Taste of Country Cooking Book

A unique experience! So much more than a cookbook, The Taste of Country Cooking is a sweetly contemplative and often elegiac travelogue through Lewis' life as a girl in Freetown, Virginia, a farming community founded by freedmen including the author's grandfather. It is hard to do justice to the moving quality of the writing, which manages to be both matter-of-fact (the post-butchering preparation of a hog carcass is described quite clearly) and lyrical (portraits of her mother cooking, the smells of fruits and slow cooking, her long summer days with her many siblings, a child's wonder at life's busyness and bounty). Lewis structures the cookbook by season, describing the high points of each and how the changing of seasons impacted farming life and the food that came to her table. Sections and subsections start with recollections about each time of year, as well as key events such as Sheep-Shearing Day, Wheat-Harvesting Day, Sunday Revival, Race Day, Emancipation Day, and Christmas Eve. Many of the individual recipes include snatches of history about this or that vegetable and how they came to her community, or how a certain cut of meat tastes compared to other cuts. She describes life on this Freetown farming settlement as an almost utopian place of hard work, plentiful food, generous friends and family, a strong sense of community, and a true partnership with nature. This was an immersive experience and I soon came to live in this special place and time.

And it was just that for Lewis: a very specific place and time: her past. At the age of 16, after the death of her father, she struck out on her own to New York City where she worked in many different jobs (including three hours as a laundress), became something of a bohemian and socialite as well as an ardent radical, eventually married Harlem communist spokesman Steve Kingston, and formed a 50/50 partnership with the fabulous international antiques dealer John Nicholson. And so through the late '40s to the mid-'50s, she was chef and partner at what would become the renowned and very au courant author-magnet named Cafe Nicholson. Many years later- with a number of stops and starts along the way - she authored a series of cookbooks that eventually positioned her as one of the foremost authorities on Southern cooking. Edna Lewis passed away in 2006 at 90 years of age. In 2014, she was commemorated in stamp form by the U.S. Postal Service. I came to learn of her recently, on episode six of Top Chef's 14th season.

All that said, perhaps the many remembrances and pictures of life in Freetown painted by Lewis have such an elegiac quality to them because she spent a mere one-sixth of her storied life in that setting. The Taste of Country Cooking is a splendid cookbook, of course, but it is also a portrait of a bygone life and an era long past. Fond wistfulness suffuses this lovely and poignant book.





Sad to say, it is unlikely that I will make many of these recipes because I really feel that the flavors that Lewis so beautifully describes will only come after using ingredients fresh from garden and field (or - during winter months -from the bounty that comes from home-canning), meat from animals that roam free on a country farm, food foraged or hunted or fished within the forest and streams surrounding her community farm, and then cooked over wood-burning stoves and hearths. That said, there were still a good number that seemed doable, including:

> Skillet Scallions
> Lentil and Scallion Salad
> Scalloped Potatoes (featuring beef broth rather than dairy)
> Pan-fried Oysters
> Virginia Fried Chicken with Browned Gravy
> Pan-fried Chicken with Cream Gravy
> Chicken Gelatine (recipe looks more tasty than its title!)
> Blueberry Sauce
> Caramel Pie

But as delicious as they may sound, the recipes are scarcely the point of The Taste of Country Cooking. This is a book about nature and a certain community and times past. I had a wonderful experience getting to know my new friend Edna, traveling with her back to her youth and through some of her earliest, most precious memories.