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

was acquainted with Escoffier; in fact, she called him “one of the few Frenchmen I ever had any respect for,” which suggests that Escoffier did her the honor of treating her as a professional equal—unlike the other French chefs in town, who would have regarded her with the undisguised contempt they had for all female cooks except their mothers. But what she valued in Escoffier’s work, or perhaps learned in the kitchen of the Comte de Paris, wasn’t so much the color schemes and the spun sugar; it was a very French fixation on ingredients. Quality began with the raw materials, Escoffier emphasized in the Guide Culinaire, and whenever interviewers asked Rosa how she cooked, she liked to tell them how she shopped. “I did the buying myself for all those dinners,” she told Lawton. “I selected everything … I would quarrel with every tradesman in the town … And I would turn over sometimes sixteen legs of mutton until I got just the right one … And I used in those days to go to Covent Garden Market and pick out all my own fruit and game, and wheel it back on a barrow myself.” She bought hundreds of quail at a time, scrutinizing each one; and although even Escoffier approved of buying turtle soup ready-made from a reputable source, Rosa purchased live turtles, killed them, and made the soup from scratch. Once, choosing the woodcocks for a Foreign Office dinner at a time when the game birds were scarce, she stayed in the shop while each one was plucked and trussed, to make sure not a single inferior bird was slipped into the order. “Whatever I got, I paid the top price, but had the best there was,” she told Lawton.

      Rosa didn’t consider her habits extravagant, she considered them essential. No steps in cooking were unimportant; every contribution from every ingredient mattered. “What I have always done (which no other cook ever does) is to cook the potatoes, and the beans, and the asparagus myself,” she told Lawton. “I do not give these to the charwoman or the scullery maid—or a person without brains.” The potatoes were treated “just the same as if they were gold.” And when she had gold, she let it shine unadorned. One of her specialties, the essence of understated luxury, was a whole truffle, boiled in champagne or Madeira and served in a napkin, one truffle per guest. King Edward was fond of this dish, she told a reporter from The New York Times: he hated being served truffles all cut up into little pieces.

      The few existing menus that can be attributed to Rosa are all written in French, and to read them is to envision one classic dish after another parading down the runway: Consommé Princesse, Médaillons de Soles à la Joinville, Suprêmes de Volaille à la Maréchale, Selle d’Agneau à la Chivry. But despite the high-style dinners she turned out for the most impressive names in Britain, she was never invited to join her male colleagues in the Ligue des Gourmands. She wasn’t even invited to join her male colleagues in the Réunion des Gastronomes, a dining club for the owners and managers of London’s leading hotels and restaurants, despite the fact that she owned the Cavendish. This snub from Britain’s French establishment may have been one reason why she refused to swoon over the ineffable glories of French cuisine when she was interviewed. She wouldn’t even admit that French cooking was superior to all other cooking the world had ever known, which was the mildest form of appreciation acceptable in her profession. “Good cooking really came from France,” she conceded, but she made it clear that the French had outlived their own success. “A Frenchman couldn’t make a simple quail pudding, for instance. He would not think it was right. He would want to chop it all up and mess it all over with something.” She thought the French used too much wine in cooking and that they overdid garlic: “You don’t want to know it’s there,” she protested. “When you use it as the French do, it kills the taste of what you are eating.” If you’re cooking for the English palate, she emphasized, beef should taste like beef and mutton should taste like mutton—a degree of simplicity she felt the French would never stand for. “And I don’t like anything to look like something else, either—I don’t believe in covering anything just to change it. If it is a sole, I don’t like it all curled up like a lobster—let it remain in its proper shape. Messing things up, is like putting a silk patch on a leather apron—unnecessary and stupid.”

      At the same time, however, she acknowledged that a great deal of British cooking was terrible, and she had very specific advice on that subject for home cooks. “Englishwomen seem to be decided on ‘killing’ taste!” she exclaimed. “If the average Englishwoman would only braise her meat, instead of doing so much roasting in her little oven! She ought to braise her vegetables with the meat, in the same pot. It would give better results, and it would save considerable expense.” And, she added, they would not have to keep buying “sundry bottles of sauces, which are always expensive.” But the problem, as she saw it, was the low status of cookery in Britain, not some grim national predilection for overboiling vegetables. “To cook, to a Frenchman