Edna Lewis - The Taste of Country Cooking: 30th Anniversary Edition

Also by EDNA LEWIS

The Edna Lewis Cookbook

In Pursuit of Flavor

The Gift of Southern Cooking
(with Scott Peacock)

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Copyright 1976 by Edna Lewis
Preface copyright 2006 by Judith B. Jones
Foreword copyright 2006 by Alice Waters

All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

www.aaknopf.com

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

The illustration Bird on Nest appears here with the permission of the illustrator, Clare Leighton.

Haystacks by Thomas Nason
Great Apples by Moishe Smith
Winter Twilight by J. J. Lankes
appear courtesy of Associated American Artists

Portions of the Spring section appeared in the May 1976 issue of Gourmet.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lewis, Edna.
The taste of country cooking.
Includes index.
1. Cookery, AmericanVirginia. 2. Freetown, Va.History. I. Title
TX715.L6684 641.5975 75-36804
eISBN: 978-0-307-76182-8

v3.1

This book is dedicated to the memory of the people of Freetown

and to Judith B. Jones, with many thanks for her deep understanding.

Miss Edna Regina Lewis was born in Virginia in 1916, in a bucolic, out-of-the-way settlement known as Freetown, which had been founded by her grandfather and other freed slaves after the emancipation of 1865. She enjoyed a childhood that could only be described as idyllic, in which the never-ending hard work of farming and cooking both sustained and entertained an entire community. In 1976, with the publication of this lovely, indispensable classic of a cookbook, she brought her lost paradise of Freetown back to life. Thanks to this book, a new generation was introduced to the glories of an American tradition worthy of comparison to the most evolved cuisines on earth, a tradition of simplicity and purity and sheer deliciousness that is only possible when food tastes like what it is, from a particular place, at a particular point in time.

To her readers thirty years ago, the community she depicted in these pages may have seemed even more remote than it does today. Back then, the possibility that many Americans might once again strive to eat only local, seasonal foods, raised or gathered or hooked by people they knew, seemed distant, at best. Back then, most of us were more or less resigned to the industrialization of our food, the mechanization of our work, the trivialization of our play, and the atomization of our communities. But with her recipes and reminiscences, Miss Lewis was able to gently suggest another way of being, one on a human scale, in harmony with the seasons and with our fellow man. For her, always, as it had in her childhood, pleasure flowed unstoppably out of doing. She saw clearly that the store-bought cake never brings lasting satisfaction; true contentment comes from baking it yourself, by hand, for someone you love. She also saw no need to rail against the absurdities of modernity; rather, she demonstrated the beauty of tradition, and by doing so, helped stir up a great longing for authenticity, accountability, and sustainability.

Another notable advocate of simplicity, Mahatma Gandhi, famously remarked that we must become the change we want to make in the world. Like Gandhi, Miss Lewis was as radical as she was traditional. To become the change she wanted to make, she left the racially divided South and plunged into the maelstrom of New York City, working variously as a typesetter for the Daily Worker and as a dressmaker for Marilyn Monroe, among other jobs, before she became the chef of an East Side restaurant in Manhattan called Caf Nicholson and, later, of Gage & Tollner in Brooklyn. In between, for a time she had a pheasant farm, which she ran with the same hands-on delight and concentration with which she cooked. She never rejected her cultural heritage; she expanded on it. She loved to wear colorful West Africaninspired dresses of her own design, and her devotion to the foodways of her childhood ultimately led her to found the Society for the Revival and Preservation of Southern Food. Her key insight was to recognize that truly great traditions belong to all the living, regardless of individual heritage; and that they belong to elective families as well as to those bound by consanguinity.

In the community of culinary celebrities, Miss Lewiss quiet dignity was legendary. On several occasions, my Chez Panisse crew and I traveled east to the big Meals on Wheels benefit in New York. Miss Lewis was unique among the high-powered chefs who were invited to cook at these affairs. Some of them would arrive with their food already made; some would arrive with big staffs and set up ruthlessly efficient production lines. Meanwhile, Miss Lewis would have set up all by herself in a little corner, and would be baking pies, one at a time, alone, or maybe with her friend Scott Peacock. There she would stand, a pillar of strength and calm, rolling out pie crust with a wooden rolling pin and crimping the pastry with her long, efficient fingers. She knew that real food made by hand means more to both those who make it and those who eat it. And she poured her self into her work because she knew that all you can take from this life is what you give away.

As you will discover from this book, Edna Lewis had an irresistible generosity and honesty of spirit. She was far more than the doyenne of Southern cooking. She was, and she remains, an inspiration to all of us who are striving to protect both biodiversity and cultural diversity by cooking real food in season and honoring our heritage through the ritual of the table. By holding on to her values and expressing them in her lifes work, she set a shining example of how to bring beauty and meaning to everyday life.

It was in the spring of 1972 that I first met Edna Lewis. Bob Bernstein, the head of Random House at the time, had suggested to his friend Evangeline Peterson that she and Edna talk with me about the cookbook they were doing together.

I was immediately struck by Ednas regal presence when she walked into my office. She was wearing one of the African-style outfits that she had made herselfa colorful, long, batik skirt and top, with matching scarf draped loosely around her neck and dangling earrings that swung when she tossed back her head. I became even more entranced when she started talking about the foods of her childhood and how she had grown up in Freetown, Virginia, a farming community that her grandfather, a freed slave, had founded. Her face would light up as she recalled gathering wild asparagus along the fence row or of the many dishes her mother would prepare for Revival Sunday (and the long, agonizing wait to taste them). I sensed immediately from her pleasure in these memories that she must be a wonderful cook.

The book that she and Peterson had put together was based on the dishes Edna served at Caf Nicholson, in Manhattans East Fifties, where Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams and other artists and writers would congregate of an evening to taste real Southern food. But it was just a collection of those recipes along with what seemed like popular caf fare. And anyway this book, called