Cohen Netflix Watch: The Duchess of Duke Street

I watched this BBC series that aired on PBS when I was in my late teens and really enjoyed it. I think I identified with the working class heroine, who with pluck and ambition and foibles a-plenty, creates a grand life on her own terms. I mean, pluck, ambition and foibles were about all I was going out into the world with, so it was good to see such a girl make good.

But it was the cooking — a thing I considered just a background detail in my teenage viewing — that made me put Duchess of Duke Street in the Netflix queue last month. The ambition of our girl, scullery maid Louisa Leyton, is to become the best cook in Victorian London and as we follow, she becomes a famed Edwardian hostess to kings, so we get all kinds of juicy tidbits of cookery and hospitality. Add that to a big soap opera of a life story that floats along on jeroboams of champagne — with a beautifully played cast of eccentric characters in lush costumes — and you have just the episodic thing to fill up those lonely, lonely hours without The Daily Show or Heroes. Learn more about the story line of the show here.

Bonus stuff: The series is based on the real life of Rosa Lewis — known as the Duchess of Jermyn Street — whose Cavindish Hotel was on the corner of Jermyn and Duke Streets in Mayfair. Learn more about her at wikipedia. Or, click here to read an interesting article from 1927’s Time magazine.