Edna Lewis and the Black Roots of American Cooking
The air around Bethel Baptist Church in Unionville, Va., is sweet with pine and moss. From the road, Bethel seems like any other small-town white clapboard church, though a closer look shows some wear: a few holes in the windows, spidery cracks in the vinyl siding, a plastic Christmas tree tossed into the woods behind its gravel lot, sun-bleached to a shade of blue God never intended. But the church was built to last, and it’s still solid at nearly 125 years old. It sits at the corner of Marquis and Independence Roads: nobility and freedom, a fitting location for a place founded by black people who decided they weren’t going to worship at the back of white churches anymore.
One of those founders was Chester Lewis, an angular man with wide, piercing eyes who spent much of his life enslaved a couple of miles down Marquis Road. After emancipation, he built a house and planted orchards with a few other families on a plot of land his former master ceded to him. He and his wife, Lucinda, were illiterate, but they welcomed Isabella Lightfoot, a black graduate of Oberlin College, to use a part of their home as a school for the fledgling community’s children. They farmed, fished and foraged all their food, threshing their own wheat, raising their own animals and walking over to Jackson’s General Store for salt, spices, vanilla and Valentine’s Day presents. They struggled but were self-reliant, relishing their freedom, and they named their settlement Freetown.
In Freetown, the people lived close to the land, cooking their harvest in wood stoves, using wells and streams to keep food cool. And they lived close to one another. Chester and Lucinda’s granddaughter Edna Lewis remembered food as the center of its culture of work and community. In 1984, she told Phil Audibert, a documentarian: ‘‘If someone borrowed one cup of sugar, they would return two. If someone fell ill, the neighbors would go in and milk the cows, feed the chickens, clean the house, cook the food and come and sit with whoever was sick. I guess rural life conditioned people to cooperate with their neighbors.’’ Their conversation was recorded a half-century after Lewis moved away, but the impression her community made on her was still profound.
Her father died in 1928, and the rest of the family, which included six children who survived into adulthood, struggled during the Depression. Lewis left Freetown by herself as a teenager, joining the Great Migration north. Eventually, the rest of the community left, too. Today, Freetown is just a stand of fruit trees, and Jackson’s store has become someone’s rickety machine shop, its porch greening with vines of Virginia creeper crawling through the floorboards. But nearby, there are a few gravestones behind a white fence. I read the epitaphs when I visited, arriving at the grave I had come to pay my respects to: ‘‘Dr. Edna Lewis, April 13, 1916–February 13, 2006, Grande Dame of Southern Cooking.’’ I reached out to touch it, but then pulled back my hand; I remembered that I had the scent of cheap fried chicken on my fingers, fried chicken that I am sure Miss Lewis, as she was always known, would not have approved of.
It was tasty, that chicken, in the way that pre-fried chicken plucked out from a pile under heatlamps can be tasty: salty and greasy, slicking the lips with bird fat. But Lewis, who placed Southern cooking in the pantheon of great cuisines, respected fried chicken as a special-occasion food. She made hers not by punishing it in a pot of hot grease, but by patiently turning it in a shallow pan, crisping it over time in a blend of lard, butter and country ham, a technique that reflects something greater than the flavor of conjoined fats. When Lewis was growing up in Freetown, she learned that there was a season truly perfect for frying chickens — late spring to early summer, when the birds were the right size and had the right feed — just as there was a season for peaches and a season for blackberries. Foods, Lewis argued, are always temporal, so all good tastes are special. And when you have only a few chances every year to make something, you make it well. You use home-rendered lard to cook the bird. You brown the breasts first, then lay them on top of the sizzling legs so that they finish cooking gently in the heat above the pan. You slip in a slice of country ham to season the fat. That’s how you give thanks for it.
Along the way, fried chicken has become a fraught food, somehow both universally beloved and also used in ugly stereotypes of black people. But Lewis treated all the food she prepared, perhaps all things she did, with dignity and sensitivity. You get this sense in photos of her: She always stood tall, often dressed in clothes made of African fabrics, her white hair crowning her head. Almost everyone who met her describes her as ‘‘regal.’’ It’s almost as if her parents knew, when they gave her the middle name Regina.
Lewis went on from Freetown to become a revered chef and cookbook author, a friend to literati and movie stars and the winner of nearly every award our culinary institutions had to give. Today, her name is revered among food-world cognoscenti but less well known than your average Food Network star, and yet her championing of Southern food, and cooking it close to the land, is more relevant than ever. ‘‘We weren’t ready for her then,’’ one of her acolytes, Alice Waters, says. ‘‘Now we are.’’
‘‘Our mother was an excellent cook,’’ Lewis’s younger sister, Ruth Lewis Smith, told me recently. ‘‘Our Aunt Jennie was an excellent cook. A lot of our family went to Washington, D.C., to work as cooks. When they came home, they all learned from each other.’’ The elite homes of Virginia, going back to the days when the Colonial elite socialized with French politicians and generals during the Revolutionary War, dined on a cuisine inspired by France. It was built on local ingredients — many originally shared by Native Americans or brought by slaves from Africa — and developed by enslaved black chefs like James Hemings, who cooked for Thomas Jefferson at Monticello. Because this aristocratic strain of Southern cuisine was provisioned and cooked largely by black people, it came into their communities as well, including Freetown. Smith is 91 and still raises chickens; a cage of quail coo in her kitchen. When I called her, she asked me to call back later because her apple butter had been on the stove for two days, and it was ready for canning.
As a girl, Lewis busied herself with gathering berries, sewing and other home-taught skills. She watched the older women intently, learning to cook alongside them. After leaving Freetown, she made her way to New York City, where she took a job at a laundry and was fired three hours later: She’d never ironed before. She became a Communist and bristled at having to enter employers’ buildings through the back door but nonetheless worked for a time as a domestic, helping to put her baby sister Naomi through art school. At one point, she became a sought-after seamstress, making dresses for Doe Avedon and Marilyn Monroe, and dressing windows for the high-end department store Bonwit Teller. Surrounded by bohemians and fashion figures, she gave dinner parties for her friends, channeling her memories of her mother and aunt at the stove.
In 1948, Johnny Nicholson, a regular at Lewis’s table, was getting ready to open a cafe on the Upper East Side. As Nicholson used to tell it, Lewis walked by, about to take another job as a domestic, when she looked into her friend’s place and said it would make a terrific restaurant. A week later, Lewis was cooking lunch at Cafe Nicholson. She offered a tidy menu: herbed roast chicken, filet mignon, a piece of fish, some cake, a chocolate soufflé. The restaurant was a smash. It had a dining room like a fabulist’s dream: floral displays and soaring palm fronds dipping down to kiss the heads of guests like Paul Robeson, Tennessee Williams and Gore Vidal. Truman Capote would come into the kitchen, purring at his new friend Edna for a fix of biscuits. William Faulkner once flattered Lewis by asking if she had studied cooking in Paris. But no, her sister Ruth Lewis Smith told me: She learned to make soufflés from their mother, back in Virginia. Smith, in fact, often made them herself, after the restaurant took off and she came to help out.
The restaurant critic Clementine Paddleford reviewed the restaurant in 1951 in The New York Herald Tribune, calling that soufflé ‘‘light as a dandelion seed in a wind’’ and noting a sense of pride in the chef: ‘‘We saw Edna peering in from the kitchen, just to see the effect on the guests and hear the echoes of praise.’’ But Lewis wasn’t just the chef. With Jim Crow in full effect and de facto segregation the reality in most of the North, this granddaughter of slaves had become a partner in a business that counted Eleanor Roosevelt among its favorite customers.
In 1961, Judith Jones, an editor at Knopf, ushered in an era of fascination with French cuisine by publishing an intensely detailed cookbook called ‘‘Mastering the Art of French Cooking,’’ written in part by a tall, warbling woman named Julia Child. A decade later, Jones was looking for someone to help America turn its sights to the glories of its own tables. One day, the chief executive of Random House, Knopf’s parent company, asked Jones if she would meet his friend, a socialite named Evangeline Peterson. Peterson had taken a liking to a wonderful caterer and wanted to write down her recipes. Unsure of what the meeting would yield, Jones agreed to it. ‘‘But when Edna swept into my office, in this beautiful garb, her hair piled up, she was just such a presence that you were a little awed by her,’’ she says.
After leaving Cafe Nicholson in the mid-1950s, Lewis had continued her cinematically eclectic life. She and her husband, a Communist activist named Steve Kingston, spent time as pheasant farmers in New Jersey, until all the birds died overnight from a mysterious disease. She opened and closed her own restaurant. She began catering and teaching cooking classes and took a job as a docent in the Hall of African Peoples in the American Museum of Natural History. A slip on a snowy night broke her ankle and, bored during her recovery, she accepted Peterson’s invitation to write together.
They had essentially finished writing a book, ‘‘The Edna Lewis Cookbook,’’ that Jones thought was fashionable but characterless. But when Lewis started talking, recalling scenes of growing up in Freetown and the foods they had gathered, grown, harvested, shot, hooked and cooked, Jones lit up. ‘‘I knew this was a voice that could teach us,’’ she said. This was the story of American food that she had wanted to hear. Peterson graciously went home, Jones asked questions, Lewis wrote answers on yellow legal pads and the seeds of her classic, ‘‘The Taste of Country Cooking,’’ were sown. Lewis would go on to write more books and to hold chef posts at esteemed landmarks like Middleton Place in South Carolina and Gage & Tollner in New York. But she will be forever remembered for writing the book that started with that meeting.
‘‘The Taste of Country Cooking,’’ published in 1976, is revered for the way it shows the simple beauty of food honestly made in the rhythm of the seasons — the now common but at the time nearly forgotten ethos of eating farm-to-table — and for the way it gave a view of Southern food that was refined and nuanced, going beyond grease, greens and grits. ‘‘Until recently, we Southerners were very apologetic about our food,’’ Lewis’s friend, collaborator and eventual caretaker Scott Peacock told me. ‘‘But she wrote about it with such reverence.’’ She inspired generations of Southern cooks to honor their own roots. Alice Waters, who is usually credited for sparking the American organic-and-local movement at Chez Panisse in California, says: ‘‘It was certainly revolutionary at that point. I was such a Francophile, but when I discovered her cookbook, it felt like a terribly good friend. By then, we were already in a fast-food world, and she showed the deep roots of gastronomy in the United States and that they were really in the South, where we grew for flavor and cooked with sophistication. I had never really considered Southern food before, but I learned from her that it’s completely connected to nature, totally in time and place.’’
The book is, in one sense, a country manual, with instructions on picking wild mushrooms and the best way to turn dandelions into wine. (It tastes like Drambuie, Lewis offers helpfully.) It’s also a cookbook, because there are teaspoons and tablespoons and ‘‘cook uncovered for 10 minutes.’’ But perhaps the truest way to describe the book is as a memoir told in recipes, where every menu, dish and ingredient speaks to her childhood in rural Virginia and how her community made a life from the land, taking pleasure in the doing of many things.
It stands as an exemplar of American food writing, a complex, multilayered, artistic and even subtly subversive document. And it stands on the other side of a cruel tradition in cookbooks from the first half of the 20th century, one in which black domestic cooks often had their recipes recorded and written by their white employers, who tended not to flatter the help in the process. Toni Tipton-Martin’s 2015 book ‘‘The Jemima Code,’’ a bibliography of African-American cookbooks, collects some examples of this, including one from 1937 called ‘‘Emma Jane’s Souvenir Cookbook,’’ by Blanche Elbert Moncure. In the equivalent of blackface dialect, a servant cook, Emma Jane, ostensibly says, ‘‘I ain’t no fancy cake maker but here is a re-ceet dat ‘Ole Miss’ taught me,’’ then goes on to give the cake a name involving both a racial slur and an insult to her own intelligence.
Lewis is a sensitive, even-toned renderer of beauty. Her small stories in ‘‘The Taste of Country Cooking’’ gently urge the reader toward a life of mindfulness, a life of learning to see the details. Early in the book, she describes a spring morning: ‘‘A stream, filled from the melted snows of winter, would flow quietly by us, gurgling softly and gently pulling the leaf of a fern that hung lazily from the side of its bank. After moments of complete exhilaration we would return joyfully to the house for breakfast.’’ As Jones once said on a panel, ‘‘You felt all through her writing that she was giving thanks for something precious.’’
In a passage called ‘‘Hog Killing,’’ Lewis recalls the day each fall when her family would turn pigs into pork. It’s not gruesome, but it is earthy. Today, at a time when the phrase ‘‘rock-star butchers’’ has occasion to exist, making us reckon with the mortal reality of meat isn’t so shocking. But it’s still grounding to read these lines: ‘‘My father would remove the liver and the bladder, which he would present to us. We would blow the bladders up with straws cut from reeds and hang them in the house to dry. By Christmas they would have turned transparent like beautiful balloons.’’ Can you imagine being so intimately connected to the guts of life that you could look at a bladder, just separated from its pig, and see a balloon for your Christmas tree? Can you imagine seeing so much to love around you?
But those same hogs also point toward deeper meaning in the text. The next paragraph reads: ‘‘The following morning my brothers and sisters and I would rush out before breakfast to see the hogs hanging from the scaffolds like giant statues. The hogs looked beautiful. They were glistening white inside with their lining of fat, and their skin was almost translucent.’’
In November 1918, two years after Lewis was born, a black man, Charles Allie Thompson was lynched in Culpeper, a nearby town. A mob hung him from a tree after claims that he raped a white woman. He had been seen asking her to help with butchering, at hog-killing time. It’s not clear whether Lewis knew this story. But she was not naïve. ‘‘She could see the ugly in the world,’’ Peacock says. ‘‘This is someone who had street smarts.’’ She wrote ‘‘The Taste of Country Cooking’’ while in her 50s, in the 1970s, after years as a political radical, after the civil rights movement, after marching for the Scottsboro Boys, nine black teenagers accused of raping two white women, who escaped being lynched in Alabama in 1931 only to be railroaded into shoddy convictions. (They were all eventually pardoned or had their convictions overturned, some posthumously.) Whether Lewis intended to imbue her hog-killing scene with such references, it became impossible for me to read ‘‘The Taste of Country Cooking’’ without a sense of the wider setting of her story and how she chose to tell it without terror, how she refused to let the past, her past, be defined by anyone else but her.
If someone handed you a book about a settlement of freed slaves trying to live off the land, what would you expect? A story of struggle, at least. Privation and desperation, probably. But in Lewis’s telling, it is a story of peace and celebration, of receiving the gifts of the earth and hard work. The children sing at concerts in this story. The recipes are arranged by menus with formal titles as literally quotidian as ‘‘A Late Spring Dinner’’ or ‘‘A Cool-Evening Supper,’’ because the very acts of cooking and serving and eating food are worthy of occasion. It is a story of refinement, not in the fine-china sense but in the sense of being meticulous and careful about the way the people of Freetown raised and grew and trapped and foraged and prepared their food, because their lives were worth that. The pleasure of that was due them.
Lewis took the story of rural black people, formerly enslaved black people, and owned it as a story of confidence and beauty. She didn’t have an easy life, even in her Freetown years. Her family suffered through two stillborn children and two more who died young of pneumonia. But she chose to see, and to show us, beauty; and under the shadow of oppression and slavery, that is a political act. I spoke with Lewis’s niece, her youngest sister Naomi’s daughter, Nina Williams-Mbengue, who, at age 12, took her aunt’s handwritten sheets of yellow legal-pad paper and typed the manuscript for ‘‘The Taste of Country Cooking.’’ Her aunt never said her book was meant to be political. But she often spoke of being inspired by the people and the humane, communal spirit of Freetown. Williams-Mbengue said: ‘‘She just didn’t have any notion that these people were less-than because they were poor farming people. She wanted to make their lives count.’’ And then she added: ‘‘Imagine being enslaved, then rising above that to build your own town. Aunt Edna was always amazed that one of the first things they did was to plant orchards, so that their children would see the fruit of their efforts. How could those communities have such a gift? Was it that the future had to be so bright because they knew the past that they were coming out of?’’
One of the most quietly devastating passages in American literature is the opening of ‘‘Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave’’: ‘‘I was born in Tuckahoe, near Hillsborough, and about twelve miles from Easton, in Talbot county, Maryland. I have no accurate knowledge of my age, never having seen any authentic record containing it.’’ Here we find so many of slavery’s psychological horrors in Douglass’s two simple, measured, masterful sentences: I can tell you, in great detail, about the location of my body. But I can’t tell you how long I have been here, because the system that made my body someone else’s property keeps the most basic, most intimate fact of my own life away from me.
It’s possible to hear the echoes of Douglass’s sentences in the first lines of ‘‘The Taste of Country Cooking’’: ‘‘I grew up in Freetown, Virginia, a community of farming people. It wasn’t really a town. The name was adopted because the first residents had all been freed from chattel slavery and they wanted to be known as a town of Free People.’’ You can hear the echoes in the even tone, in facts, plainly stated, that have to say no more to say so much. The message here is empowered, almost fierce: Our town may not have been a town, according to the people who draw the maps and place the post offices. But it was a town, a whole world, because we, and I, say so.
‘‘The book was this coming out,’’ Jones says. ‘‘But she felt able and entitled to it. She was very strong in her beliefs.’’ When they were working on the book together, Jones noticed that there wasn’t a menu for Thanksgiving. She asked Lewis about it, who said, quietly: ‘‘We didn’t celebrate Thanksgiving. We celebrated Emancipation Day.’’ And so she wrote a menu for that, leaving it to the reader to figure out why.
Nearly every year, Lewis went back to Virginia, often visiting the site where Freetown had stood, even when all that remained was a stone chimney and a few houses, sagging as if molten. But she would delight in feeling the soil under her feet with her older sister Jenny, who still lived nearby. ‘‘I remember trailing along behind them, picking blackberries, the brambles getting caught in my pants and my hair,’’ Williams-Mbengue says. ‘‘And they would be giggling, picking berries and wild greens for salads.’’ While she was writing ‘‘The Taste of Country Cooking,’’ Lewis cooked with Jenny to refresh her memory of the techniques and the flavor and often called her from New York while testing the recipes. She read historic cookbooks to learn more about the cooking done by blacks in the past, how Native Americans ate, what French influences Thomas Jefferson brought to her home region. She spoke of the creativity of black women in the kitchen; how that represented some measure of freedom when they otherwise had none. ‘‘She always talked about how, in spite of these people being slaves, they created a cuisine that would become world-renowned,’’ Williams-Mbengue says.
Lewis stood as the ambassador of that cuisine, who announced the universality of its appeal and importance and who wrote, in part, to preserve it. She feared that the departure of people from the land, and the rise of fast food and convenience foods, would change the culture of cooking. ‘‘Southern cooking is about to become extinct,’’ she said to The New York Times Magazine in 1992. And she feared, too, that people would lose sight of who should be credited for that cooking. ‘‘It’s mostly black,’’ she said, more forceful in her later years, because blacks ‘‘did most of the cooking in private homes, hotels and on the railroads.’’ She began work on, but never finished, a book about the significance of black cooks in Southern food.
Southern food has had its ups and downs in the national consciousness. In 1962, Eugene Walter of Mobile, Ala., wrote of his culinary homesickness while traveling for Gourmet magazine: ‘‘It’s interesting that in New York one can find authentic food of every country on earth, save of the South. What is advertised as Southern fried chicken is usually an ancient fowl encased in a cement mixture and tormented in hot grease for an eternity. Southern biscuits à la New York are pure cannon wadding. Gumbo they’ve not even heard of.’’ But for the last nine years, by my calculations, two-thirds of the nominees for the James Beard Foundation’s annual award for the best book on American cooking have been on the subject of Southern food. Southern books have won the award all of those years but one. Yet none of those Beard award winners, or nominees, were black.
Leni Sorensen is a Virginia historian of African-American cooks. ‘‘Many black people have not heard of Edna Lewis because they’re urban and raised in schools to learn that farming is dirty and slavery was awful, so let’s not talk about it,’’ she told me. ‘‘There is a feeling: ‘Oh, hell no, we just got off the farm.’ And for many black people, to see any activities done under slavery now as professional is just too painful.’’ Joe Randall, a chef of five decades and a friend of Lewis’s, says: ‘‘Cooking was relegated to black folk, and when Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, a lot of civil rights leaders said, ‘We don’t have to work in your restaurants anymore.’ ’’ Randall taught hospitality management at universities and says, ‘‘A lot of my students’ grandparents said, ‘I didn’t send my baby to college to be no cook.’ ’’
Once cooking became a profession with cultural cachet — Randall attributes this rise to the moment in 1977 when the Department of Labor began classifying chefs not as ‘‘domestics’’ but as ‘‘professionals’’ — many black chefs then became pigeonholed as ‘‘soul-food cooks.’’ In her 2011 book ‘‘High on the Hog,’’ the culinary scholar Jessica B. Harris writes that in the 1960s ‘‘soul food was as much an affirmation as a diet. Eating neckbones and chitterlings, turnip greens and fried chicken became a political statement for many.’’ But Lewis publicly distanced herself from soul food, once saying to Southern Living magazine, ‘‘That’s hard-times food in Harlem, not true Southern food.’’ Adrian Miller, who wrote a book called ‘‘Soul Food,’’ says he understands where Lewis was coming from: ‘‘This is the food of black migrants, who were transplanting a cuisine to where they couldn’t always find what they had before. So they had to find substitutes, like canned and processed ingredients. I think Lewis thought it just was something different than the scratch cooking that she made.’’ Lewis came directly from slaves and from the land and the food that they grew and prepared for themselves. Her food wasn’t a remix of food that they got from the elite; it was the same food as the elites ate, only they owned it themselves. She had no truck with the belittling mainstream idea of soul food — cheap and greasy — as the totality of black cooking, but it’s easy to see how her words would fall hard on ears that still hear pride in the term.
It has been almost 10 years since Lewis died, 40 since she published ‘‘The Taste of Country Cooking.’’ Who carries her torch? There are many calling for seasonal, organic eating, but who else has been afforded the iconic position Lewis held, to keep showing us the rich history and influences that black cooks have had on American food? Jones found Lewis by chance. Is America looking hard enough for the next Edna Lewis?
It’s a question that has weighed on Tipton-Martin for years, as she pored over hundreds of African-American cookbooks to write ‘‘The Jemima Code.’’ She got to speak to Lewis at a food writer’s event and, while still in awe of her, steeled herself to tell her that she was not the only one. ‘‘I told her that I wanted to tell the world that there were more women like her than just her,’’ she said. A while later, Lewis sent her a letter, written on the same kind of yellow legal pad that she used to write ‘‘The Taste of Country Cooking.’’ ‘‘Leave no stone unturned to prove this point,’’ she wrote. ‘‘Make sure that you do.’’
Recipes: Spiced Pears | Corn Muffins | Smothered Rabbit | Biscuits | Garden Strawberry Preserves
