Unlike his dour, reclusive mother, Queen Victoria, Edward was an unabashed sybarite who reveled in the culinary privileges heaped upon royalty. “There is probably no man in England who has mastered the art of dining so completely as the Prince of Wales,” ran an admiring article in the journal Food and Cookery. That was one way of putting it. Historians, by contrast, described Edward’s appetite as so relentless it frightened his wife and doctor. He stuffed himself mercilessly at every meal, and by the summer of his coronation he was so fat that he refused to get on a scale. (One of his biographers has pointed out what was possibly “an unconscious mockery” in the words to Edward Elgar’s “Land of Hope and Glory,” first performed in honor of the new king: “Wider still and wider shall thy bounds be set; / God, who made thee mighty, make thee mightier yet.”) Nonetheless he was a very popular monarch who won the affection of the British in part because of the obvious delight he took in good living. Even relatively simple meals served to the royal family were vast, including the suppers held behind the royal box at the Royal Opera House. Up to a dozen courses were hauled to the Opera House along with the silver, the linens, and the gold plate, for a meal to be devoured at intermission. Whenever Escoffier had the honor of preparing a banquet in Edward’s honor, the great chef did not hold back: he poached the quails in Château d’Yquem and stuffed the chickens with both truffles and foie gras.
But Rosa took a different approach to pleasing the most influential man in her life. When she cooked for Edward, she cooked in English. “Do you know King Edward’s favourite meal?” she asked a reporter in the course of an interview four years after the king’s death. “Let me whisper. It was boiled bacon and broad beans. He loved them.” This was hardly a secret, especially after she told it repeatedly, but Edward’s fondness for old-fashioned British home cooking was genuine. All haute cuisine all the time was a lot of haute cuisine even for him. At his command Buckingham Palace instituted the custom of serving roast beef and Yorkshire pudding on Sunday nights. He also relished a plate of salt beef—beef that had been brined and boiled—with its homely sides of dumplings and carrots. Most of the chefs who were invited to cook for the king when he visited a restaurant or a private house wouldn’t have dreamed of boiling carrots for him, not when they had a chance to do their extravagant best. Even Rosa, catering a society dinner where he was the guest of honor, could hardly send out a whole menu of plainspoken English fare. But she could slip one or two of his favorites into the meal and soothe for a moment that frantic appetite. Rosa understood his hunger.
Edward died in 1910, but his influence on Rosa’s cooking—or, more accurately, the glow of the royal imprimatur on her cooking—lasted for years. He was certainly in the room two or three years after his death when she served one of the most important lunches of her career. Nathaniel Newnham-Davis, the widely read food writer, had asked to interview her over lunch at the Cavendish, and Rosa agreed. She was in the full bloom of her success, and critical recognition from Newnham-Davis would mean far more than the praise she had received from the daily press. Well-born and cosmopolitan, Newnham-Davis retired from the military in 1894 and took up a second career in journalism, pursuing a longtime passion for good food and wine. He had already published two collections of his reviews by the time he met Rosa—Dinners and Diners and The Gourmet’s Guide to Europe—and he was at work on a third. His reviews were always positive, his writing style always genial, and he was endlessly fascinated with the style and atmosphere that made each restaurant noteworthy. His accolades counted, and he heaped them all over Rosa. When The Gourmet’s Guide to London appeared in 1914, it featured his story about the Cavendish among reviews of more than three dozen other restaurants, including all the most renowned. The book was small and easy to carry around, with only a few illustrations, but two of the city’s chefs were honored with photographs, and they were Rosa Lewis and Escoffier.
Rosa looked very demure in the picture, dressed in a simple shirtwaist and gazing modestly away from the camera. She had made a brilliant success of Newnham-Davis’s visit, in part by closely reading his reviews beforehand and gaining a sense of his personality. Newnham-Davis often mentioned his preference for shorter, lighter meals, for instance, and said outright that he skipped courses whenever he was served more than he wanted to eat, no matter how great the chef. So she planned a succinct little lunch and invited a few other guests whom she handpicked to flatter both herself and the journalist. “Into the tea-room came a slim, graceful lady with a pretty oval face and charming eyes, and hair just touched with grey,” wrote Newnham-Davis. “She was wearing a knitted pink silk coat, and one of those long light chains that mere men believe were intended to support muffs. She was arm in arm with one of the prettiest of the young comediennes of to-day, and when she told me that amongst the people she had asked to lunch was an ex–Great Officer of the Household, a young officer of cavalry, and an American editor, I began to feel that at last I was moving in Court circles.”
Sure enough, Newnham-Davis was delighted when he could see a relatively simple meal coming his way. “Mrs. Lewis lays it down that three dishes are the right number at any lunch, for she, like all other really great authorities on gastronomy, is opposed to a long menu,” he reported with much gratification. He didn’t even chastise her for slipping in a fourth dish this time—she was merely breaking her own rule, “as great authorities sometimes do.” The first course was grilled oysters and celery root on skewers, and then came “one of those delicious quail puddings which are one of Mrs Lewis’s inventions and for which King Edward had a special liking.” Quail in any form was a specialty of Rosa’s, and quail pie (as he termed it later in the story) had become her signature. “There was a whole quail under the paste cover for everyone at table, with a wonderful gravy, to the making of which go all sorts of good things and which when it has soaked into the bottom layer of paste makes that not the least delicate part of the dish.” After this she served breaded chicken wings and kidneys and concluded the lunch with what Newnham-Davis described as “pears and pancakes, an admirable combination.”
Rosa had taken the daring step of serving the city’s most renowned food writer an entirely British meal. In fact, her disavowal of cookbooks notwithstanding, she may have taken her recipe for quail pudding right out of Charles Herman Senn’s New Century Cookery Book, a well-known British manual published in 1901, which called the dish “Pouding de Cailles à l’Anglaise (Quail Pudding).” We have her recipe, because she shared it with a reporter from the Daily Mail in 1909, and her procedure was the same as Senn’s: she lined a pudding basin with a suet pastry, filled it with quails and thin slices of beef, topped them with seasonings and stock, added a pastry cover, and boiled the pudding. This was a classic boiled pudding with nothing French about it except the regulation French name that had been tacked on to give the dish a properly high-class identity. But Newnham-Davis showed no surprise or displeasure at being served such a lunch—quite the contrary. Like everyone else in London’s elite circles, he knew the late king’s preferences at table: Edward’s passion for grilled oysters was as famous as his devotion to Rosa’s quail pudding. Rosa had prepared a not-so-subtle homage to her great patron, and Newnham-Davis understood exactly who was gazing down upon the lunch table with a pleased expression on his royal face.
The admiring story about Rosa that went into The Gourmet’s Guide to London was the first account of her to be published in book form and a significant source for all the books and articles that followed. Rosa herself may have consulted it when she was talking to Mary Lawton ten years later, or perhaps it was Lawton who lifted bits and pieces of the article in the course of assembling her book. Yet Newnham-Davis and Lawton could have been writing about two different women. Newnham-Davis described someone charming, modest, and ladylike, a stellar cook who deserved, he said, to be seen as the female equivalent of Escoffier. His attitude was one of delight and honest respect. As a journalist, he was a gentleman. Mary Lawton also pro
fessed great admiration for Rosa, but as a journalist, she was a journalist, and she wanted a story with a vivid character at the center. The rambling, name-dropping monologue in an all-but-audible Cockney accent, swaggering across the pages of Lawton’s book, would have been inconceivable coming from the genteel Mrs. Lewis who presided over Newnham-Davis’s account. Ultimately it was Lawton’s version that became immortal, not only because it made better copy, but because it was true. After 1914, the Rosa who had so impressed Newnham-Davis disappeared into the harsh sorrow of the war years. When she returned, she was another creature.
“Life became the War and the War only,” Rosa told Lawton. “Every year it got worse.” She was forty-seven when it began; she had been mingling with the British elite for more than twenty-five years, and each day brought word of another young man she knew, killed in battle. His father had stayed at the Cavendish, or his mother had hired her to cook, or he had come to parties at the hotel with his university friends. She cut out the war stories and the obituaries and pinned them up on the walls of the Cavendish. The hotel itself was requisitioned: she housed ninety British troops at a time and fed some two hundred Belgian refugees in the garage. Wounded soldiers who had been released from the hospital stayed at the Cavendish until they could return to the front, so many of them crammed into each room that some of them were sleeping on the floor. Crutches were stacked all over the hotel. “Every man who left for France always had a package,” she told Lawton. “If it was not pies or cakes, or suet puddings, it was cocktails, eau de Cologne, listerine, ham, chicken, cheese.” British officers traveled with servants, whom Rosa knew as well as she knew the officers, and every time she sent a food parcel to someone at the front, she sent another to his servant. Lord Ribblesdale’s son Charles Lister, who was wounded at Gallipoli, wrote to Rosa asking for “a nice, damp plum-cake. If made damp and packed in tins they keep splendidly.” Soon after writing, he died on a hospital ship; he was twenty-seven, and Rosa grieved with his father. Any soldier who had nowhere to stay on leave, or who decided to stop at the Cavendish for a few days on the way home, was made welcome with a bed, brandy, champagne, and, according to long-lasting rumor, feminine company if he wished it. Rosa never presented a bill to a soldier or an officer. Civilian guests at the Cavendish, including politicians, businessmen, and foreign diplomats, might find a few extra charges on their bills that they didn’t recognize. If they wanted to remain on good terms with Rosa, they paid quietly.
After the armistice, she repaired and refurbished the Cavendish and tried to run it as usual. But the Britain of wealth and frivolity, the Britain that had shaped her imagination and inspired her ambition, was gone. Everything she relied upon to furnish her identity as the remarkable Rosa Lewis, that wonderful cook who was friends with lords and ladies—the borrowed gowns, the foie gras in aspic—was unobtainable or out of style. How on earth was she to prepare Médaillons de Soles à la Joinville for a party of twenty, or even six? The supply of young women she once trained to poach slices of sole in a fish stock, arrange them around a display of shrimps, mushrooms, and truffles, coat them lightly with a sauce, and garnish each with a sliced truffle had disappeared into offices or factories. “I can not get the servants that I used to have—nobody wants to do anything in the way they used to do it,” she complained. As for the ingredients—“There is nothing left,” she said flatly. “I would not do a dinner now if you gave me a hundred pounds to walk into the kitchen.” Once, in the 1920s, a duchess begged and begged: would Rosa please prepare a dinner? She finally went out and tried to buy partridges, found a few she wouldn’t have dreamed of accepting before the war, and cooked them. But she wouldn’t take any money. If the duchess was going to complain about the food, Rosa didn’t want to listen.
Meals at the Cavendish became skimpier and more erratic, and the catering business shut down entirely. Perhaps if she’d been younger, she could have updated her recipes to suit the new economy and a new generation. But she couldn’t scrap the habits of a lifetime, and she didn’t have much respect for the rising rich. “The young bloods of today haven’t tasted that other sweet world,” she told Lawton. “They are an awful lot!” The more money they had, the worse they were at spending it, especially on food. “The only thing that appears to matter is the jazz band. I think people who require jazz music to eat by are short of their intelligence.” So she let it all go.
She had cooked her way to the top; now the top was gone and so were the meals that had given her access to it. She was still vigorous, still dropping all the best British and American names. But without food as her fixed point, she was adrift, with nowhere to fix her attention except the past. Her culinary reputation survived in memory only, and gradually she took on a new identity that would be her refuge for the rest of her life. She became an eccentric, one of those dimly alarming characters who have been wandering through English letters for centuries. By the 1920s she had stopped taking visitors downstairs; she had no staff dressed in white to show off and no decent food to serve. When people arrived, she entertained them in a back parlor she called the Elinor Glyn room. Glyn was the notorious author of Three Weeks, a novel published in 1907 that scandalized its avid readers by depicting a clearly sexual affair between a young man and an older woman. (King Edward, whose sense of morality was much stronger in public than it was in private, once furiously shut down a dinner table conversation about Three Weeks because there was a young girl within hearing distance.) Glyn had no association with the Cavendish, but Rosa loved playing off the lingering aura of the novel. It suited the vaguely racy, vaguely bohemian, vaguely lunatic image she was assembling, the one she wore wrapped around herself like the furs she insisted on calling her “Sables of Sin.” Whenever she couldn’t pay her bills, she said, she put on her sable coat and went to her creditors with half of what she owed. One look at the fur and they were fully persuaded she could come up with the rest.
Writers began portraying her as a Miss Havisham figure, locked in the tattered remnants of the past, “wearing a bile-green coat and skirt, twenty years out of style, and an amber chain that bumped her knees gently,” as The New Yorker put it in a profile published in 1933. The novelist Anthony Powell, who described Rosa in his memoir Messengers of Day, said she might have passed for the wife of a civil servant were it not for a distinctly raffish look suggesting that this particular wife “had suddenly decided to have the most reckless of nights out.” The backdrop was always the Cavendish, which became more and more of a shambles over the years, with its uncertain plumbing, dusty tapestries, and antique furniture piled about haphazardly. A handful of old-timers continued to check in; others used to stay there for the low rates. Looming out of a dim interior an ancient waiter might be glimpsed—“an irascible, scowling old man who muttered angrily to himself,” recalled Daphne Fielding—though he had little to do but pour champagne most of the day and long into the evening. Rosa was never without what she called a “cherrybum”—a jeroboam—and she wandered around the hotel making sure no glass was empty. As in the war years, she always charged the champagne to the wealthiest guest on hand. Fielding, who had been one of those freewheeling roisterers of the 1920s known as “the Bright Young Things,” said her friends sometimes dropped in at the Cavendish for a lark and had late-night champagne with Rosa. Once—“after a court ball at Buckingham Palace,” she wrote—they showed up and roused Rosa from bed. She came downstairs in a nightgown, wrapped in her sables, and sat in a daze of champagne and reminiscences until dawn.
Invariably, the accounts of Rosa in these years dwelled on what it was like to carry on a conversation with her. Especially after a glass or two, she liked to spin a surreal monologue featuring random names from the past—socialites and aristocrats, ladies of loose morals, kings and prime ministers—who bobbed about like chairs and bureaus and bedposts on the floodwaters of memory. “You don’t know how much I’ve helped some of these young men,” she announced at a lunch with Powell. “Look at the way Jack Fording
bridge wanted to marry Ivy Peters. He wanted to marry her. Set on it, he was. The Duke was almost off his head about his son and heir. I introduced Fordingbridge to Frieda Brown, and he dropped Ivy Peters like a hot potato. People forget all the good I’ve done.” Joseph Bryan III, who wrote the New Yorker profile of Rosa, quoted her rambling on and on in unfettered Cockney, sounding a good deal more demented than picturesque, and there was no mistaking the pathos wrapped around the working-class accent. When people congratulated her on the story, Rosa said she hated it.
She hated nearly everything written about her. One exception was a novel by her old friend the diplomat and writer Shane Leslie, who slipped Rosa into The Anglo-Catholic as Louisa Rose, proprietor of the Sackville Hotel. Leslie’s loyalty to Rosa could not be shaken, and he described the food at the Sackville just as her cooking used to be described everywhere: very French, utterly resplendent, the cuisine of monarchs, famed all over London. Few other writers had anything good to say about the food at the Cavendish in these years. Theodora FitzGibbon, who stayed at the hotel during World War II and later became a prolific cookbook writer, remembered an appalling dish she called “Game Pie” being served three times a day. She said she had once been served an unusual breakfast dish—“it was a chunk of smoked haddock, which tasted like fish flannel”—after which the pie didn’t seem so bad. Still, these amused accounts of the ramshackle state of the Cavendish and its owner had no sharp edges: all the writers were fond of Rosa personally, and their stories were affectionate, if comic. Bryan, in The New Yorker, called her “the most remarkable woman in England.” (He even praised the food, calling it “delicious,” either because he hoped to remain on good terms with Rosa or because the story wasn’t fact-checked.) But Rosa didn’t care about their good intentions. As soon as she saw herself re-created in print, she exploded in fury. The persona she had created, costumed, and given voice to belonged to her, and nobody else had the right to appropriate it for their own purposes—not even in an article about Rosa Lewis.
What She Ate Page 8