'Queen of Cooks'

An English cook came to Manhattan last week in the imperial suite of the Berengaria, proceeding thence to the Ritz. Dazzled, newsgatherers hailed Mrs. Rosa Lewis as the most exalted onetime scullion who ever lived, remembering that she and the late Edward VII were once close as two quails on a spit. Callow, the newsgatherers betrayed an ignorance of great scullions, cooks, laundresses.

For example, the Tsarina Cath- arine I was a laundress, the daughter of Lithuanian serfs. She washed some foul breeches so charmingly for a trooper, that a sergeant took her for his doll. From her knobby washboard she vaulted, with the ad- miration of an army corps, beyond the antechamber of Peter the Great. He was a humorist--perhaps the greatest. With a fillip never equaled by another monarch he set his laundress, bouncing and buxom, on the world's tallest throne.

Naturally no comparison can be drawn between the Laundress-Empress and Mrs. Rosa Lewis.* The Seventh Edward, though jovial, was no such humorist as Peter the Great. He merely liked his tidbits well prepared. When Lady Randolph Churchill, mother of the present Chancellor of the Exchequer, presented her cook, Mrs. Rosa Lewis,+- to Edward VII (the Prince of Wales) and told him she was a good cook he never doubted it. "Damme," said Edward, "She takes more pains with a cabbage than with a chicken. . . . She gives me nothing sloppy, nothing colored up to dribble on a man's shirt-front."

At the Ritz last week, she said: "Never believe the old adage that the way to a man's heart is through his stomach. Personality counts more--what you say and how you say it. ... I never regarded myself as a cook while I was preparing a meal. Instead I thought of myself as a hostess, perhaps that's why I've succeeded. . . "

Why do I call myself 'London's fifth mother'? Well, all the scores of college boys and girls who put up at my hotel have a mother and two grandmothers. Then they acquire a mother-in-law, so you see I am the fifth in line. . . .

"But someone was asking about my recipes. . . . King Edward, now, was fond of your Virginia ham. I never baked it. I used to boil it slow, so it was almost steamed. You know the year of the ham, and you soak it a short time or a long one, depending on whether it's a good year or not. Then you tie it up in a cloth like a pudding. It's very good cooked in beer, too, just a little beer, and steamed. Then when it's done--no sauce--just pour some plain champagne out of your glass over it. That's the way King Edward used to like it."

For a while she had the honor of being the first woman in history to cook for the gentlemen in White's Club until she resigned after calling an amorous nobleman "an old woodcock in tights." King Edward lavished on her gifts which only a sovereign could bestow with propriety upon a subject. "Brooches, bracelets and things" were her portion, and the Cavendish Hotel, which she still owns. She comes to the U. S. for two reasons--partly tohelp her publishers, and partly to sell some pre-Gobelin tapestries, showing the life of Constantine the Great, which have been part of her collection. "There have only been three men in my life," said Mrs. Lewis.

--Cf. her biography, The Queen of Cooks-- and Some Kings, by one Mary Lawton, publicity tuner (TIME, June 29, 1925).

+-"My family said that if I did not marry Mr. Lewis they would shoot me. ... I told the parson to be quick and get it over with. So we were married and I threw the ring at him at the church door and left him flat."