Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} The Taste of Country Cooking by Edna Lewis Back of the Bookshelf: The Taste of Country Cooking. Some of the most beloved cookbooks in our library are the dustiest: books we grew up with, inherited from our grandparents, found at yard sales, or bought new decades ago. In this column, we celebrate these bibliographic treasures, and our favorite recipes therein. By Tim Mazurek March 27, 2013. Edna Lewis’s masterpiece of Southern cuisine, The Taste of Country Cooking , is widely hailed as one of the most important cookbooks of the 20th century, so it doesn’t make sense that it would require a resurrection, and certainly shouldn’t end up on the back of any bookshelf. If you already know Edna Lewis, you probably assume everyone does, but an informal poll of my friends found that only one or two people knew who she was and exactly zero owned one of her cookbooks. It is possible that this points to some failing of mine in choosing friends—not enough Southerners? Too few cooks? But I fear she may be one of those food writers who never became as widely read as others held in the same esteem. The Taste of Country Cooking chronicles life in Freetown, Virginia, the small farming community where Lewis spent her childhood. The book details a year in the life of Freetown and includes seasonal recipes and stories of life among friends and family. The recipes are organized into evocatively titled menus tied to particular events or times of year: Emancipation Day Dinner, A Dinner Celebrating the Last of the Barnyard Fowl, and A Late-Spring Lunch After Wild Mushroom Picking. Each menu also includes personal anecdotes and tips for working with ingredients, all delivered in Lewis’s tender and encouraging manner. It is a cookbook for those who enjoy having a friend with them in the kitchen. It is also a book that inspires you to seek out the best, freshest ingredients—the recipes deserve that respect. I return to The Taste of Country Cooking regularly, sometimes for the Busy Day Cake recipe (a nutmeg-laced snacking cake—easily one of my all-time favorites), but more often because I find great comfort in Lewis’s voice. The book functions a bit like a fairy tale for adults, telling the story of a time and place long ago and far away. A place deeply connected to the earth and seasons, and full of simple pleasures like wild strawberries, first snows, and harvest time. It is a life and a relationship to food that is particularly attractive to me as a resident of 21st-century metropolis in an era of industrialized food production. Lewis makes an eloquent and convincing case for local and seasonal eating which seems as important now as ever. Free from today’s political rhetoric, Lewis leads by example. In Freetown, local and seasonal eating was simply a way of life. Edna Lewis has said that cooking, for her, was an attempt to recapture the beauty and flavor of the foods of her childhood. Most of our childhoods’ don’t much resemble her’s, but luckily for us she left us instructions to get there. The Taste of Country Cooking Tim Mazurek. Title: The Taste of Country Cooking by Edna Lewis (Knopf, 1976). The author: Edna Lewis left Freetown, Virgina, in her late teens and moved east, eventually landing in New York City. She worked as a dress maker, before becoming the cook at the famous Cafe Nicholson, a restaurant popular with artists and bohemians. She wrote four cookbooks. Notable quote: “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 together had to do with food.” Favorite recipe: I have two. The Busy Day Cake, which is the perfect snack cake, and these buttermilk Griddle Cakes, which are the perfect breakfast treat. The rustic pancakes are topped with some stewed blueberries and maple syrup. Lewis suggests serving them with breakfast sausage, I am not going to argue. Sour Milk Griddle Cakes. Tim Mazurek is a freelance writer and the blogger behind the site_Lottie+Doof . Classic Cookbooks: The Taste Of Country Cooking by Edna Lewis. Once upon a time, in the shadow of the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, there was a small farming community called Freetown. Not a town precisely, it was founded by three families of freed slaves after the Civil War. Over time, eight more families joined. One of the first things they did was set up a school, taught by a graduate of Oberlin College. Although each family had its own farm and house—all built in a circle—they all came together to pitch in with the most laborious tasks such as hog butchering and wheat harvesting, which over time developed into community celebrations, complete with enormous feasts. “The spirit of pride in community and cooperation in the work of farming is what made Freetown a very wonderful place to grow up in,” wrote Edna Lewis, a granddaughter of one of the founders of Freetown more than a century after its founding. “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.” Lewis left Freetown as a teenager and moved north, first to Washington, D.C., and then to New York City, where she worked at a variety of jobs, including typesetter at The Daily Worker, pheasant farmer, dressmaker, docent in the Hall of African Peoples at the American Museum of Natural History, and chef at Café Nicholson in Manhattan and Gage & Tollner in Brooklyn. Eventually, through acquaintances in the food world, she met Judith Jones, the cookbook editor at Knopf who had worked with, among many others, Julia Child, James Beard, Madhur Jaffrey, and Joan Nathan. Jones was entranced by Lewis’ stories of growing up in Freetown and the food she and her family grew, gathered, raised, and ate. Every week for a winter, Lewis would visit Jones to share stories; Jones’ questions and prompts, she found, inspired near-perfect recall of her childhood, and she would go home and write those stories down on yellow legal pads. The result was the book The Taste Of Country Cooking , published in 1976. There is something extremely comforting about reading about someone else’s idyllic childhood. In Freetown, there’s a time and a place for everything (often preordained by the position of the stars in the sky), everyone has a job to do, even the children, and they’re all happy to do it. The Taste Of Country Cooking tells the story of a typical year in Freetown, starting in spring and ending in winter, told through evocatively titled menus: “A Spring Breakfast When the Shad Were Running,” “A Cool-Evening Supper,” “Making Ice Cream on a Summer Afternoon.” There were no freezers in Freetown—all the ice was cut from the river in the wintertime and stored in the icehouse, another community project— and the only form of refrigeration was a wooden box submerged in a nearby stream. Everything else had to be carefully preserved and stored. Food was closely tied to the seasons: that shad only came in spring, chickens were best for frying in early summer, and wild grapes were at the ripest at twilight in the early fall. When the book was published in the ’70s, after Americans had spent several decades enamored of convenience food, seasonal cooking had become such a novelty that hippie back-to-the-land types who embraced it considered themselves revolutionaries. In the foreword to my edition of The Taste Of Country Cooking , Alice Waters, one of the leaders of that revolution, writes that Lewis was an inspiration to cooks of her generation: “For her, always, as it had in her childhood, pleasure flowed unstoppably out of doing . She saw clearly that the store-bought cake never brings lasting satisfaction; true contentment comes from baking it yourself, by hand, for someone you love.” Lewis mentions more than a few times in The Taste Of Country Cooking that some of the flavors of her childhood are no longer available. The beef doesn’t taste right, what’s labeled “mutton” is usually just older lamb, many of the vegetables and herbs she loved are impossible to find in city markets. But this book isn’t a lament for the Good Old Days, and it’s not a polemic about the importance of eating only fresh food or a call for the revival of Southern cuisine (though it was, in fact, instrumental in promoting both). Instead, it’s a gentle reminiscence, an immersion in a lost way of life. In that respect, it reminds me of other books I loved when I was a kid about other kids growing up long ago: All-Of-A-Kind Family, Betsy- Tacy, Homer Price, and, most of all, the early books of the Little House series. In fact, I think if my mother had sat my sister and me down for our evening bedtime story and read us The Taste Of Country Cooking , we wouldn’t have complained. (This impression is reinforced by the line drawings scattered throughout the text.) What the book lacks in narrative momentum—there are no petty arguments or episodes of bad behavior and none of Lewis’ relatives or neighbors is even mentioned by name except for Aunt Jennie Hailstalk, “an elegant lady and masterful cook, who envied no one,” and Uncle George, who always brought the bourbon—it makes up for in detail. Hog butchering, as anyone who ever read Little House In The Big Woods could tell you, is dramatic enough without inserting any petty infighting. (And yes, there is a pig’s bladder! But while the Ingalls girls used theirs as a toy, the Lewis children turned theirs into a Christmas decoration.) The Taste of Country Cooking. 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 . Read More. 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. Read Less. All Copies ( 33 ) Softcover ( 1 ) Hardcover ( 11 ) Choose Edition ( 2 ) Book Details Seller Sort. 2006, Knopf Publishing Group. Hillsboro, OR, USA. Edition: 2006, Knopf Publishing Group Hardcover, Fair Details: ISBN: 0307265609 ISBN-13: 9780307265609 Pages: 268 Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group Published: 2006 Language: English Alibris ID: 16667154975 Shipping Options: Standard Shipping: $3.99. Choose your shipping method in Checkout. Costs may vary based on destination. Seller's Description: Fairly worn, but readable and intact. If applicable: Dust jacket, disc or access code may not be included. ► Contact This Seller. 2006, Knopf Publishing Group. Edition: 2006, Knopf Publishing Group Hardcover, New Available Copies: 10+ Details: ISBN: 0307265609 ISBN-13: 9780307265609 Pages: 268 Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group Published: 2006 Language: English Alibris ID: 16583021237 Shipping Options: Standard Shipping: $3.99 Trackable Expedited: $7.99 Two Day Air: $14.99 One Day Air: $19.99. Choose your shipping method in Checkout. Costs may vary based on destination. Seller's Description: New. Sewn binding. Paper over boards. With dust jacket. 268 p. Contains: Illustrations. ► Contact This Seller. 2006, Knopf Publishing Group. Grand Rapids, MI, USA. Edition: 2006, Knopf Publishing Group Hardcover, New Available Copies: 5 Details: ISBN: 0307265609 ISBN-13: 9780307265609 Pages: 268 Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group Published: 8/1/2006 Language: English Alibris ID: 16664987737 Shipping Options: Standard Shipping: $3.99. Choose your shipping method in Checkout. Costs may vary based on destination. Seller's Description: New in New jacket. The Taste of Country Cooking (Hardback or Cased Book) ► Contact This Seller. 2006, Knopf Publishing Group. Edition: 2006, Knopf Publishing Group Hardcover, New Available Copies: 5 Details: ISBN: 0307265609 ISBN-13: 9780307265609 Pages: 268 Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group Published: 2006 Language: English Alibris ID: 16601878602 Shipping Options: Standard Shipping: $3.99. Choose your shipping method in Checkout. Costs may vary based on destination. Seller's Description: New. Sewn binding. Paper over boards. With dust jacket. 268 p. Contains: Illustrations. ► Contact This Seller. 2006, Knopf Publishing Group. Columbia, MD, USA. Edition: 2006, Knopf Publishing Group Hardcover, Fine/Like New Available Copies: 3 Details: ISBN: 0307265609 ISBN-13: 9780307265609 Pages: 268 Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group Published: 2006 Language: English Alibris ID: 16572848542 Shipping Options: Standard Shipping: $3.99. Choose your shipping method in Checkout. Costs may vary based on destination. Seller's Description: Fine. Sewn binding. Paper over boards. With dust jacket. 268 p. Contains: Illustrations. In Stock. 100% Money Back Guarantee. Brand New, Perfect Condition, allow 4-14 business days for standard shipping. To Alaska, Hawaii, U.S. protectorate, P.O. box, and APO/FPO addresses allow 4-28 business days for Standard shipping. No expedited shipping. All orders placed with expedited shipping will be cancelled. Over 3, 000, 000 happy customers. ► Contact This Seller. 2006, Knopf Publishing Group. Edition: 2006, Knopf Publishing Group Hardcover, New Available Copies: 10+ Details: ISBN: 0307265609 ISBN-13: 9780307265609 Pages: 268 Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group Published: 2006 Language: English Alibris ID: 16633910495 Shipping Options: Standard Shipping: $3.99. Choose your shipping method in Checkout. Costs may vary based on destination. Seller's Description: 100% Brand New! ► Contact This Seller. 2006, Knopf Publishing Group. Edition: 2006, Knopf Publishing Group Hardcover, Fine/Like New Available Copies: 10 Details: ISBN: 0307265609 ISBN-13: 9780307265609 Pages: 268 Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group Published: 2006 Language: English Alibris ID: 16633910496 Shipping Options: Standard Shipping: $3.99. Choose your shipping method in Checkout. Costs may vary based on destination. Seller's Description: Fine. 100% Brand New! ► Contact This Seller. 2006, Knopf Publishing Group. Edition: 2006, Knopf Publishing Group Hardcover, New Available Copies: 10+ Details: ISBN: 0307265609 ISBN-13: 9780307265609 Pages: 268 Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group Published: 2006 Language: English Alibris ID: 16645877627 Shipping Options: Standard Shipping: $3.99. Choose your shipping method in Checkout. Costs may vary based on destination. All About Edna Lewis, The Grande Dame Of Southern Cooking. Six things you should know about the pioneering chef. Edna Lewis was a renowned chef, culinary ambassador, and the godmother of Southern cooking (according to many)—and she created an unforgettable presence in the food industry. With an ability to inspire both novice and experienced chefs from the time she entered the restaurant business—and even now posthumously—the skilled Lewis grew to become one of the most respected women and chefs in the game. Lewis portrayed both grace and gumption in every meal she created and every move she made, continuously pushing for genuine Southern cooking to be protected and remembered. And while many who are currently in the restaurant industry (and some self-proclaimed epicures) are familiar with Lewis's beloved cookbooks, there's more to know. Who was the Grand Dame of Southern Cooking, really? Here are six things to know about Edna Lewis. Edna Lewis was the granddaughter of formerly enslaved people. One of eight children, Edna Lewis was born in Freetown, VA, on April 13, 1916. The town is rich with history as it was founded in the 19th century by three formerly enslaved people—one of whom was Lewis's grandfather, Chester Lewis. During her upbringing, Lewis never missed an opportunity to learn from women older than her. As a young girl, she busied herself with home-taught skills such as sewing, baking, and cooking. She keenly observed the women near her as they completed each task; later, she would make their traditions and recipes famous. Lewis held many jobs before becoming a professional chef. After the death of her father in 1928, Lewis—just a teenager then—joined the Great Migration north by herself. She moved to Washington D.C. and then to New York City, and when she arrived, she nabbed a job at a laundromat. But the soon-to-be chef was fired after just three hours due to her lack of ironing knowledge. Throughout her time in New York, Lewis worked at a communist newspaper, worked as a domestic (which helped put her younger sister Naomi through art school), campaigned for President Franklin D. Roosevelt after becoming involved in political demonstrations, and even became a highly sought-after seamstress (a talent she picked up in Freetown). The latter of the jobs landed her the opportunity to create custom designs for actresses Doe Avedon and Marilyn Monroe. She also worked to dress the windows for the now-defunct high-end store, Bonwit Teller. She took her first job as head chef in 1948. Already positioning herself to expand upon the legacy that her grandfather imposed, in 1948, Lewis was offered the opportunity of a lifetime and shifted gears. A good friend of hers—antique dealer Johnny Nicholson, who frequently attended the coveted dinner parties Lewis threw—was preparing to open a new café on the Upper East Side. After a brief conversation, the two went into business together, and Lewis became the head chef at Café Nicholson, located on East 57th Street in Manhattan. Lewis created a menu filled with simple Southern delicacies, and her cooking drew in a number of celebrated faces: Paul Robeson, William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, Gloria Vanderbilt, Truman Capote, Richard Avedon, and many more. The restaurant was a huge success, and Lewis served as chef until her departure in 1954. Lewis's second cookbook, The Taste of Country Cooking , broke barriers for African-American women and the South. After her departure from Café Nicholson, Lewis—along with her husband Steve Kingston—spent time as a pheasant farmer in New Jersey until a mysterious disease killed all of the birds overnight. She also opened and then closed her own restaurant, taught cooking classes, began catering events and even served as a guide in the Hall of African Peoples in the American Museum of Natural History. It wasn't until an accidental slip and fall that resulted in a broken ankle that she decided to put her recipes into book form. Thus, in 1972, The Edna Lewis Cookbook ( her first cookbook, with over 100 recipes) was released. It was impactful and praised by culinary figures of iconic stature such as James Beard and M.K.F. Fisher. But it wasn't until four years later when her second book— The Taste of Country Cooking —was released that those who weren't locals began recognizing her accomplishments. Revered as the book that brought back the interest and love to genuine southern cooking, The Taste of Country Cooking was one of the first cookbooks by a Black woman to reach a national audience. To this day, it remains essential reading for many up-and-coming chefs who aspire to her level of knowledge, expertise, and ability to speak to the reader through a wonderfully personal lens. Through her writings, Lewis had the ability to teach—both recipes and history about the South—and share portions of her life by way of cooking. Some of her cookbooks are now out of print, but most of them are easily accessible in libraries and online. In 1992, Lewis hung up her chef's hat. Lewis lived and worked in many different areas including Chapel Hill, NC; Charleston, SC; and Decatur, GA—the last of which was her last place of residence. Living an accomplished life as a chef since the late '40s, Lewis finally retired from cooking in 1992. Her retirement, however, didn't prevent her from still being active in her initial mission of protecting the likes of Southern cooking. In the mid-1990s, the aptly named "Grand Dame of Southern Cooking" and a few friends founded the now-dissolved Society for the Revival and Preservation of Southern Food with a goal to keep the history of Southern cooking alive. Lewis has won a plethora of awards. Throughout her years in the food industry, Lewis racked up a number of awards and accolades. Most notably, Lewis is recognized as being the inaugural recipient of the James Beard Living Legend Award (1995). She was also named Who's Who in American Cooking by Cook's Magazine (1986), named the Grand Dame by the international organization of female culinary professionals known as Les Dames d'Escoffier (1999), received the inaugural Lifetime Achievement Award form Southern Foodways Alliance (SFA) (1999), was inducted into the KitchenAid Cookbook Hall of Fame (James Beard, 2003), and so much more. Lewis, at the celebrated age of 89, passed away in her home in Decatur, GA, on February 13, 2006. Posthumously, Lewis was also honored with the creation of a United States postal stamp in her image. The Taste of Country Cooking. The Taste of Country Cooking By Edna Lewis. In recipes and reminiscences equally scrumptious, Edna Lewis celebrates the uniquely American nation cooking she grew up with some fifty years in the past in a small Virginia Piedmont farming neighborhood that had been settled by freed slaves. With menus for the 4 seasons, she shares the methods her household ready and loved meals, savoring the delights of every particular time of 12 months: The harvest of fall a advantageous dinner of baked nation ham, roasted newly dug candy potatoes, and heat apple pie after a day of corn-shucking . . . the looking season, with the deliciously “totally different” style of sport fattened on hickory nuts and persimmons . . . hog-butchering time and the making of sausages and liver pudding . . . and Emancipation Day with its wealthy and beneficiant thanksgiving dinner. The scores of recipes for these marvelous dishes are set down in loving element. We come to grasp the values that fashioned the outstanding girl her love of nature, the pleasure of residing with the seasons, the sense of neighborhood, the passable feeling that arduous work was at all times rewarded by her mom’s good meals. Having made us yearn for all the great meals she describes in her reminiscences of a misplaced time in America, Edna Lewis reveals us exactly the right way to recuperate, in our personal nation or metropolis or suburban kitchens, the style of the recent, good, pure nation cooking that was so glad an element of her girlhood in Freetown, Virginia.