I hope you enjoy this issue of Between the Layers! If you like what you read and want to support my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Why Edna Lewis Still Matters - No. 394The Taste of Country Cooking is 50 years in print + Poulet à la Crème is beautifully old school like Miss Lewis
WHEN I MET CHEF AND COOKBOOK AUTHOR Edna Lewis in the late 1980s at Middleton Place, along the Ashley River north of Charleston, she was tall, silver-haired, elegant, and unpretentious. She spoke with a sweet but distinguished voice. “Miss Lewis,” as she was addressed by the press and people who worked with her, was winding up a Low Country residency at this grand 18th-century home and gardens and living in the upstairs of what was called the “Rice House,” creating menus, selecting ingredients, and cooking for guests as she had done most of her life. The setting must have been poignant for Miss Lewis, the grandchild of an enslaved Virginia brick mason. To be living and working on what had been a rice plantation built by enslaved hands with proceeds enriching four generations of old-line South Carolina, could not have escaped her. Middleton Place was built in the early 1700s and acquired in 1741 by Henry Middleton, second president of the First Continental Congress. The estate would be the family’s home as Middletons played important roles in America’s history. Henry’s son Arthur was a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Today the gardens, an inn, and restaurant are open to the public.
Born in 1916, one of eight children to Eugene and Daisy Lewis, Edna Lewis was raised in Freetown, Virginia, a small farming community in the state’s Piedmont settled by freed Black people after Emancipation. The fertile land surrounding it had cranked out tobacco and then cotton. Here the residents of Freetown built their own homes. Miss Lewis’s grandfather ran a school out of his living room and was a founder of Bethel Baptist Church in nearby Unionville. And if you’ve read Miss Lewis’s 1976 cookbook, The Taste of Country Cooking, you know that church was the site of homecoming each second Sunday in August. One of my favorite menus from her book was the “Sunday Revival Dinner.” As she writes, “Revival was in a way a kind of Thanksgiving. There was real rejoicing: The fruits of our hard labor were now our own, we were free to come and go, and to gather together for this week of reunion and celebration.” The menu included Baked Virginia Ham, Southern Fried Chicken, Braised Leg of Mutton, Sweet Potato Casserole and Corn Pudding, Green Beans with Pork, a Platter of Sliced Tomatoes with special seasoning, pickles and yeast rolls, biscuits, both Sweet Potato Pie and Summer Apple Pie as well as Tyler Pie (custard pie to which she added coconut), Caramel Layer Cake, lemonade and iced tea. When I read about the “special seasoning” on her tomatoes, I was taken back to my mother’s kitchen. Miss Lewis sprinkled over granulated sugar, fresh black pepper, and a “light touch of salt” and let the tomatoes marinate 10 to 15 minutes. “It was a marriage of flavors that needed no other touches except perhaps a garnish of chervil,” she said, “the common herb of my childhood.”
Edna Lewis left home at 16, traveled to Washington, D.C. and eventually New York City to find work as a seamstress. According to the New York Times, in 1948 her friend Johnny Nicholson, owner of Café Nicholson, became aware of Miss Lewis’s fine cooking and asked her to be the restaurant’s chef. Here she met the famous patrons who dined there—Truman Capote, Gloria Vanderbilt, Tennessee Williams, Eleanor Roosevelt, and others. Over the years she would design clothing and style Bonwit Teller store windows, run a pheasant farm, clean homes, work as a caterer, and write. She wrote The Edna Lewis Cook Book in 1972, along with socialite Evangeline Peterson, for whom she had regularly catered parties. According to Sara B. Franklin in her book, The Editor, about the life and works of book editor Judith Jones, after being shown Miss Lewis’s first book, Jones wanted only Edna Lewis without Peterson in her next. Miss Lewis wrote down her recipes and menus from memory on yellow legal pads, her 12-year-old niece Nina Williams-Mbengue typed up the pages, and they sent them to Jones who sensed something special about publishing this unheard American voice. “The whole country was abuzz with discussion of what, 200 years into its existence, it meant to be American,” Franklin wrote in The Editor.
What I wouldn’t learn until I read Franklin’s book was that Miss Lewis’s time at Middleton wasn’t a PR stunt from her publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, to sell more books. It should have been because her second book, In Pursuit of Flavor, had just been published in 1988. The work Miss Lewis did all her life—cooking, sewing, cleaning homes—isn’t the kind that guarantees much retirement income. She came to Middleton because she needed the work. And when she left, she didn’t feel compensated for her time, Sara Franklin discovered via conversations with Judith Jones. Middleton would continue to serve Miss Lewis’s recipes long after she was gone. And as best as I can recall, the meal Miss Lewis and her staff prepared for myself and other journalists was smothered quail, spoonbread, fresh peas simmered with lettuce, and a cake with berries for dessert. It might have been her Sunday cake for which she was famous, a butter cake scented with nutmeg. You can watch it and other recipes being prepared on the PBS film called Finding Edna Lewis. Richmond culinary anthropologist and award-winning writer Debra Freeman produced and directed this documentary from the eyes of eight women who had been inspired by Edna Lewis. One of them was my friend Leni Sorensen.
On a recent trip to Virginia, my husband and I drove through the rolling foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains west of Charlottesville, hoping to find Miss Lewis’s hometown of Freetown. We mistakingly drove to the wrong Freetown. Instead of finding the plaque that commemorates the post Civil War settlement of freed Blacks Miss Lewis’s grandfather helped found, we found what was left of another community of freed slaves founded under similar circumstances. Fortunately, on the trip I was able to reconnect with Crozet, Virginia scholar and culinary historian Leni Sorenson via phone to talk about Edna Lewis and why she continues to matter today. Edna Lewis died in 2006 just shy of her 90th birthday. Dr. Sorensen is an expert in 18th- and 19th-century cooking methods used by Virginia housewives and the enslaved, including those who cooked for Thomas Jefferson. She participated in the research that led to the restoration of the kitchens at Monticello, worked with chef Walter Staib for the PBS series A Taste of History, and has studied the life and recipes of Mary Randolph of the Virginia House-wife. She said Edna Lewis’s life bridged two very different worlds. “The Taste of Country Cooking and her narrative of this community is so important,” she said. “Edna Lewis is writing it about her past but with a very present remembrance when she was 60 years old. “She’s someone who has used wood stoves as well as microwaves and electric stoves so her perspectives as a young girl are very strong and detailed. I remember when I first read a copy of that book the year it was published. I was farming in South Dakota and cooking on a wood stove and milking cows and had a huge garden, and here suddenly is this book by a Black woman in a world I knew, and there had been none like it. I knew there were Black women out there who knew this stuff, but I wanted to find them.”
Arriving in Williamsburg, I made a beeline to the library at the College of William & Mary to see their collection of historic cookbooks. And there was Edna Lewis’s first book, out of print and hard to find. Judith Jones must have flipped through these same pages and as she read the words she heard Miss Lewis and thought America might be ready to listen to her, too. And yet, they weren’t. Book sales were disappointing for The Taste of Country Cooking and editor Jones had to fight hard to get the book published, Sara Franklin writes in The Editor. But that has changed recently. In 2024, the New York Times said The Taste of Country Cooking was the most influential cookbook of the past 100 years. Now 50 years old, Taste is still in print.
I stopped on page 27 of The Edna Lewis Cook Book at the recipe for Poulet à la Crème, which is chicken in cream sauce. I made a copy, and brought it home with me. And last week I cooked Edna Lewis’s creamed chicken with fresh peas from my garden. It took me back to Middleton Place, to meeting this great American chef and writer, and to my own rediscovery of Southern cooking. Poulet à la crème is beautifully old school just like Edna Lewis. It is rooted in technique and tradition, just like Edna Lewis. Spanning the decades of her life, Edna Lewis remained grounded in timeless Virginia recipes of her homeland. And along the way, she changed how the world viewed Southern cooking, according to Debra Freeman. There’s nothing trendy about chicken baked in its own juices, with seasonal vegetables, wine, and a splash of cream. But there is something profound and comforting about it, too, and it’s exactly the kind of food I am hungry for right now. - xo, Anne What’s your favorite Edna Lewis recipe or remembrance?P.S. A FEW MORE TIDBITS… Watching the Edna Lewis film, I learned that Miss Lewis never addressed farm life as hardship. And while she grew up in a segregated world, she considered the food on her table beautiful. Miss Lewis had a saying about food, and I guess you can say this is true about many things, “if it’s good, it will be remembered.” And she thought having a ham on hand to season food was like having a basic black dress to wear. Classic. Here are two other posts about Edna Lewis from my archives, accessible to paying subscribers:
Chicken and Dumplings - No. 188
THE RECIPE: Edna Lewis’s Poulet à la CrèmeFrom The Edna Lewis Cookbook (1972) is this lovely recipe. Whether you bake or simmer this one-pot meal, it is a good basic to have on hand for suppers or company. Use a whole small chicken, cut into pieces, or as I did with two large breasts, that I cut in two with sharp kitchen scissors. Really amp up the recipe with mushrooms if you love them, and don’t forgo the whole cloves. This is a lovely touch and adds a lot of flavor. At the end, I swirled in a couple cups of fresh spinach leaves from my garden and a half cup freshly shelled peas, both just to cook through, and no more. I added the bit of Parmesan to the cream to give it more flavor. Serve with rice, pasta, mashed potatoes—something cozy. Makes 4 servings Prep: 20 to 25 minutes Cook: 50 to 55 minutes
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