Edna Lewis

Edna Regina Lewis was born on the thirteenth of April, 1916, in the small farming settlement of Freetown, in Orange County, Virginia — a community founded after emancipation by formerly enslaved families, among them her paternal grandfather, Chester Lewis, and his wife, Lucinda. She was one of eight children born to Eugene Lewis, a farmer, and Daisy Lewis. In that self-sufficient Black community she learned to forage, hunt, garden, and cook from the land, marking the seasons by what the fields and woods gave.

Her father died in 1928, when Edna was twelve. As a young woman she joined the Great Migration northward, settling eventually in New York City. There, in 1948, alongside Johnny Nicholson and Karl Bissinger, she helped open Café Nicholson, where her cooking drew luminaries such as Tennessee Williams, Marlon Brando, Gloria Vanderbilt, and Salvador Dalí, and made her one of the era's most celebrated Black chefs.

Lewis turned her memory of Freetown into literature. She published The Edna Lewis Cookbook in 1972 with Evangeline Peterson, and in 1976, with editor Judith Jones, The Taste of Country Cooking — now regarded as one of the essential American cookbooks, a seasonal record of Southern rural life told through its table. She followed with In Pursuit of Flavor (1988) and The Gift of Southern Cooking (2003), the last with Scott Peacock.

Honored as the grande dame of Southern cooking, she co-founded the society that became the Southern Foodways Alliance, insisting that the food of freed people and their descendants was a cuisine of dignity and refinement. Edna Lewis died on the thirteenth of February, 2006, in Decatur, Georgia, and was laid to rest in Freetown, the ground that made her. May her table remain forever set, and her name spoken with reverence.