Book 2: Edna Lewis and Ethnography, 1976

Alt text: We see a book, slightly worn around the edges. A gray-haired black woman is in focus as holds a metal bowl of bright red tomatoes. in the foreground are tall yellow sunflowers. The woman is surrounded by vegetation. This image is surrounded by a light yellow border. Its title, in a reddish brown font, is at the top of the image, while the author is at the bottom, with two small stars on either side of her name.

Image courtesy of the Smithsonian The National Museum of African American History and Culture

The Taste of Country Cooking by Edna Lewis
Call Number: TX715 .L6684
ISBN: 9780394732152
Publication Date: 1976-05-12

Description: “The recipes and reminiscences of the American country cooking Lewis grew up with some 50 years ago. A richly evocative memoir of a lost time and a practical guide to recovering its joys in your own kitchen.”

I want to begin by sharing Edna Lewis’ own words:

“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 theywanted to be known as a town of Free People.

My grandfather had been one of the first. Over the years since I left home and lived in different cities, I have kept thinking about the people I grew up with and about our way of life. Whenever I go back to visit my sisters and brothers, we relive old times, remembering the past. And when we share again in gathering wild strawberries, canning, rendering lard, finding walnuts, picking persimmons, making fruitcake, I realize how much the bond that held us had to do with food.

Since we are the last of the original families, with no children to remember and carry on, I decided that I wanted to write down just exactly how we did things when I was growing up in Freetown that seemed to make life so rewarding. Although the founders of Freetown have passed away, I am convinced that their ideas do live on for us to learn from, to enlarge upon, and pass on to the following generations. But above all, I want to share with everyone who may read this a time and a place that is so very dear to my heart.” The Taste of Country Cooking, an excerpt from her introduction (Edna Lewis Foundation).

Even in this short excerpt from her much larger body of work, we can glean so much information about what it was like for her unique identity largely informed by being a Black woman descendant from enslaved African people in the South who later went on to establish their own community in the still segregated and oppressive Virginia. She makes it clear how food has been so strongly linked to this lineage.

Why does this belong in our library?

This book can serve as an ethnographic study of Edna’s time. Ethnography is the study and systematic recording of human cultures.
Unlike Ammelia Simmons, there are full biographies of Edna Lewis available to us. Her book not only serves as an ethnographic study of the descendants of freed people, but also a memoir of her life, as she imbues her recipes with stories and emotion, unlike Ammelia.
Lewis was one of the first chefs to utilize a strongly seasonal menu.
Her recipes are still highly accessible to a modern home cook. She even provides entire menus for specific types of feasts. And most importantly, these are recipes someone would actually want to make!
Every tool she uses is still in use today. The book is specifically written for a modern home kitchen.
The cover of the edition I linked to is beautiful. We see Edna Lewis in a garden with a basket of tomatoes. It helps show us what might be inside of this book, and It’s great to see such an important Black chef on its cover.
The book underscores the value of food and community. She writes of family and neighbors and the people of Freetown in between recipes. Lewis illustrates that good food is a ritualized set of behaviors--like how she, along with family and friends, forage for ingredients, cook together, and then gather to dine together.
She writes “The spirit of pride in community and of cooperation in the work of farming is what made Freetown a very wonderful place to grow up in…Whenever there were major tasks on the farm…then everyone pitched in, not just family but neighbors as well. And afterward we would all take part in the celebrations, sharing the rewards that follow hard labor.” (Pg. XIV Lewis, Edna. The Taste of Country Cooking. 1990 version. Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. 1976 New York.)
The dedication reads: “This book is dedicated to the memory of of the people of Freetown”

Things to keep in mind:

Uses the classic imperial system of measurement. I would prefer metric, but this is less important for the savory dishes as they don’t require the exactitude of pastry.
It has limited images in the form of illustrations, which are visually appealing but not comparable to a fully colored HD photograph.
Because of its structure in providing entire menus, it is harder to find a type of recipe. Meaning, if you wanted to look at every salad recipe or every dessert recipe, you would have to comb through each menu. On the other hand, it does create a unique reading experience and forces the reader to engage with the book.
She is often referred to as the “black Julia Child” and Chef Samin Nosrat articulates well in an instagram post my issue with this:

Alt Text: A screenshot of an Instagram post with a black and white picture of Edna Lewis. @ciaosamin, the account of Chef Samin Nosrat, writes: This is Edna Lewis. Some people refer to her as “the Black Julia Child,” but I think that does a disservice to the both of them. Miss Lewis is the single most important figure in American regional cooking history. Learn about her. You can start by reading her seminal book, The Taste of Country Cooking. (Photo by John T. Hill)

What I recommend you make:

Unique to Edna’s book amongst the three I’ve chosen is that it provides entire menus and their respective recipes. I recommend that you pick one menu for whichever season you are in and make that menu. It might be laborious, most likely fun, but you will also get the most of those recipes because Edna curated that menu for us. Edna also repeatedly connects her food to her community. Cooking is often less about the food itself but the community that surrounds that food. I propose that you gather a group of people who form your community and make the recipe together and dine together, as Edna intended.

Other resources:

Videos:

An Interview with Chef Edna Lewis

In this interview from 1994, we get to see and hear Edna Lewis. While her book has her portrait on its cover, to have access to this video can show us how she sounded, her speech, the suprasegmental features of her communication, and especially her physical mannerisms. We see her in her chef whites, inside her kitchen of appears to be mainly other Black chefs, a rare sight in today’s NYC kitchens.

Maangchi & Japanese Breakfast Explore Effects of War on Korean Cuisine | Close to Home

Maangchi is a Korean-American who is an "untrained" chef (she did not attend school nor did she work in a restaurant. As a former pastry chef who attended culinary school, I think Maangchi has more than cemented her right to claim herself as a chef). With a video, we can experience Maangchi speak by listening and watching. We can hear her acquired English, her use of her native Korean, and watch her suprasegmental features as she communicates. Similar to Edna Lewis, her page serves as both a resource of culinary knowledge and an ethnographic study by listening to her life in Korea and her long journey to NYC.

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