What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women and the Food That Tells Their Stories. Laura Shapiro
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