Finding Edna Lewis
While housebound in the Sierra foothills following a three-day snow event last week, I caught up on articles that I’ve been saving for just such a day. While perusing a website called Literary Hub (LitHub.com), I found a link to an article by Nicole Rufus published Dec. 10, 2021, entitled“The Publishing World is Finally Embracing Black Cookbooks.” It begins with this statement: “An industry-wide reckoning last summer led to growing publisher interest in books about the African diaspora and its foodways.… Black folks have long championed and celebrated its food literature.”
The article talks about a long-overdue course correction in Black-authored cookbooks following the Black Lives Matter movement and concludes: “Regardless of what’s to come, Black folks working in the food space will undoubtedly continue to celebrate the contributions of the culinary world that have already been made, and the countless ones to come.”
As I read the fascinating article, my thoughts traveled back to an ice storm in January 2008 when Kit and I were living in Missouri. I had decided to cozy in by our Buck Stove and stay warm while perusing back issues of cooking magazines. In an issue of Country Living, I learned about Bonnie Slotnick Cookbooks, “a little shop pack with rare cookbooks, magazines & antique volumes dating to the 18th century.” Slotnick opened her shop in October 1997 in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village following her careers as a freelance artist and a cookbook editor. She describes her little bookshop as a source for out-of-print and antiquarian cookbooks as well as personal cookbook collections saying, “You never know what you’ll find.”
When my issue of Gourmet arrived that January, it had a feature article on Edna Lewis—a woman of color who had won praise for her cookbooks from the likes of food visionaries like James Beard, Alice Waters and M.F.K. Fisher. I remember being amazed that I’d never heard of Ms. Lewis or her cookbooks. “A granddaughter of freed slaves,” the Gourmet article reported, “Lewis left home when she was just 16 years old and went on to become a renowned chef at Manhattan’s star-studded Café Nicholson. Her books have spread the gospel of genuine southern cuisine and inspired a generation of home cooks.”
Leafing ahead to the article, I was captured by a full-page photograph of Edna Lewis. She is an elegant, white-haired woman in her eighties with skin the color of light brown sugar. Her muscular, left hand rests on the edge of a wooden table that she appears to be leaning against for balance. With her right hand, Ms. Lewis cuts rounds from dough that she’s kneaded and rolled out on the well-floured surface of the table. Pictured opposite is a down-home pot of simmered greens topped with cornmeal dumplings so flakey and golden they looked like they might fall off the page.
In an extended comment by Ms. Lewis in that Gourmet article, she speaks nostalgically of local ingredients from her rural southern childhood in Freetown, Virginia. “Southern cooking is a meal of early spring wild greens—poke sallet before it is fully uncurled, wild mustard, dandelion, lamb’s-quarter, purslane, and wild watercress.” And as if her prose were not nourishment enough for the soul, her plain and simple recipes for clay pot guinea hen, Brunswick stew, smothered steak, potato casserole, buttermilk cookies and fried apple pies left me eager to taste her southern cooking.
Ms. Lewis gained acclaim cooking at Café Nicholson on East 58th Street in Manhattan (1948-1954). Gourmet editor Ruth Reichl, noted, “her broiled oysters, roast chicken with watercress, and chocolate soufflé attracted a glittering crowd of writers, artists, aristocrats, and movie stars.” It is reported that during a Broadway run of “A Streetcar Named Desire,” playwright Tennessee Williams and actor Marlon Brando often dined late at Café Nicholson, and then walked Ms. Lewis home.
But more than the homey ingredients in Ms. Lewis’s regional recipes in the article, I loved reading her tribute to the writers, musicians, and artists she felt had contributed to our understanding of the character of southern cooking. “Southern,” she wrote, “is Truman Capote.” When dining at Café Nicholson, “he would request that I make him some biscuits.” Ms. Lewis later worked as a teaching assistant in the African Hall of the American Museum of Natural History and contributed frequently to House & Garden Magazine. She died in 2006 at the age of 89.
After reading the Gourmet article that snowy January day in 2008, I emailed Bonnie Slotnick (bonnieslotnickbooks@earthlink.net) and ordered a gently used, first edition copy of Ms. Lewis’s seasonal cookbook, “The Taste of Country Cooking,” (Alfred A, Knopf, New York 1976). The book is dedicated “to the memory of the people of Freetown and to Judith B. Jones (who was also Julia Child’s editor) for her deep understanding.”
And so began my journey to find Edna Lewis—a unique woman of color who mastered the art of southern country cooking with fresh, seasonal, regional ingredients decades before “slow food” and “localvore” entered America’s culinary vocabulary. Along the way, I found Bonnie Slotnick’s used cookbook shop in Manhattan. “You never know what you’ll find,” its owner reminds readers. And that is precisely what every journey of discovery should be about.
I now have another mission. That is to learn about other Black cookbook authors, starting with Malinda Russell who is now regarded as the first Black cookbook author. In 1866, A Domestic Cook Book: Containing A Careful Selection of Useful Receipts for the Kitchen was self-published by Mrs. Russell, “An Experienced Cook,” and printed at the “True Northern” Office in Paw Paw, Michigan. Her story and many others are chronicled in The Jemima Code—Toni Tipton-Martin’s seminal tome on African-American cookbooks. Ms. Edna Lewis’s The Taste of Country Cooking, published a century after Mrs. Russell’s cookbook, is a part of this story.