Mrs. Pat; and Montagu Porch, whom she married at sixty-four, was three years younger than Winston.) “She was one of the most perfect women . . . that I have ever met,” Rosa declared. Another figure in her personal pantheon was Thomas Lister, Lord Ribblesdale, who lived at the Cavendish for years and became a genuine friend. Ribblesdale was lord-in-waiting to Queen Victoria and also master of the buckhounds, a post that chiefly required him to display the grandeur of British high birth as he led the royal procession at the opening of Ascot. By all accounts he did this superbly. John Singer Sargent’s portrait of Ribblesdale, showing him swathed in the magnificent cape, breeches, and boots of a nobleman ready for a day’s hunting, hangs in the National Gallery. Rosa was devoted to him and treasured her copy of the painting. (In fact, she said it was she who urged him to present the original to the museum.) “Lord Ribblesdale was the most wonderful man in the world,” she told Lawton. “His voice and manner and everything about him was just charming. He was a very, very great gentleman—a great specimen of an English gentleman.”

  By contrast, she wanted nothing to do with what she called “boughten” nobility. “I don’t like the people who buy their titles,” she told Lawton. “I don’t like the man who makes sugar or the man who gives a few thousands to a hospital having a title, I only like titles which are inherited.” Back in olden times, she went on, “people used to lie under the table drinking and drive a four-in-hand and go swash-buckling around, but they did those things like gentlemen and aristocrats and on certain occasions only—not every day in the week like the nouveau riche hooligans do now. . . . Now it is all vulgar, because the people who do it are vulgar. . . . They are aping their betters.”
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  The arrivistes were doing badly what Rosa was determined to do perfectly. 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 at a garden party could chat for a moment and move on. At a dinner, by contrast, the upstart had to
understand all 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.