Edna Lewis

A seamstress by trade, Lewis was known for her exquisite dresses, both for "society ladies" such as Dorcas Avedon (then wife of famed photographer Richard Avedon) and Marilyn Monroe, but became known even better for her African-themed dresses. Later she turned her love of cooking into a new career: she became a chef at a New York restaurant, which became a hit. She stayed on for several years before quitting to work on her farm. After breaking her leg in the 1970s, she spent her time writing, putting down her recipes and thoughts about Southern-style cooking. The Edna Lewis Cookbook was her first effort. Her second, The Taste of Country Cooking, published in 1976, "may well be the most entertaining regional cookbook in America" said a New York Times book critic. Her cookbooks "revived the nearly forgotten genre of refined Southern cooking while offering a glimpse into African-American farm life in the early 20th century," the Times said. With her new-found popularity as a cookbook author, Lewis went back to restaurant work and later founded the Society for the Revival and Preservation of Southern Food. In 1999 the Southern Foodways Alliance gave her its first lifetime achievement award. Miss Lewis, as she liked to be called, died at her Georgia home in her sleep on February 13. She was 89. From This is True for 12 February 2006 Suggestions for further reading: The Gift of Southern Cooking: Recipes and Revelations from Two Great American... By: Edna LewisScott Peacock List Price: $29.95 Amazon Price: $19.77 Editorial Review: The books of Edna Lewis--In Pursuit of Flavor, The Taste of Country Cooking, and the out-of-print Edna Lewis Cookbook--should be on any serious cook's bookshelf. Add to that list The Gift of Southern Cooking, which she wrote with fellow Southern cook, Scott Peacock. In her time, Edna Lewis has quietly upheld the virtues of a good meal and the Southern cooking she learned as a child. Her grandfather, a former slave, joined with freed slaves to found Freetown, a Virginia farming community. So Lewis grew up with the food at hand, fresh buttermilk, for example. She moved to New York City early on where she cooked for and rubbed shoulders with artists and actors, musicians and writers, cooks and Communists. And through all her years, through her life and through her cooking, she described the most elegant, simple line. It's there for you to see in each of her recipes, the way she approaches flavor. Here in her mid-80s Lewis brings out the best of Southern cooking with a collaborator less than half her age. She's a Virginian; he's from Alabama. So get ready for a delicious spread. They are both dedicated to preserving Southern food ways, and to updating whenever they can. The book is simply packed with wonderful treats from Spicy Eggplant Relish all the way to Warm Apple Crisp. It's written in Peacock's voice and unless he says so there's no telling where his recipes end and hers begin. But it doesn't matter. They are peas in a pod, those two. You will not only learn how Southern food should taste with The Gift of Southern Cooking, you will learn why and you will learn how. Neither your fried chicken nor your buttermilk biscuits will ever be the same. --Schuyler IngleEdna Lewis--whose The Taste of Country Cooking has become an American classic--and Alabama-born chef Scott Peacock pool their unusual cooking talents to give us this unique cookbook. What makes it so special is that it represents different styles of Southern cooking--Miss Lewis’s Virginia country cooking and Scott Peacock’s inventive and sensitive blending of new tastes with the Alabama foods he grew up on, liberally seasoned with Native American, Caribbean, and African influences. Together they have taken neglected traditional recipes unearthed in their years of research together on Southern food and worked out new versions that they have made their own. Every page of this beguiling book bears the unmistakable mark of being written by real hands-on cooks. Scott Peacock has the gift for translating the love and respect they share for good home cooking with such care and precision that you know, even if you’ve never tried them before, that the Skillet Cornbread will turn out perfect, the Crab Cakes will be “Honestly Good,” and the four-tiered Lane Cake something spectacular. Together they share their secrets for such Southern basics as pan-fried chicken (soak in brine first, then buttermilk, before frying in good pork fat), creamy grits (cook slowly in milk), and genuine Southern biscuits, which depend on using soft flour, homemade baking powder, and fine, fresh lard (and on not twisting the biscuit cutter when you stamp out the dough). Scott Peacock describes how Miss Lewis makes soup by coaxing the essence of flavor from vegetables (the She-Crab and Turtle soups taste so rich they can be served in small portions in demitasse cups), and he applies the same principle to his intensely flavored, scrumptious dish of Garlic Braised Shoulder Lamb Chops with Butter Beans and Tomatoes. You’ll find all these treasures and more before you even get to the superb cakes (potential “Cakewalk Winners” all), the hand-cranked ice creams, the flaky pies, and homey custards and puddings. Interwoven throughout the book are warm memories of the people and the traditions that shaped these pure- tasting, genuinely American recipes. Above all, the Southern table stands for hospitality, and the authors demonstrate that the way everything is put together--with the condiments and relishes and preserves and wealth of vegetables all spread out on the table--is what makes the meal uniquely Southern. Every occasion is celebrated, and at the back of the book there are twenty-two seasonal menus, from A Spring Country Breakfast for a Late Sunday Morning and A Summer Dinner of Big Flavors to An Alabama Thanksgiving and A Hearty Dinner for a Cold Winter Night, to show you how to mix and match dishes for a true Southern table. Here, then, is a joyful coming together of two extraordinary cooks, sharing their gifts. And they invite you to join them.   The Taste of Country Cooking: 30th Anniversary Edition By: Edna Lewis List Price: $23.95 Amazon Price: $16.29 Editorial Review: In recipes and reminiscences equally delicious, Edna Lewis celebrates the uniquely American country cooking she grew up with some fifty years ago in a small Virginia Piedmont farming community that had been settled by freed slaves. With menus for the four seasons, she shares the ways her family prepared and enjoyed food, savoring the delights of each special time of year: • The fresh taste of spring—the first shad, wild mushrooms, garden strawberries, field greens and salads . . . honey from woodland bees . . . a ring mold of chicken with wild mushroom sauce . . . the treat of braised mutton after sheepshearing. • The feasts of summer—garden-ripe vegetables and fruits relished at the peak of flavor . . . pan-fried chicken, sage-flavored pork tenderloin, spicy baked tomatoes, corn pudding, fresh blackberry cobbler, and more, for hungry neighbors on Wheat-Threshing Day . . . Sunday Revival, the event of the year, when Edna’s mother would pack up as many as fifteen dishes (what with her pickles and breads and pies) to be spread out on linen-covered picnic tables under the church’s shady oaks . . . hot afternoons cooled with a bowl of crushed peaches or hand-cranked custard ice cream. • The harvest of fall—a fine dinner of baked country ham, roasted newly dug sweet potatoes, and warm apple pie after a day of corn-shucking . . . the hunting season, with the deliciously “different” taste of game fattened on hickory nuts and persimmons . . . hog-butchering time and the making of sausages and liver pudding . . . and Emancipation Day with its rich and generous thanksgiving dinner. • The hearty fare of winter—holiday time, the sideboard laden with all the special foods of Christmas for company dropping by . . . the cold months warmed by stews, soups, and baked beans cooked in a hearth oven to be eaten with hot crusty bread before the fire. The scores of recipes for these marvelous dishes are set down in loving detail. We come to understand the values that formed the remarkable woman—her love of nature, the pleasure of living with the seasons, the sense of community, the satisfactory feeling that hard work was always rewarded by her mother’s good food. Having made us yearn for all the good meals she describes in her memories of a lost time in America, Edna Lewis shows us precisely how to recover, in our own country or city or suburban kitchens, the taste of the fresh, good, natural country cooking that was so happy a part of her girlhood in Freetown, Virginia.   In Pursuit of Flavor (The Virginia Bookshelf) By: Edna LewisMary Goodbody List Price: $17.95 Amazon Price: $12.21 Editorial Review: Perhaps no other cook has played such a central role in the renaissance of traditional southern cooking as Edna Lewis. When asked who has influenced them most, chefs from New York to Little Washington to Charleston cite Ms. Lewis and her classic collection of recipes, In Pursuit of Flavor, first published in 1988. Edna Lewis learned to cook by waHChing her mother prepare food in their kiHChen in a small farming community in Virginia. Because she was raised at a time when the vegetables came from the garden, fruit from the orchard, pickles, relishes, chutney, and jellies from quick canning, and meat from the smokehouse, Edna Lewis knows how food should taste. Every recipe included in her cookbook, both old friends and new discoveries, reflects her memory of and continuing search for good flavor. In chapters devoted to fruits and vegetables, meat and fowl, fish, herbs and spices, bread, and other baked goods, Ms. Lewis shares her secrets for getting the best out of food: combining tomatoes with cymling squash, pumpkins with onion and bacon, cooking sweet potatoes with lemon, and boiling corn in its husk. She always keeps a bit of country ham around to perk up greens, cooks fish fillets or chicken breasts in parchment, and braises meat in a clay pot to keep it moist. Her baking recipes, for the griddle and the oven, include tips on the right flour to use, how to make your own baking powder (to avoid the chemical taste), how to listen for signs that a cake is done, and when to use frozen butter in a pie crust and when to use pure leaf lard. In Pursuit of Flavor brings generations of cooking wisdom to today's kitchen.   The Old Mine's Secret: Anne Lewis And Her Village Cousins In Wartime (1921) By: Edna Henry Lee Turpin List Price: $28.95 Amazon Price: $22.00   Bring Me Some Apples and I'll Make You a Pie: A Story about Edna Lewis By: Robbin Gourley

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