Just as wearisome were overlong evenings at the table. During the season many of the rich attended formal dinners nearly every night, often sitting next to the same person each time, since places at the table were assigned strictly according to social rank. Depending on one’s regular dinner partner in the course of a particular season, the meals could drag on with excruciating tedium. King Edward was an especially difficult guest in this regard: he got bored very quickly as course after course plodded along. In the royal household he insisted that dinner last no more than an hour, and the new timetable became fashionable across society, at least as an ideal. Hostesses tried their best to keep the courses moving steadily, though having paid huge sums for truffles, foie gras, imported game, and hothouse fruits, they now found themselves nervously watching out for guests who were enjoying a dish so much they threatened to linger over it. “I still remember my intense annoyance with a very greedy man who complained bitterly that both his favourite fish were being served and that he wished to eat both,” recalled Consuelo Vanderbilt Balsan, the American-born wife of the Duke of Marlborough. “I had to keep the service waiting while he consumed first the hot and then the cold, quite unperturbed at the delay he was causing.” Lady Colin Campbell set down the rule: No second helpings of the soup or the fish, ever. Second helpings of the other courses were permissible, but only at a small and forgiving family meal.
It wasn’t easy to navigate a safe route through British haute cuisine: traps for the unwary were set everywhere. Anthony Trollope, that excellent authority on Victorian class anxiety, made a point of identifying it with culinary anxiety in his novel Miss Mackenzie, published in 1865. As novelists so often do, he sent several characters to a dinner party, this one at the home of the heroine’s sister-in-law, Mrs. Mackenzie. Eager to stage the affair properly, she had hired a butler named Mr. Grandairs to supervise the food and service, and chose the increasingly fashionable service à la Russe—the food to be offered in courses rather than set out on the table all at once. Each course was a disaster. The soup, purchased from a shop and laden with Marsala, arrived at the table cold. The fish, “very ragged in its appearance,” was also cold; and the melted butter had become “thick and clotted.” Then came three ornate little entrées—“so fabricated, that all they who attempted to eat of their contents became at once aware that they had got hold of something very nasty.” While these were under way, champagne went around the table but quickly ran out since Mrs. Mackenzie had economized by ordering only one bottle. “After the little dishes there came, of course, a saddle of mutton, and equally of course, a pair of boiled fowls.” These were badly carved, and nobody got any of the sauces since they didn’t appear until the course was nearly finished. “Why tell of the ruin, of the maccaroni, of the fine-coloured pyramids of shaking sweet things which nobody would eat … the ice-puddings flavoured with onions? It was all misery, wretchedness, and degradation.”
And yet, as Trollope emphasized, Mrs. Mackenzie was not trying to better herself with that pretentious dinner. This was not an instance of an upstart aiming at a higher class than she deserved. “Her place in the world was fixed, and she made no contest as to the fixing. She hoped for no great change in the direction of society.” She had staged such a dinner simply because that was how well-bred people were supposed to entertain, and since she didn’t have the money or the experience to do it properly, she had done it badly. At this point Trollope, who had clearly eaten more than his share of misbegotten dinners, broke out of his narrative and addressed his readers directly. Why, oh why, he demanded, couldn’t “the ordinary Englishman” with a middle-class income simply offer his friends a little fish and a leg of mutton?
But such a familiar, comfortable solution was inconceivable for Mrs. Mackenzie, and for hosts and hostesses far more sophisticated than she was. Everyone knew that it was the French who occupied the highest realms of cuisine, while the very notion of traditional British cuisine was, as the London chef Charles Elmé Francatelli put it, “a by-word of ridicule.” By the time Rosa began catering, thousands of French chefs were working in British homes, clubs, hotels, and royal palaces, drawn across the English Channel by the opportunities beckoning from a prosperous, bustling nation that was ready to enjoy the unexpected laurel of culinary prestige. Escoffier himself moved to London in 1890 and spent the rest of his career there, in charge of renowned restaurants first at the Savoy Hotel and then at the Carlton. In 1913, when he was president of the London branch of the Ligue des Gourmands, an international association of distinguished French chefs, London had sixty members—the largest branch in the world. Paris came in second, with forty-three. London had become one of the great capitals of French cuisine, and British-born chefs needed French training if they hoped to reach the height of their profession.
Everything about Rosa made her a doomed candidate for advancement in this culinary world. She was British, she lacked formal training in a restaurant kitchen, and worst of all, she was female. The French prejudice against women in professional kitchens had long ago settled over England in a fog of misogyny that wouldn’t lift until decades after her death. For a woman with culinary ambitions there was only the National Training School of Cookery, founded in 1874 to funnel women into careers as cooking teachers and household cooks. Neither of these futures appealed to Rosa, nor was she interested in any of the school’s other diploma programs, which included Housewifery, Needlework, and Laundry. At the time, the most successful woman in the British food world was Agnes Marshall, whose accomplishments would have made her a phenomenon in any age. She ran a cooking school, wrote four successful cookbooks, published a weekly paper called The Table, and sold an extensive line of packaged ingredients, including Marshall’s Curry Powder, Marshall’s Icing Sugar, and Marshall’s Finest Leaf Gelatine. We don’t know whether she and Rosa ever met, or if Rosa saw her as any sort of inspiration, but Rosa chose a very different path. She didn’t teach, she didn’t write, she didn’t sell; she simply cooked, at a professional level that the leaders of her profession refused to recognize. After she bought the Cavendish, she made a point of staffing her kitchens entirely with women and took every opportunity to tell the press why she was doing so: “A good woman cook is better than a man any time.”
Nonetheless, she was careful to work the way every ambitious male cook in London was working: they all kept an eye on the restaurants run by Escoffier. His innovative techniques and recipes, rooted in classic cuisine but refining and refreshing it, constituted the new gold standard for anyone aspiring to work in the best kitchens. There was no escaping his influence, especially after his comprehensive Guide Culinaire, packed with instructions for every dish in his repertoire, was published in French in 1903 and four years later in English. Escoffier’s best-known principle was “Faites simple”—“Simplify”—but even so, he raised the glamour stakes with every major dinner he created. When a group of Englishmen who had won handsomely at Monte Carlo wanted to celebrate at the Savoy, Escoffier created a red-and-gold dinner dripping with excess, its colors carried out in every course from the smoked salmon and pink champagne to the final “Mousse de Curaçao,” which was covered with strawberries and displayed inside an ice sculpture modeled after the hill of Monte Carlo and decorated with a string of red lights. (Only a chicken stuffed with truffles forced the chef to depart, briefly, from the color scheme.) “M. Escoffier holds that things which are beautiful to the taste should be fair to the eye,” wrote Nathaniel Newnham-Davis, the most prominent