KENNESAW, Ga. | Feb 25, 2022

KSU Honors Student Camilla Stegall discusses the history and cultural significance of renowned chef and food writer Edna Lewis.

Welcome back to the Cookery Corner! February is Black History Month and March is Women's History Month. Here in the Cookery Corner, we are celebrating the works and legacy of renowned chef and cookbook author, Edna Lewis. We’ll do this by first getting to know about her and then diving into her first cookbook, The Edna Lewis Cookbook, from 1972. 

Edna Lewis was an African-American woman born in 1916 in Freetown, Orange County, Virginia. Freed slaves, including Lewis’s grandfather, founded Freetown. Freetown truly captured the essence of a community. Although everyone had their own farms, neighbors helped each other throughout the year. According to Lewis, Freetown had an amazing abundance of fresh foods and emphasis on cooking. These two elements influenced Lewis’s life and style of southern cooking, which led to her legendary career.  

When she was 16, Lewis left Freetown and eventually moved to New York, where she took on a variety of jobs, ranging from a typesetter for the Communist paper, The Daily Worker, to seamstress work from which she developed her own African-influenced fashion design. All the while, she maintained an interest in cooking. In 1947, John Nicholson and Carl Bissinger, friends of Lewis, invited her to join with them in opening a new restaurant which became Café Nicholson. The café served many famous guests, including Eleanor Roosevelt and southern writers William Faulkner, Truman Capote, and Tennessee Williams. 

Lewis left Café Nicholson and New York in 1953 and took on other occupations, including pheasant farming. She later returned to New York, where she became a caterer and cooking tutor. One of her students was Evangeline Peterson, a socialite who encouraged Lewis to write a cookbook. In 1967, Lewis started her own restaurant to help the people of Harlem, however, it went bankrupt by early 1968. After the bankruptcy of her restaurant and during the boredom of bedrest due to a broken leg, Lewis finally decided to write the cookbook which became The Edna Lewis Cookbook, published in 1972. 

 

Lewis and Peterson were put in contact with Judith Jones, who was an editor for the Alfred A. Knopf publishing company, to publish their cookbook. It is thanks to Jones that we have the Diary of Anne Frank in English and Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking. When Jones met with Lewis to discuss The Edna Lewis Cookbook, she learned that Lewis had even more life and culinary experiences to write about.

 
After The Edna Lewis Cookbook, Lewis worked with Jones to write what would become her greatest cookbook and a classic piece of southern cookery, The Taste of Country Cooking, published in 1976. While The Edna Lewis Cookbook had been well-received, The Taste of Country Cooking brought Lewis to the next level of culinary standing and revived interest in southern cooking. Lewis’s version of southern cooking was not the almost cartoony stereotype of southern cooking (food writer Francis Lam sums it up as “grease, green, and grits”) that pervaded at the time, but rather focused on the fresh farm cooking of Freetown, Virginia.   

Significantly, Lewis, an African-American woman, reached this stage of recognition with The Taste of Country Cooking in a century that rarely acknowledged African-American, especially women’s, expertise, enterprise, and experience in the kitchen. The Taste of Country Cooking wasn’t only a cookbook, but a memoir of Lewis’s life in Freetown, with reminiscences of food-related events in Freetown that provided new insight into the lives and food culture of southern African Americans and their prominent involvement in southern foodways. This makes it not only a rich culinary text, but an amazing piece of African-American southern early-twentieth-century cultural history.  

After publication of The Taste of Country Cooking, Lewis continued her career as a chef and wrote two more cookbooks: In Pursuit of Flavor in 1988 and The Gift of Southern Cooking: Recipes and Revelations from Two Great American Cooks, which she co-wrote with fellow southern cook, Scott Peacock, in 2003. Lewis moved to Atlanta in 1992. In 1996, she moved to Decatur, Georgia, to live with future co-cookbook writer, close friend, and mentee, Scott Peacock. Their close friendship included the co-founding of the Society for the Revival and Preservation of Southern Food. Lewis was passionate about keeping southern cooking and the significant African-American involvement in it alive. Their Society melded into the Southern Foodways Alliance, of which Lewis was one of the founding members, in 1999. Lewis died in Decatur in 2006, two months before her ninetieth birthday. 

Interest in her work and remembrance of her legacy as the “Grand Dame of Southern Cooking” remains today. She was celebrated with fellow “Celebrity Chefs,” including Joyce Chen and Julia Child, in a USPS stamp collection in 2014. The Savannah, Georgia-based, Edna Lewis Foundation honors her legacy with opportunities, including scholarships, for African-American students studying in the areas of agriculture, culinary arts, food writing, and storytelling. Lewis’s life and her recipes continue to inspire the next generations of chefs.  

Join us next time as we dive into The Edna Lewis Cookbook and examine some recipes that would be a tasty treat for someone you love this or any month of spring!  

For more information about Edna Lewis check out: 
NPR – The Life and Legacy of Southern Cook Edna Lewis – an interview with the director of the Southern Foodways Alliance, John T. Edge. 
Edna Lewis: At the Table with an American Original edited by Sara B. Franklin – I highly recommend this book to learn more about Lewis, as this book features essays about her, the context of her life and legacy, and remembrances of interactions with Lewis and/or her cookbooks. 
Her other cookbooks, especially The Taste of Country Cooking and The Gift of Southern Cooking provide insight into her life in Freetown and her close and culinary friendship with Scott Peacock. 
For more information about The Edna Lewis Foundation here is their website: https://www.ednalewisfoundation.org/   
For more information about the Southern Foodways Alliance and their history here is their website: 
https://www.southernfoodways.org/about-us/history-founders/   
Here is an interview with Edna Lewis in 1994, where she discusses her ventures in Atlanta and the prominence of African Americans in the development of southern food: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34hEzh-D7Qo  
To learn more about the literary editing career of Judith Jones: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/02/us/judith-jones-dead.html