Rosa could dress the part, and she had an honorary seat at some of the best tables in town; but she knew very well that a former scullery maid was never going to be accepted as an equal in the highest circles, no matter how cheerily everyone socialized with her. Hence she never tried to pass. Once she went with a party of top-drawer friends to dinner at the Carlton, the finest French restaurant in London. At a table across the room she saw half a dozen gentlemen and a lady (“very ugly”) whom she recognized—they were representatives of Pommery, the champagne house, and quite surprised to see her there. One of them asked, loudly, “Isn’t that Mrs. Lewis, the Cook?” Rosa called back across the room, “Yes, it is Mrs. Lewis. I’ve sold all my cutlets, how are you getting on with your champagne?”
To get a sense of the full force of this remark, it’s crucial to remember that Rosa made a point of announcing her class identity with a flourish every time she opened her mouth. She never discarded her Cockney accent—precisely because she knew as well as Eliza Doolittle that it was the most damning of all the accidents of birth and upbringing that kept a flower seller on the street in rags. There were a good many disreputable accents strewn across England—indeed, only one was safely beyond criticism, and that was the style of speech known in the mid–nineteenth century as “pure and classical parlance” and later as BBC English. But Cockney had no rival as the most widely despised of the incorrect accents. Phonetics experts ruled it ugly, offensive, and “insufferably vulgar,” and women in particular were warned to take strict care of their h’s, for ladylike speech was perceived as the outward manifestation of both status and virtue. Manuals on correct pronunciation were popular among those who hoped to climb the ladder, and it was widely believed that a diligent student could shake off poor habits of speech just as he or she could learn from an etiquette manual not to slurp the soup. Rosa could have cleaned up her accent, but she made a choice to retain the speech she had been raised with and deliberately lavished it with slang and profanity. A barrage of impassioned Cockney became her trademark, and everybody who encountered her received a direct hit. American reporters loved to quote her in full color, with every lurid expression intact. In the British press, however, she was invariably quoted in standard English. It would have been impossible for print to convey the impression of a respectable woman if the reporter had ladled a Cockney accent over everything she said.
To be treated with respect, to be treated exactly as one would treat a lady—despite the apron, despite the accent—was what she demanded of the world. When she chose cooking as her life’s work, she made a point of choosing haute cuisine, the most expensive and socially competitive cooking of its time. If food was going to be her shield and her weapon, she would deploy it at such an exalted level that nobody could look down on her. It was a smart choice for a young cook of that era, because wealthy British families were preoccupied not only with setting a fine table, but with using that table to reflect their own rarefied place in society. If Rosa had indeed been in the audience at Pygmalion, she would have scoffed at Shaw’s decision to send Eliza Doolittle to a garden party to test her skills. What a paltry victory! The truly treacherous social occasion of her time was a formal dinner. Rosa, whose longtime vantage point from behind a full-length apron gave her a perspective that Shaw lacked, would have sent Eliza straightaway to the dining room.
“Nothing more plainly shows the well-bred man than his manners at table,” wrote the anonymous author of How to Dine, or Etiquette of the Dinner Table. “A man may be well dressed, may converse well … but if he is, after all, unrefined, his manners at table will be sure to expose him.” And if his manners passed scrutiny, his conversation might trip him up. One reason a dinner party was “one of the severest tests of good breeding” was that a proper host would have made sure that all his guests came from similar backgrounds. “They need not necessarily be friends, or all of the same absolute rank,” explained Lady Colin Campbell in The Etiquette of Good Society, “but as at a dinner people come into closer contact one with the other than at a dance or any other kind of party, those only should be invited to meet one another who move in the same class or circle.” In other words, an upstart at a garden party could chat for a moment and move on. At a dinner, by contrast, the upstart had to understand all the references that bubbled along in the conversation and even contribute a few. (It may not have occurred to Shaw that there was a more exacting test for Eliza’s initial outing than a garden party. He was a vegetarian and also hated getting dressed up, so he made a point of refusing most invitations to formal meals.)
But Rosa understood what was at stake at the dinner table. She knew why people anxiously studied books like How to Dine, which was published in 1879, around the time she first went out to work. “Soup will constitute the first course, which must be noiselessly sipped from the side of a spoon,” counseled the author. “Fish usually follows soup. It is helped with a silver fork, and eaten with a silver fork, assisted by a piece of bread held in the left hand.” Less than a decade later, “Fish should be eaten with a silver fish knife and fork,” ruled the handbook Manners and Tone of Good Society. “Two forks are not used for eating fish, and one fork and a crust of bread is now an unheard-of way of eating fish in polite society.” Only the cognoscenti could hope to make their way through a fashionable meal flawlessly. When Rosa chose high-class cookery as her future, she was gaining access not only to a cuisine, but to all the social behaviors associated with it. She was learning the secret handshake.
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 “