Muncie Times, Muncie, Delaware County, 15 February 2007 — Page 35

The Muncie Times • February 15, 2007 • Page 35

COOKING Honoring Edna Lewis Our homage to the Grande Dame of southern cooking

In Pursuit of Flavor

In Memoriam: On February 13, 2006, Edna Lewis died at the age of 89. To pay tribute to this culinary icon, we've reprinted three simple, elegant recipes from her 2000 cookbook In Pursuit of Flavor. We've also included Bon Appetit's 2001 feature on Lewis' life and career, and a link to her collected cookbooks, including The Gift of Southern Cooking, her collaboration with friend and colleague Scott Peacock. Lewis will be greatly missed. Who is Edna Lewis? No one has done more to take down-home cooking beyond the Grits Belt than the indomitable Edna Lewis — the granddaughter of slaves, a chef and cookbook author who is the unofficial ambassador of Southern cuisine. Her groundbreaking career was capped in 1999 with her designation as Grande Dame by Les Dames d’Escoffier, an organization of female culinary professionals from around the world. Lewis's life is a great American story. Bom in 1916 in Freetown, Virginia, a tiny farming community founded by her grandfather, she traveled to New York and became a chef at a time when female chefs, let alone black female chefs, were few and far between. Her landmark 1976 book, The Taste of Country Cooking, was one of the first cookbooks by an AfricanAmerican woman to reach a wide audience, and it is credited with

helping spark a nationwide interest in genuine Southern, country-style cooking. "Edna Lewis is an icon," says Barbara Haber, a food historian and curator of books at Harvard’s esteemed Schlesinger Library. "She commands enormous respect and affection." Lewis the Cook and Writer As a food writer Lewis is warmly personal. She offers helpful kitchen shortcuts — tips and tricks as well as techniques — such as how to boil com in its husk and how to add a bit of country ham to perk up greens. Reading her books, we feel that we're getting the friendly benefit of years of trial and error; we hear the echo of mistakes made. If you're making coconut layer cake, she advises, buy two coconuts, in case one is bad. To judge when the cake is done, try listening to it: The liquids in the cake make bubbling noises that grow faint when it's ready; if it's too noisy, put the cake back in the oven. This is the very essence of comfort food — cooking with all of the quirks left in. The Taste of Country Cooking Lewis organized The Taste of Country Cooking with menus set to the routines of rural life: "A Spring Breakfast When the Shad Were Running," "Making Ice Cream on a Summer Afternoon," "Morning-After-Hog-Butchering Breakfast." These slices of seasonal life evoke a world of persimmon beer and country-fried apples, watermelon-rind pickles and smothered rabbit and Saturday-night yeast bread. The rhythm of farm work and holiday feast follows the back-and-forth between people and nature, revealing a regional cuisine's original connection to the soil. Lewis's advocacy of natural foods reflects not the zeal of a convert but the living memory of being a farm girl in Freetown, where the woods and orchard and garden were her supermarket, and a box behind the kitchen stove served as a makeshift nursery for hatchling chicks.

Lewis chronicles bygone rural folkways and food ways, such as the practice of planting root vegetables in the dark of the night. She also describes forgotten figures of rural life, such as the itinerant hog killer, a traveling butcher who appeared each year at the first cold spell. Everything is precisely detailed, yet heightened by mystery, seen through the thrilled eyes of a child — a blending of procedure and rapture that make the book an American original. It was at the urging of Judith Jones, her editor at Knopf, that Lewis wove her recipes around childhood stories, giving the book its glow of luminous recollection. She wrote of the bliss of a spring morning, red sun rising behind thick fog, "the velvety green path of moss leading endlessly through the woods," and of rushing out after a summer storm to look for turtles washed up from rain-swollen streams — turtles that might end up in that day's pot of soup. Further on, Edna's father plows the field, and she follows along, walking barefoot in the new furrow, "carefully putting one foot down before the other and pressing it into the warm, plowed earth." Her father sings; the plow turns up roots of a sassafras bush that will become tomorrow's tea; her brother and sister return the call of a nesting bird, "Bobwhite, bobwhite, are your peaches ripe?" It’s all incredibly lovely, and indeed. The Taste of Country Cooking is one of those food books you fall in love with. "You talk about it," says Haber, "the way you talk about a work of fiction." This dream of a rural childhood paradise was written by an urban exile — a woman in late middle age (Lewis turned 60 as the book came out), guided by the "memory of good flavor" back to "a time and a place that is so very dear to my heart. In Recent Years Lewis retired as a chef in 1992 — her last position was at

Brooklyn's venerable Gage & Tollner — and now lives in Atlanta, where she’s co-authoring a new cookbook with Scott Peacock, of the Watershed restaurant. She and Peacock share an apartment, and their affectionate collaboration has won them renown as the Odd Couple of Southern cooking. "Scott is my buddy," says Lewis. "And he's a great cook. Tuesday night is fried-chicken night at his restaurant. People go wild for it." On the phone Lewis has a girlish laugh and rambles warmly about her early years in New York City — taking a job at the Daily Worker and joining political demonstrations ("I was a radical," she chuckles), going to a party where her friend Ken Scott, the designer, had decorated his apartment walls with cookies. "Life is great,” she says, "when you're young and free and can do anything." These days, at a young 85, Lewis is still spry and active, attending the occasional culinary event and helping Peacock with her biography. "I'm in awe of Ms. Lewis," says Peacock. "There's simply no one else like her." Lewis's Far-Reaching Culinary Influence People who know Lewis can't say enough about the life she has led, or about the woman herself. "Edna is both a grand lady and an unpretentious person," says John Egerton, author of several books on Southern cooking. "Every place she’s gone, she has touched and inspired people." For decades, aspiring young chefs have profited from her guidance, Egerton notes. "Edna has always been free with her skills and techniques. She doesn't create masterpieces to be observed only from a distance. She invites you in." Perhaps that helps explain what makes Southern cooking so magical, even to non-Southerners. Comfort food isn't just taste, after all, but a whole set of relations. The relentless specialization of modem life has taken its toll on home culicontinued on page 36