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 British cuisine was, as the London chef Charles Elmé Francatelli put it, “a by-word of ridicule.” By 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 B
ritish 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 proper shape. Messing things up, is like putting a silk patch on a leather apron—unnecessary and stupid.”
At the same time, however, she acknowledged that a great deal of British cooking was terrible, and she had very specific advice on that subject for home cooks. “Englishwomen seem to be decided on ‘killing’ taste!” she exclaimed. “If the average Englishwoman would only braise her meat, instead of doing so much roasting in her little oven! She ought to braise her vegetables with the meat, in the same pot. It would give better results, and it would save considerable expense.” And, she added, they would not have to keep buying “sundry bottles of sauces, which are always expensive.” But the problem, as she saw it, was the low status of cookery in Britain, not some grim national predilection for overboiling vegetables. “To cook, to a Frenchman, is to be an artist,” she told the Daily Sketch. “To cook, to an Englishman, is to be a menial. We have simply got our standards of the kitchen wrong.” Think of the kitchen as an artist’s studio, she urged, or a lawyer’s office, or a surgeon’s consulting room. Encourage a “better class of people” to take up cooking. “There is only one remedy,” she concluded. “You must make cooking a profession, and you must cease calling cooks servants.” This last, of course, was at the heart of her entire career.
The best cooks of all came from America, she used to say—an opinion so heretical not even Americans shared it, but Rosa had her reasons. “Your American darkies . . . are wonderful cooks,” she told Lawton. “It was a darkey cook from Savannah who taught me to cook rice.” And not just rice: Rosa also discovered Virginia hams, canvasback ducks, waffles, maple syrup, sweet potatoes, corn on the cob, p
eanuts, and bell peppers. Her tutor was Mosianna Milledge, one of the best-known cooks in Savannah, Georgia, and the only one of her peers whom Rosa praised by name. They met when Rosa first went out catering. Mosianna had worked for the Gordons, a prominent Savannah family, for many years; and when their daughter Juliette married and moved to England, Mosianna followed to see to the cooking. Juliette and her husband, William Low, became part of the social set around Lady Randolph Churchill and began hiring Rosa to help Mosianna with dinner parties. There was no way to obtain in England the Southern specialties Juliette wanted to serve, so she had them shipped from home; and Mosianna introduced Rosa to new foods and a different way of cooking. Within a few years the Lows’ marriage disintegrated: he became infatuated with another woman, which set off a long, ugly battle over divorce and money that didn’t end until after his death in 1905. (Seven years later Juliette Gordon Low returned to Savannah and founded the Girl Scouts.) But Rosa kept the new Southern foods in her repertoire. The Americans in her clientele loved them, and the British were so enthusiastic that Jacksons of Piccadilly, the luxury food shop, began stocking Virginia hams and brandied peaches.
Rosa said that she invented most of her recipes and that she carried them in her head; she never acknowledged looking in a cookbook. But every time she planned a menu, put on an apron, and went into the pantry, she was aware of the most famous appetite in Britain. The Prince of Wales had transformed her career from hired cook to sought-after caterer, and his seal of approval made it possible for her to earn enough money to buy the Cavendish. She cooked with him in mind, whether or not he was going to be at the table. There’s no reliable evidence for a love affair here: much has been hinted, but little has been footnoted. Rosa called him “the most wonderful person in the world . . . so appreciative of everything,” and assured Lawton that he had given her many presents, including a great deal of jewelry, which unfortunately had all been stolen. Whatever the scope of the relationship, she grew up as a cook in response to his tastes; they animated her own, and she expressed devotion to him all her life.
What She Ate Page 7