8 Edna Lewis Recipes for a Real Taste of Country Cooking

It’s impossible to overstate the importance of Edna Lewis in the pantheon of American chefs — especially in the realm of Southern cuisine. Lewis exalted and explained farm-to-table cooking in the regional South, starting in 1972 with The Edna Lewis Cookbook and culminating in 2003 with The Gift of Southern Cooking, her now-classic collaboration with chef Scott Peacock. 

Lewis made her Food & Wine debut in the November 1983 issue with a country menu that included gratinéed oysters, pan-fried quail with spoon bread and country ham, kale with pork stock and red onions, sugar cookies, and poached pears. Along with Peacock, she crafted a lavish Thanksgiving menu for Food & Wine’s November 1998 issue with recipes for Pole Beans Cooked in Smoky Pork Stock, Roasted Beets in Gingered Syrup, Spicy Collard Greens, Cranberries with Orange Zest and Port, Cloverleaf Rolls, Benne Wafers, Ambrosia, Egg Custard, a Blackberry Cordial, and more recipes below.

“If America were to elect two figures to represent the changing nature of family, then Edna Lewis and Scott Peacock might win by a landslide,” Kate Sekules wrote in the introduction to the feature. “The Odd Couple of Southern Cooking was what food writers dubbed Lewis and Peacock in the early ’90s, when they first began appearing as co-chefs. But as they sit together around a Thanksgiving table in New York City, surrounded by their motley family of mentors, sisters, and friends, discrepancies in age, race, and gender melt like lard in a hot skillet. There is nothing odd here, nor are they a couple. In fact they act more like a pair of high school conspirators, cooking up grand schemes — which is, in fact, exactly what these two Atlanta neighbors are doing.”

Lewis was born in 1916 in Freetown, Virginia, a farming community founded by people who were formerly enslaved. Though she wasn’t much of a cook growing up, she paid close attention to dishes like liver pudding and hominy, crafted by her aunt Jenny Hailstalk, and took up cooking for and with her friends when she made her way to New York City at the age of 16.

In 1948, one of these friends, John Nicholson, opened Cafe Nicholson on 58th Street in Manhattan — wisely hiring Lewis as the chef. The restaurant drew a glittering clientele including regulars such as William Faulkner and Tennessee Williams, who lived across the street and along with Marlon Brando, would take Lewis home at night, stopping at bars along the way. By 1952, Lewis had tired of city life and opened a pheasant ranch in New Jersey, only to return to the city four years later to become a highly sought-after private chef. In 1974, while acting as a docent in the African Hall of the American Museum of Natural History, a chance encounter with the editor Judith Jones led to the eventual publishing of The Taste of Country Cooking in 1976. This loving and lyrical culinary chronicle of a year of her youth in Freetown is now widely regarded as one of the most important cookbooks of the 20th century.

Peacock met his future collaborator and close friend for the first time when she was working as the chef at Gage & Tollner in Brooklyn, then jumped at the chance to serve as her assistant at a fundraising dinner at the American Institute of Wine and Food in Atlanta. Though he was 27 and she was 74, the two became inseparable, researching, writing, cooking, and even living together in Atlanta until her death in 2006.

“I guess there are a lot of obvious differences between us, but there’s a lot alike, too,” the Georgia-born Peacock told the New York Times in 2003. “We’re both loners and we’re both basically shy. We’ve both struggled with depression and we’re both Southern.”

They found communion in the kitchen, and if you sit down with these recipes, you may find yourself filled with the spirit of country cooking — and the soul of the legendary chef who captured it for the ages.