Edna Lewis

Edna Lewis was the grande dame of Southern cooking — a chef and author who single-handedly elevated the food traditions of the rural Black South from folk cooking to a recognized American cuisine worthy of the world's attention. Her 1976 cookbook, The Taste of Country Cooking, is considered one of the greatest American cookbooks ever written. It documented the seasonal cooking of Freetown, Virginia — a community founded by formerly enslaved people, including her own grandfather.

Born in Freetown in 1916, Lewis grew up in a self-sustaining community where families grew, hunted, fished, and preserved their own food according to the seasons. She moved to New York City as a young woman and became chef at Café Nicholson in the 1940s, where her refined yet soulful cooking attracted a celebrity following that included Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, and Gore Vidal.

Lewis's cookbooks — The Edna Lewis Cookbook, The Taste of Country Cooking, In Pursuit of Flavor, and The Gift of Southern Cooking (with Scott Peacock) — documented a way of eating and living that was rapidly disappearing. She insisted that Southern food was not monolithic and that the cooking of the Black rural South had its own sophistication and terroir. She received multiple James Beard Awards and is widely credited with inspiring the farm-to-table movement decades before it had a name.