What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women and the Food That Tells Their Stories. Laura Shapiro
an old friend, was planning a Christmas visit to Rydal Mount, William wrote to tell him Dorothy was demanding a present. She fancied a box of the winter apples known as “Norfolk Beefins” and had been asking for them over and over, saying “she was sure if Mr Robinson knew how she longed for them, you would send her some.”
Responding to Dorothy’s pleas and outbursts was a tiring job, and responding to her physical needs was even worse. Dorothy’s symptoms included incontinence and bouts of violent diarrhea, as well as racking pains, chills, fever, and perspiration. She and her bedclothes had to be cleaned up repeatedly. She could not be left alone. Sometimes she moaned, chattered gleefully, or let out a wild shriek; when she was in a fury she struck out wildly at the women caring for her, and on occasion she horrified the family by bursting into profanity. When guests stayed overnight in the house, they had to be given rooms as far as possible from Dorothy’s lest she frighten or unnerve them. Yet there were also periods of clarity when she seemed almost her old self. “If I ask her opinion upon any point of Literature, she answers with all her former acuteness; if I read Milton, or any favourite Author, and pause, she goes on with the passage from memory,” William observed wonderingly. She was able to write a letter occasionally or sit in the garden contentedly. Then suddenly she became a spoiled child again, hurling demands. All year round she insisted on having a fire in her room, saying the warmth was the only thing that made her feel better. In summer her room was so hot nobody else could bear sitting in it, but if the fire was allowed to die down, she went into one of her rages until it was restored to full strength. The ever-sweltering bedroom drove Mary to the edge of her patience. “This is an intolerable experience,” she complained in a rare burst of open frustration. She was thinking in part about the amount of money they were spending on coal in the middle of August.
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.
“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