What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women and the Food That Tells Their Stories. Laura Shapiro
was not a stupid thing to cook. I saw that the aristocracy took an interest in it, and that you came under the notice of someone that really mattered.” Other girls her age chose factory work, but what was a factory girl? “Just one of a number of sausages!” Cooking offered a way to stand out, to win the attention of the sort of people who counted. “My family did not know what Lords or Ladies or Earls or Dukes meant,” she said. “I knew it by being a Cook.”
So it was as a cook that she made her way to the most fashionable dinners in London and the countryside. One of her first employers after Sheen House was Lady Randolph Churchill, the American-born mother of Winston. How she and Rosa connected is unknown, but Rosa’s culinary training at Sheen House would have made her an excellent candidate for a job in a high-class kitchen, and Lady Randolph’s kitchen was among the highest. Her in-laws were the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough; with that flawless credential, as well as the fortune she brought from America, she had become one of the leading hostesses of an obsessively social era. The most important of her dinner guests was the Prince of Wales, who would become King Edward VII after Victoria’s death in 1901. A warm friend and admirer of Lady Randolph’s, rumored to be her lover as well, the prince was also a prodigious eater who genuinely appreciated fine food. Rosa’s cooking pleased him, and from the moment he first complimented one of her dinners, her future was assured. (There are many anecdotes describing this turning point, mostly along the lines of “And the Prince was so impressed by the food that he asked to meet the chef, whereupon a slim young girl dressed in white appeared at the door and hesitantly …” etc., etc.) No matter how the prince and the cook discovered each other, Rosa’s career soon flowered. Society ladies who were distinguished enough to entertain the prince but nervous about whether their kitchens were up to the task hired Rosa for the evening. Other ladies, who couldn’t hope to bring the prince to their tables but aspired to put on luncheons and dinners and late suppers in the best style of the time, hired her as well. Abundant gossip suggesting that Rosa was one of the prince’s many lovers—she never confirmed or denied—did its own part to heighten her desirability as a caterer.
In 1893, just six years into her career as an independent caterer, Rosa married a butler named Excelsior Lewis. She told Lawton she cared nothing for him and married only because her family insisted; but since her parents barely register in her life story apart from this sudden spark of influence, she very likely had other reasons. Describing the wedding to Lawton, she made it sound like a comic song in a music hall: “I went off to church, and we were married. I had nothing on but a common frock. I told the parson to be quick, and get it over with, and he said—‘Why, what a funny woman you are. I’d like to know where you live.’ So we were married, then I threw the ring at him at the church door and left him flat.” But she didn’t leave him flat, not yet. Though she showed no interest at all in children or a conventional domestic life, marriage moved Rosa into a zone of respectability that was very useful to her: with her own home, and a husband attached to her name, she could go from mansion to mansion working wherever she pleased. After the wedding the two of them lived together for nearly a decade while she went right on with her cooking.
Over the next twenty years, Rosa built up her catering until she was managing a staff of six, eight, sometimes twelve women, all uniformed in white, who accompanied her to one wealthy home or another to stage the glamorous luncheons and dinners that were her specialty. “I took full charge,” Rosa told Lawton. “I had complete authority—as though it were my own house, like a general in command.” England had a profligate upper class in the decades preceding World War I, and lavish entertainments were at the center of the London season, which ran from May through July. At a time when a High Court judge was earning £5,000 a year, Rosa said she used to make more than £6,000 during the three-month season alone. She loved talking about her glory years. “I used to go down to Mr. Waldorf Astor’s place, Hever Castle, nearly every week-end … I did dinners for Lady Millicent, Duchess of Sutherland … I did the Ascot Races and the Goodwood Races … Everybody of any note, politicians and famous people, Lords and Ladies, everybody in the aristocracy and in the great London world, had me for their dinners and luncheons.” Sometimes, for families living in the country who wished to entertain in London, she not only prepared the food but rented and decorated an entire house—a service nobody else in the catering business could match, she emphasized. “I furnished the linen and silver and everything and my linen had no names on, silver had no names and my muslin curtains came from the Maison de Blanc in Paris. I would get all the curtains and new carpets from Paris, and then I would go and hire all the best rugs I could find, and all the best furniture I could find, and the whole house would then look as though it were lived in, and not a rented place.” According to Rosa, the other caterers were left in the dust, teeming with jealousy.
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