In 2024, the New York Times declared The Taste of Country Cooking to be the most influential American cookbook of the past 100 years. So why don't more people know about it? And why isn't its author, Edna Lewis, a household name? The simple answer is because she was Black.
Born and raised in rural Virginia, Miss Lewis eventually settled in New York City. She became the chef of a celebrated cafe known for its Southern-inspired dishes. Years later, with encouragement from Judith Jones, Julia Child's editor, Edna Lewis wrote The Taste of Country Cooking. The book emphasizes how seasonality and vegetable dishes drive Southern cooking. Beyond the recipes, it contains a trove of valuable information about Southern and African American foodways.
Now, she is the subject of a documentary, Finding Edna Lewis. For executive producer and host Deb Freeman, the goal of the film is to shine a spotlight on Miss Lewis's life and share her work with a wider audience.
The film is available on PBS. You can also catch a screening of Finding Edna Lewis on Wednesday, March 26, 2025, at the California African American Museum. It'll be followed by a discussion with Eater LA reporter Mona Holmes.
Evan Kleiman: Hi, Deb. I so enjoyed the documentary. There was something about the cinematography and the rhythm of it that, for me, mirrored Miss Lewis's way of being. It was very elegant.
Deb Freedman: Well, first of all, thank you so much. And all props definitely need to go to our visual folks who really understood what we were trying to do. I'm so glad you picked up on that because one of the things from the outset was that we definitely want to take different pieces of Miss Lewis's life and really talk about them in depth. It did mirror that seasonality aspect that Miss Lewis put together when she was writing The Taste of Country Cooking. I'm so glad someone picked up on that.
How did you first learn about Edna Lewis?
I did not grow up knowing about Miss Lewis, even though I grew up in Virginia. Only when I started writing about Black foodways about a decade ago did I realize who she was. It really came through a Google search of looking for Virginia chefs and trying to learn more. When I saw her name, I read a little bit about her online and said, "Oh, well, I'm gonna drive to the store and get The Taste of Country Cooking."
I remember getting it and going back to the car and sitting in the parking lot and being so surprised by it, because it does not read like a normal cookbook that is just straight recipes. There's a narrative, there's prose, and it's just really beautiful. I was absolutely floored.
Can you describe her upbringing in Freetown, Virginia?
Freetown Virginia folks are familiar with Charlottesville, which is where the University of Virginia is. Freetown is about 20 or minutes or so away from there, so it's a very small town, and it was founded by emancipated slaves. That obviously makes it one of the more interesting things, because this is a from-the-ground-up, kind of community that was very close knit, but it was important for folks there to have their own schools. So teachers were brought in to teach children how to read and write.
It was largely a farming community where folks were not only growing vegetables, but they were also butchering animals as well. It was very agricultural. It was very much a community that really relied on the seasonality of what was growing and when. And that determined the way that they ate.
Deb Freeman and chef Adrienne Cheatham (right) discuss the life and legacy of Edna Lewis. Photo courtesy of Field Studio.
Can you describe Edna Lewis, the woman? Describe her bearing, her voice, her writing style?
Her voice, at least for me, is very similar to her writing in that it's very soft spoken, it's very elegant. It's very direct at the same time, it's very soothing in a lot of ways. So that is how I imagine her personality to be. I have talked to her niece, for example, Nina, and she was saying that although she was soft spoken, she had a great sense of humor, and she was very determined. I think underneath all of the kind of genteelness of it all, there clearly had to be some sense of steadfastness and purpose. And I think you can see that underlying in her writing.
I was so intrigued by the story of Café Nicholson, the restaurant she created with John Nicholson in 1948. Tell us about the place, the kind of food she was making, who patronized the restaurant, and how did it come about?
Edna Lewis, when she moved to New York, one of the things that she did to support herself was essentially cook for dinner parties throughout the city, and she gained this reputation for being just an amazing cook. By the time the opportunity to cook at Café Nicholson came along, Miss Lewis already had a stellar reputation among the who's who in Manhattan, if you will.
What's interesting to note is that she was also a partner in the restaurant, which at that time, was practically unheard of for a woman, much less a Black woman, in 1948. She's there and she's cooking, not necessarily your stereotypical kind of Southern food, fried chicken, your mac and cheese, that sort of thing, but she's definitely cooking Virginia food, right? She's definitely doing a roast chicken, for example. She's doing that well.
So she's cooking this food for this interesting celebrity/upwardly mobile/bohemian community that comes to see her, and so she was not schmoozing. She was a working chef. She would cook while their service was going on. She and her sister were in the back, definitely handling every bit and piece of whatever was coming out of the kitchen that night.
Give us some names of who patronized the restaurant, because it gives so much flavor to what we imagine.
Jackie Robinson was there. Truman Capote was there. Eleanor Roosevelt actually showed up, and she was there. It's these interesting academic folks who are in the literary canon, who are showing up there. It's really interesting because it's a cross-section that you wouldn't necessarily expect to find in this tiny little restaurant in New York.
It must have been one of the most difficult scenes for you to shoot but was so historically laden, the scene where you're visiting a former plantation where she actually worked as a cook for a while. Can you describe the place and that part of her life?
That scene we filmed at Middleton Place, which, as you said, Miss Lewis actually cooked at, as she was hired to recreate plantation cooking and plantation food. That was really interesting to shoot, because, as you said, it was incredibly emotional. Once you set foot on the property, it's very, I think "heavy" is probably the word that I would use. Everyone from the crew to Amethyst Ganaway, who was our guest during that segment, every single person just felt this overwhelming presence of just… I'm not into spooky things, but people who were there before. I don't quite know how else to explain it.
Getting through that interview was definitely challenging because we're not just speaking to Miss Lewis, we're also speaking to the enslaved people who came before, and who worked where we were sitting. It was incredibly important to shoot there but it was also incredibly difficult.
Not only did she work there at the restaurant, she actually lived on the premises. So she would walk from the millhouse to the restaurant, to and fro every single day. One of the things that I kept thinking about was, "What was that like? What did that mean for her?" She's the granddaughter of enslaved people to basically not only work but live and work where those sort of atrocities were going on every single day. So it really was very weighty. But I think it is an important thing to know, not only just in her life, but in the film as well.
"Finding Edna Lewis" shares the story of a woman who was raised in rural Virginia but found fame by introducing many Americans to seasonal Southern cooking. Photo courtesy of PBS.
Absolutely. I mean, it was very poignant to actually see that apartment. In the process of creating this documentary and the series, which you created before this, was there a particular experience or a nugget of research that you came upon that surprised or delighted you?
You know, butter-laden dishes, although they are there and they are delicious, and as a Southerner, I absolutely love them, but there's a diversity that's also there. I also think that more narrowly, talking about Virginia food, I think Virginia food gets a bad rap. If it even gets any sort of conversation at all in food media, Virginia often gets overlooked as far as our food traditions and how a lot of Southern foods start right here in Virginia. I think that, because she always had that as a focus in every single one of her cookbooks, she's really putting Virginia first in our foodways. And that's something that I think food media today could really pay attention to.
Were there challenges trying to uncover details about her life to cover in the movie?
Yeah, there is some archival footage of her. There is not as much as I would have liked to include. So that definitely was a bit of a challenge. We were filming, and we didn't know if we were going to be able to find any footage that was digitized, that we would be able to include. Honestly, I think it was in November, we finally were able to get some digital footage. The University of South Carolina had a clip, which we actually showed in the documentary, and they actually took it from reel-to-reel to digital for us. We were absolutely grateful that we were able to put that in along with some audio clips of Miss Lewis, we were able to include that as well.