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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.

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