White Truffles in Winter (21 page)

In the end, nothing could save him.

A few months before Escoffier moved to London, Damala was found dead from an overdose of morphine and cocaine.

When asked for a quote, “Well, so much the better,” Sarah said. Her husband was finally out of his misery. That was her public response. Privately, she changed her legal name to Damala, as he had wanted, and wore mourning dress for more than a year.

“Perhaps love is the worst addiction of all,” Escoffier told his wife.

And that was precisely what Delphine was afraid of—complete surrender. That was why she could not join him in London. She tried to explain that to him but he didn't seem to understand. In Monte Carlo she had a house filled with her family. Not just her own children, but also her sisters and their families, her mother and her aunts. She was a part of something larger—La Villa Fernand. Everyone depended on her. Everything revolved around her. She had her own world.

“I know no one in London. Only you.”

“What more do you need?”

“Myself.”

After a time, Escoffier found himself not eating. A plate of sweet pink shrimp or veal chops in a blackberry sage sauce or a simple roasted wild duck made him think, “I'll wait until Delphine comes.” Even at Sunday dinner with Ritz, Marie and their children, Escoffier would find himself eating very little and thinking how lovely it would be when Delphine and his sons arrived and the two families could spend sunny afternoons feasting under the chestnut trees.

Later that first year, still in mourning, Sarah came to London to oversee the English translation of a new play by Victorien Sardou,
Fédora
.

She and Escoffier sat at a table in back of The Savoy's American Bar. It was between lunch and dinner service. She drank champagne. He looked at his watch.

“It's about a princess who wears a particular kind of hat. A man's hat. It's a perfect role for me, is it not? As soon I place this new hat on my head, the fedora will be famous.”

“Of course,” he said.

“ ‘Of course?' That's all you can say?”

“You look very nice in hats.”

“And I am, of course, a princess.”

“Of course.”

Escoffier was too thin, gray and tired.

Sarah leaned across the table, lifted her black veil, and kissed his hand.

“I'm not losing you, too. Am I? I could not bear it.”

A single tear rolled down her face and into his palm; slipped down his lifeline.

And so he told her of Delphine's hesitation. “I have never felt so alone.”

The next day, Sarah moved her entire entourage into The Savoy; it became her London home.

“After all, we are friends, are we not?”

“Yes, we are friends,” he said and that statement both surprised and comforted Escoffier. At first, friendship was not what he wanted at all but through the years he had come to find refuge in it. Sarah never seemed to be far from him. And now she was a part of his everyday life. Every night when she returned from the theater, Escoffier would bring her something exotic, savory or sweet, and they would sit together in her rooms and look out over the city of London and sometimes talk and sometimes make love. But mostly just sit. Together. Peacefully. It calmed him. It calmed them both.

And so Rosa Lewis was an unexpected development.

Even before they met, Escoffier knew everything about her; everyone in London did. She was the competition. When Lady Randolph Churchill acquired Rosa's services, the Prince of Wales spied her drinking champagne and, mistaking her for a partygoer, kissed her. When informed that he had just kissed the cook, he was not surprised. After that lovely dinner she was deserving of a kiss, he explained.

“She takes more pains with a cabbage than with a chicken.”

The future king had English tastes, after all.

Of course, as was always the case with Dear Bertie, one kiss alone would not do. Rumors were rampant. Escoffier was intrigued. It was difficult not to be. Every day at exactly the same time, he passed through the park on his way back from church and there she was. Rosa was unmistakable. Her hair often seemed aflame; her laughter crackled and popped. She would cross the park dressed in her chef's whites—her tall white toque, starched white dress and high laced “cooking boots” made of soft black kid leather—with a gaggle of identically dressed assistants trailing behind her like a mother duck with her ducklings. And at the very end of the line would always be someone who Escoffier imagined to be her junior chef, an assistant of some sort, a very young woman dragging a feisty black Scottish terrier behind her.

“Afternoon, Mr. Escoffier,” Rosa would say, although sometimes she'd speak to him in French—at least, he assumed it was French—her Cockney accent was so strong he could barely understand her.

“Do you have women in your kitchen?” she asked.

“I have them everywhere,” he replied.

He enjoyed the confusion greatly.

Early one morning, Rosa appeared in the kitchen of The Savoy. She was wearing her famous black cooking boots but was not dressed for cooking. She wore a gown of white silk with a large black hat covered in white silk lilies and a black-and-white ribbon. Against the backdrop of her red hair, it was striking. From her towering hat to her black cooking boots she was very tall, a Victorian version of Marie Antoinette.

But no one noticed her.

The kitchen was hot and bustling. A family of Russian men arrived carrying sides of beef thrown over their shoulders; they nearly ran her down. Fishmongers with bushels of lobsters, the mahogany claws snapping aimlessly, shouted, “Clear off!” as they pushed by her. Men were everywhere: their arms filled with screeching songbirds in bamboo cages or dried sausages hung like so many rosaries. Her carefully rolled hair began to unravel under the heat of it.

The kitchen was divided into several rooms on two floors. On the top level, there were vast spaces; one obviously was the staging area. It had a long tiled archway over a seemingly endless steel counter. On the wall, block letters designated several cooking stations,
“Entrées,
Légumes, Grillades, Poisson.”
A small army of waiters with immaculate long white aprons on top of their tuxedoes leaned over the counter questioning each
chef de partie
about the day's offerings, making copious notes.

Behind the chefs, in the bowels of the kitchen, hundreds of silver pots and copper pans were suspended on racks over dozens of stoves and griddles and cooking pits and more gleaming counters. Coke and wood stoked the fires; the flames spat. In the great white-tiled room freshly plucked wild turkeys, geese, pheasant and ducks were slowly spinning before a roaring fire. Sides of mutton were being slid onto spits. There were men making stocks with beef and hare. Some were just peeling, continuously peeling carrots, potatoes, the fat knobs of rutabagas and small pink beets. Some were brushing the dirt off bushels of wild mushrooms with a wire brush or washing the truffles in brandy and patting them dry. Escoffier was nowhere to be seen.

One floor down, the air was cold; that part of the kitchen was filled with ice. Rosa had never seen that much ice before. In the center of the room, there was an entire table stacked with dressed partridge, woodcocks and quail set on trays of ice. Boxes of ice held fresh fish—gray sole, Scottish salmon and skate—and fish that had been poached, studded with truffles and embedded in amber jelly. There was even a table filled with iced trays of
petits-fours
and
pâté de fruits
. And in the corner of the room there were three men dressed as if it were the dead of winter, carving harps, birds, and some sort of life-sized Grecian woman out of solid blocks of ice and next to them, two men making pink roses and baskets out of spun sugar.

I want this,
Rosa thought.
This is what my kitchen should be.

“He's in the alley,” a young boy said. He was carrying a tray of
pâtés
as he ran past her. She opened the back door and stepped into the bright street, the thick soup of London. In the alley, there was a line of delivery carts carrying even more meat: racks of lambs, birds of all sizes and shapes and fishes that were still flapping. There was a wide and deep wagon filled with small and larges casks, some marked “vinegar” and some marked “wine.” The nervous horses bucked as she walked past.

At the very end of the line was Escoffier in his immaculate chef whites. He stood on the back of a rotting wooden wagon helping two nuns load boxes of food. The driver was too ancient to help. The horse looked even older. He stopped when he saw Rosa.

“I had no idea that the only women in your kitchen were nuns,” she said.

“We are just here for Gala Nights,” they said.

“How very provocative.”

Escoffier jumped down off the cart. “That's what the pensioners call them. Gala Nights.”

“We can't afford meat at the Home. If it wasn't for Monsieur Escoffier, we would not have money to feed the horse, either.”

“He's put us on the menu,” said the novitiate. “Quail Pilaf à la Little Sisters of the Poor. We're famous.”

Mother Superior did not look pleased. “Fame is not a virtue, Sister.”

“It is in the restaurant business,” Rosa laughed. “But what is a Gala Night?”

“When we get to finally eat meat, of course.”

Escoffier opened up a box. It was filled with tiny quail carcasses that had been cleaned away except for two perfectly uneaten legs.

Rosa picked up a carcass and laughed. “And because proper society won't grab the bird and give it a gnaw, the good sisters can feed pensioners?” she said in her Cockney brand of French. “And the recipe?”

“Stolen from the Russians.”

“Only fitting.”

“The bird is coated with spices and wood-smoked and then placed on the pilaf.”

“I had no idea you were noble.”

“No one should go hungry.”

The two nuns kissed both his cheeks and his hands. “You are too kind,” Mother Superior said.

“Wait.” Escoffier took a small cask of wine from the next cart. “For all the sisters. Medicinal purposes, of course.”

As the cart pulled away, Rosa linked her arm in his. She towered over him but he didn't seem to mind.

“I could learn from you,” she said.

“In the kitchen?”

“Wherever you like.”

“Let us begin in the kitchen, then.”

“I'm not dressed to cook.”

“Then we must undress you.”

ROSA WORE ESCOFFIER'S
chef's whites; they fit her well enough. The head housekeeper of The Savoy removed her dress from his rooms and had it pressed and hung in his closet. The request was not out of the ordinary. Rosa was, after all, one of the Duke's women. All of the Duke's women took up much of the staff's time.

“How many plates?”

“Eighteen hundred for lunch and supper.”

“Blimey.”

“Oui.”

And so, at lunch, Rosa stood with Escoffier as he inspected each dish before it left the kitchen. Each rib of lamb, each fillet of fish, every mousse and aspic—everything from sauce to soup to garnish was placed just so.

Shortly before lunch was over, Ritz entered the kitchen with a plate in his hand. Escoffier inspected it.

“It is perfect.”

“Yes, it is,” Ritz said. “But somehow our guest understood that
Poulets de grains à la Polonaise—
even though our dear Monsieur Echenard said that he had described the method of cooking, and how the juices of the liver soaked into the bird, and how important the essence of the chicken that permeated the liver was—meant something fried with chips.”

“And so what does he want now?”

“Fried tripe, onions, sausage and mashed potatoes. I assured him it was a brilliant combination, a splendid choice. He's very rich. And so how do we make it?”

“We don't,” Escoffier said.

“I know of a stall,” Rosa said. “It's near a cab stand, not far from here.”

Ritz kissed her hand. “Send a boy, then,” he said. “The customer is never wrong. They are ignorant. They are foolish. They are often embarrassing. But never incorrect.”

Later that night, upstairs in Escoffier's rooms, he ran a hot bath for Rosa. Steam filled the small room. She took off her clothes slowly, without modesty. Slipped into the water. He handed her a glass of Moët.

“Will you teach me the art of French cooking?”

“Of course.”

“I'm a woman.”

“You are also clever, unafraid of work and skilled in your own right.”

“People would talk.”

“That is true.”

It was very true and they both knew it. But, at that moment, the possibility of scandal seemed to be worth the risk to Escoffier. There was something about Rosa that reminded him of Sarah. A much younger Sarah, of course, and Sarah was more beautiful, more regal in bearing, more like a queen, but Rosa had that same red hair and elegant neck, the pale butter skin.