Edna Lewis built the future of American dining on Black country tradition

Edna Lewis, pictured in 1992, published the landmark "The Taste of Country Cooking" 50 years ago this month, changing mainstream ideas of American food in the process. (John Spink/Atlanta Journal-Constitution/AP via CNN Newsource)

In the first chapter of Edna Lewis’s “The Taste of Country Cooking,” she focused not on food, but on a time and a place.

The cookbook, published in 1976 and continuously in print ever since, is divided seasonally. While introducing spring in Virginia, Lewis saves ingredients or instructions for later, opening with a description of the season’s first warm morning, marked by the sight of freshly hatched chicks, “chirping and pecking in the snowy slush.”

In those local, specific details was an approach that would revolutionize food culture across the country. Lewis grew up in Freetown, a farming community established by former slaves in central Virginia. To her, food was inherently tied to the seasons and to the land — a view of cuisine that Americans were used to applying to the fabled terroir of European wine and food, not their own.

Lewis died in 2006, but the ideas she shared 50 years ago in “The Taste of Country Cooking,” out in a new anniversary edition, define how the nation eats today. When the book first appeared, the South was still considered backward, and its food too salty and too fatty — a “heart attack on a plate,” in the words of the Southern chef Scott Peacock, who co-wrote a 2003 cookbook with Lewis and took care of her in her final years.

Lewis’s account of Southern cooking established what are now basic premises of American fine dining. Restaurants build menus around the turning of the seasons; online influencers preach the value of foraging and eating locally.

“She is certainly laying down the marker that says, ‘This is who we are,’” said author and journalist Toni Tipton-Martin, who wrote the foreword for the 50th anniversary edition, “‘and this is what our food is and has always been.’”

“The Taste of Country Cooking” at times reads more like a personal history than a cookbook. Lewis details the amount for which her enslaved grandmother was bought, and notes the poetry readings, children’s plays and other community events that shaped her early years. Her memories of food are tied to the changes of the year. There are summer thunderstorms and the joy of fresh turtle soup followed by late afternoon ice cream-making, a “family affair.” Later in the year comes the Emancipation Day celebration — no Thanksgiving here — and December’s hog butchering. In another book, the image of hogs hanging from scaffolds might be horrific; here, it is a thing of beauty, a visible representation of a community’s labour.

Lewis gives instructions on roasting one’s own coffee beans, decades before the third-wave coffee movement; she describes foraging for morel mushrooms and emphasizes the “great flavor” of local beef. Long before farm-to-table was a trend or expectation, before bakeries touted locally grown and milled flours or chefs and home cooks alike sourced directly from farmers markets, Lewis’s book provided a blueprint based on the cycles of Black farming.

While the book was “unquestionably” ahead of its time, Peacock said, it was less a runaway popular hit than a sensation among her fellow chefs and people “in the know.” The godfather of American gastronomy, James Beard, praised Lewis’s work in 1976 in his syndicated newspaper column, specifically applauding her rich descriptions of everyday communal living.

“I was extremely moved by the book,” he wrote, “and immediately wanted to cook many of these earthy American recipes that depend for their excellence on the bounty of our good soil.”

Using “good soil” to describe American food, particularly Southern food, marked a change of perspective. Southern culture wasn’t presented as refined, Peacock said. By using the language of French wines to write about Southern food, Beard was placing the latter on the same footing that European food held in the American imagination.

Still, “The Taste of Country Cooking” didn’t immediately change stereotypical views of Southern food. Peacock, who met Lewis when he was a young chef, recalled telling her that he was going to study in Italy, like all “the cool kids.” Lewis, he said, instead encouraged him to “learn about your own cuisine before you go off studying someone else’s.”

“That was a shocking thing to hear,” he said. “I certainly didn’t think there was anything to study or to know or learn about the food that I’d grown up on.”

In 1976, chefs like Beard and Julia Child were already changing American cooking culture, which in the wake of industrialization, had become dominated by products like pancake mix, canned soup and instant pudding. As Child taught home cooks how to roast chicken and braise meats, more American women were trying to cook in more sophisticated ways, Tipton-Martin said.

Meanwhile, with the victories of the Civil Rights movement and the mass popularity of Black culture across music, film and television, the era was, as Tipton-Martin put it, a “period of reclamation for all things Black.” That included Black food.

But mainstream ideas of “soul food,” a common catch-all for what was perceived to be slave food, made it appear as if chitlins were the only thing Black people ate, Tipton-Martin said.

In Lewis’s world, Southern food wasn’t built on chitlins and overcooked vegetables, the staples of struggle after the Great Migration. Instead, Lewis focused on the food she grew up with, highlighting dishes like lentil and scallion salad, plum preserves, and beef à la mode, reminiscent of the classic French dish.

“What she did was pioneer a new way of thinking about Black cooking,” Tipton-Martin said.

The concept of farm-to-table eating had started to infiltrate American fine dining — most notably at Alice Waters’ Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California — in the years before “The Taste of Country Cooking” was released. But Waters credited her time living on a market street in France as the foundation for her ideas, while Lewis was inspired by the everyday foods and techniques she’d grown up with.

After Lewis’s book, Tipton-Martin said, “everyone is beginning to acknowledge that the South is an incredible resource for local flavorful foods, because you’re capturing them at their seasonal best.”

Mashama Bailey, chef and co-founder of Grey Spaces, which operates Southern restaurants both in the US and in Paris, said she read “The Taste of Country Cooking” “like a novel — not once, not twice, but like three, four times.”

Bailey heads the board of The Edna Lewis Foundation, and specifically credits Lewis’s influence on her menu at The Grey in Savannah, Georgia.

“I really do adore the way that she kind of brings you into what her thought process is when it comes to cooking, what the traditions around those dishes meant to her and her family,” Bailey said, “and how much she relied on not just learning how to cook from her elders, but also learning how to grow things and when to pick things.”

She referenced the restaurant’s recipe for hoppin’ john, a dish of black-eyed peas and rice that originated in South Carolina. The Grey uses brown rice and heirloom Sea Island red peas, and the dish reminds Bailey of something her grandmother or great grandmother would make. But she resists the urge to zhuzh it up in some more chef-y way, instead trying to stay true to “these ancestral grains and beans and peas,” Bailey said.

“The Taste of Country Cooking” heralds traditional ingredients throughout. Lewis’s recipe for ham in heavy cream sauce calls for the use of Virginia ham specifically, with a little authorial saltiness: “I don’t think any other type of ham is any good.” For watermelon-rind pickles, she notes the watermelon varieties her family specifically planted: Jackson, Congo and Tom Watson.

“There’s a very strong directness to the food in ‘The Taste of Country Cooking,’” Peacock said. “And that is much more a trend now than it certainly was 40 years ago.”

Beyond professional kitchens, home cooks now also embrace slower techniques like fermenting sourdough or building laminated pastries, Peacock said, and hit cookbooks like Ella Quittner’s “Obsessed With The Best” or Samin Nosrat’s “Salt Fat Acid Heat” guide readers through detailed examinations of the cooking process.

Even in a more culinarily ambitious age, some of Lewis’s approach remains aspirational. In her recipe for fried chicken, she noted that frying chickens were produced “only once a year,” and “hand-raised and specially fed,” which she said produced the most delicious results. Lewis’s pan-frying method — with lard and other pork for flavor — has been cited in versions of her recipe by the restaurateur and TV personality Andrew Zimmern, the New York Times and America’s Test Kitchen, None of them, however, insist on using seasonal chicken.

Waters, of Chez Panisse, remembered Lewis in her foreword to the 2006 edition of the cookbook, saying that in the midst of industrialization of food and the mechanization of work, Lewis’s work suggested “another way of being,” both “in harmony with the seasons and with our fellow man.”

“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 honouring our heritage through the ritual of the table,” Waters wrote.

After “The Taste of Country Cooking,” Lewis went on to write more books about Southern food, continuing to focus on its connection to the land. And that land defined what Americans ate: Cooking by enslaved Africans shaped the national palate, Bailey said, and the South was once the agricultural hub, sending crops and produce northward.

Lewis’s insistence on honouring Southern food and its Black origins didn’t just elevate Southern food, it changed ideas of what American food both was and could be.

“It’s time that we recognize her for that,” Bailey said. “She’s an American cook, cooking American food.”

By Leah Asmelash, CNN