Lewis, Edna Regina

Impact on the world

Published 'The Taste of Country Cooking' in 1976, a cookbook so influential that decades later it remains, in Food & Wine's words, central to the canon of American culinary writing; Lewis was committed to fresh, seasonal, locally sourced ingredients as a way of life long before 'farm-to-table' became a culinary movement, and her work is now widely credited with restoring dignity and complexity to a cuisine often reduced to simplistic stereotypes.

Life & background

Born in 1916 in Freetown, Virginia, a small farming community founded by formerly enslaved people including her own grandfather, Lewis grew up growing, foraging, and preserving the food her family ate. She moved to New York City as a young woman, working as a seamstress for clients including Marilyn Monroe and as a typesetter for a communist newspaper, before her home-cooked dinners for friends led to her becoming chef and co-owner of the bohemian Café Nicholson in 1949, where she served her rural Virginia cooking with a French inflection to clientele including Marlon Brando, Tennessee Williams, and Eleanor Roosevelt. After a broken leg sidelined her cooking career in the late 1960s, she began writing down her recipes, leading to 'The Edna Lewis Cookbook' (1972) and, with the close guidance of editor Judith Jones, 'The Taste of Country Cooking' (1976), a book that wove childhood memory and Southern and African American food history together with recipes. She continued cooking at restaurants in both the North and South into her seventies, formed a celebrated late-life partnership and friendship with chef Scott Peacock, with whom she co-wrote 'The Gift of Southern Cooking' in 2003, and received the inaugural James Beard Living Legend Award in 1995; she remains an acknowledged muse for numerous later Black chefs, including several James Beard Award winners who credit her work directly.

Sources

1. Smithsonian Magazine; National Women's History Museum; PBS NewsHour; Institute of Culinary Education