At 50, Edna Lewis' Seminal Cookbook Still Holds Sway

“I will never forget spring mornings in Virginia,” chef Edna Lewis writes in her seminal 1976 cookbook, “The Taste of Country Cooking.”

About an hour east of the land that inspired those words, the season found author and historian Michael W. Twitty at his home, his hands in the tilled, weeded soil, tending to seeds and roots, for his inaugural Edna Lewis garden. Here, he’s sown watermelon, greens, peanuts, white-fleshed sweet potatoes, red field peas, fish peppers, pole beans and chervil in anticipation of a warm spring and summer.

“It’s not the first time she’s on my mind while I’m planting,” he said of Lewis, whose work from the 1970s until her death in 2006 at age 89, informed generations of Black cooks.

On Tuesday, Knopf, the book’s publisher, released a 50th anniversary edition of her “The Taste of Country Cooking,” with a new design and a foreword by historian and author Toni Tipton-Martin. In the years since its release, it has become known as a pioneering American cookbook.

In it, Lewis -- she hated the title “chef” -- a champion of cooking seasonally and without waste, offered a correction for the convenience foods that had begun to take over the American diet in the 1970s. But among its seasonal menus and tips for choosing the best produce, it also acts as memoir and story of place. She presents a firsthand account of life in one of Virginia’s many Freetowns, communities established by formerly enslaved people in the middle of the 19th century, and highlights a specific period of American culinary history.

“Her writing is so beautiful, the recipes read kind of like bedtime stories,” said chef Leah Branch of the Roosevelt in nearby Richmond. “She teaches you to have an appreciation for the taste of things around you and what’s around you instead of showing off her technique, which she has in spades.”

In Lewis’ hands, salads are full of freshly picked greens; beans or fruit are cooked and served in cream, accentuating their freshness and pristine flavor; and all manner of pork, a central ingredient in western Virginia cooking, is used as both main dish and seasoning.

For Twitty, the book’s profoundness resides between the lines. Lewis, he said, reminds the reader that most of the agriculture, cooking and hospitality associated with the region and the broader South came from her enslaved African ancestors. She captures what Twitty calls an “AfroVirginia,” where West African ingredients, like Guinea fowl and watermelon, occupy the same space as Indigenous American produce, like squash and sweet corn.

The book showed Martin Draluck, a chef and the founder of Black Pot Supper Club, a Los Angeles-based pop-up, that he could live and cook seasonally by embodying those same farm-to-table principles. “It was clear that she was one of the first to put that connection to paper,” Draluck said.

On a recent spring morning, lavender-colored wisteria poured from tall trees like pastel waterfalls on the way to the former site of the Freetown in Orange County, Virginia. The community is now marked with a silver plaque, erected in 2024, that credits Lewis for generating “national interest in Southern cuisine and fresh, seasonal ingredients,” specifically calling out “The Taste of Country Cooking.”

“That was the first book that showed me how elegant Southern food could be,” said Debra Freeman, journalist and executive producer of “Finding Edna Lewis,” a public-television documentary series.

Lewis was born in 1916 to Eugene and Daisy Lewis, one of eight children. Her grandfather Chester Lewis, who had been formerly enslaved in a nearby town, began the community with other families, establishing a small school in his living room.

Memories of enslavement punctuate the stories Edna Lewis recalls from her grandfather and her grandmother. (In a particularly heartbreaking aside, her grandmother Lucindy Morton, a brick mason in enslavement, insisted on building a big house so she could always account for her children and grandchildren.)

But there was also freedom. Chester Lewis also helped found the Bethel Baptist Church in nearby Unionville, which plays a central role in “Taste of Country Cooking,” as the site of many gatherings, like the Sunday Revival Dinner.

“There was real rejoicing: the fruits of our hard labor were now our own, we were free to come and go, and to gather together for this week of reunion and celebration,” Edna Lewis wrote of Sunday Revival meals. Attended by Freetown community members past and present, these mid-August dinners offered a chance to celebrate the end of a busy harvest to give thanks for the ability to get together over wooden tables topped with baked Virginia ham, spiced Seckel pears, pickled cucumbers, cakes and pies, in a larger event than weekly post-church meals.

Freeman said Lewis’ spotlight on these gatherings -- and the community’s cooks -- spoke to what makes “Taste of Country Cooking” so special.

“There’s no ego in the book,” said Freeman, who recently attended a post-church lunch at Bethel Baptist.

At age 16, Lewis left Freetown for Washington, D.C., and eventually made her way to New York City, in time finding success as a seamstress. In 1948, her friend Johnny Nicholson, the owner of Café Nicholson, asked her to be the restaurant’s chef. While much has been made of the midcentury glitterati that dined there (Truman Capote, Gloria Vanderbilt, Eleanor Roosevelt), the real luxury was in the kitchen, where the spirit of Freetown informed the herbed roast chicken and soufflé (among other dishes).

In 1972, she would release “The Edna Lewis Cookbook,” written with Evangeline Peterson, but her second book would be more personal.

On yellow legal pads, she wrote recipes and recollections of the planting, harvesting, animal butchery and preserving in Freetown, calling her sisters and making annual pilgrimages to Virginia. Her niece Nina Williams-Mbengue, just 12 years old at the time, typed up the pages and sent them to Judith Jones, the Knopf editor who commissioned the project.

The year “The Taste of Country Cooking” was published, questions about identity, personal and national, swirled in the collective imagination. America was celebrating its 200th birthday. That August, author and journalist Tom Wolfe would declare the 1970s “The Me Decade,” and Alex Haley’s “Roots” would be released, recording his family’s journey from West Africa to America via the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

“The whole country was abuzz with discussion of what, 200 years into its existence, it meant to be American,” Sara B. Franklin wrote in “The Editor,” a biography of Jones, adding, “Judith aimed to position Edna Lewis’ ‘The Taste of Country Cooking’ as a powerful and provocative response, one packaged in the unlikely form of a cookbook.”

But it could be argued that a cookbook was the ideal packaging. Through recipes, Lewis, the descendant of formerly enslaved grandparents, could share her experiences -- the beauty of her community’s region, their resourcefulness and the love and care of their land. She could preserve a time, place, a way of living and a cuisine, in amber, speaking to her longing and gratitude for having experienced it.

Although initial sales were unremarkable, the book has sold over 175,000 copies to date, according to a Knopf representative. That it remains in print 50 years on, even prompting a reissue, speaks to its legacy.

Reading “The Taste of Country Cooking” when it was released, Tipton-Martin found a proud look at a community, its culinary skills and history. It felt different from how Black women in domestic work were and are typically portrayed, she said.

“She reclaims what was previously used to marginalize,” Tipton-Martin said, adding that it inspired her to continue to document that generational knowledge in her books “The Jemima Code” and “Jubilee: Recipes from Two Centuries of African American Cooking.”

Growing up in New Jersey, Thérèse Nelson, a chef and the founder of Black Culinary History, dedicated to preserving Black food culture, discovered a home in Lewis’ work. “I was deeply looking for a heritage,” she said. Lewis “showed me that we’re inheriting these dishes and techniques.” For her, the book signaled the presence of a more expansive world of Black cooking.

“She was so cleareyed about giving her point of view,” she said.

Asked about Lewis’ Freetown, many chefs took on a softer, more impassioned tone: Their answers touched on feelings of safety and, ultimately, grief for a period in their lives that has passed.

In that way, metaphorical Freetowns have shown up in my own life: a small kitchen in Virginia Beach, where my grandmother cooked dinner for me and my cousins before her night shifts as a healthcare worker, her starched, all-white uniform barely creasing as she walked out of the door; a beach in St. Thomas, where my great-uncle watched a boiling pot of oil turn red snapper crispy while I swam in warm, salty water.

Lewis’ work (and “The Taste of Country Cooking”) offers a refuge. She captures Black expertise, tastes and joy in dishes as simple as a busy day cake made as dinner finished up, because living on one’s own terms is worthy of celebration.

“At a time when our history is being removed, a written record is evidence of a lived history,” Tipton-Martin said, “it’s never too late to tell the truth.”

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Edna Lewis’ Busy Day Cake

“A busy day cake, or sweet bread as it was really called, was regular cake batter, measured out and stirred in a hurry while vegetables cooked on one end of the wood stove,” Edna Lewis writes in her 1976 cookbook and farm-to-table manifesto, “The Taste of Country Cooking.” Slightly sweet and crumbly, this cake, adapted from the 50th anniversary edition of her cookbook (Knopf, 2026), comes together quickly and is a great backpocket recipe for a simple dessert that can be adorned with any seasonal fruit compote, Lewis’ brandied peaches or even sweetened whipped cream. The cake has a beautiful rise but may sink a bit in the middle; that’s just part of its humble charm.

Recipe from Edna Lewis

Adapted by Korsha Wilson

Yield: 8 to 10 servings

Total Time: 55 minutes

Ingredients:

Unsalted butter, at room temperature, for the pan

All-purpose flour, for the pan

8 tablespoons/113 grams unsalted butter, at room temperature

1 1/2 cups/300 grams granulated sugar

3 large eggs

2 cups/255 grams all-purpose flour, sifted

1/2 cup whole milk, at room temperature

4 teaspoons baking powder (see Tip below)

2 teaspoons vanilla extract

1/4 teaspoon kosher salt, such as Diamond Crystal

Light grating of nutmeg

Preparation:

1. Heat oven to 375 degrees. Butter and flour the bottom of an 8-by-8-inch cake pan.

2. In a large bowl, blend the butter and sugar by hand using a wooden spoon, until the color of the butter has lightened and the mixture is fluffy. This will take several minutes. Add in eggs one by one, mixing each in until it’s fully incorporated. Add in 1/2 cup of flour and 1/4 cup of milk together and mix well. Repeat with another 1/2 cup flour and the remaining 1/4 cup milk, incorporating well, then stir in the remaining 1 cup flour.

3. Add baking powder, vanilla, salt and nutmeg and mix well.

4. Spoon batter into the prepared pan. Bake for 40 minutes, until a toothpick or knife inserted comes out clean.

5:Let cool slightly in the pan, about 15 minutes. Cut into squares and serve warm.

Tip: Edna Lewis famously advised against baking with commercial double-acting baking powder because she found the ones on the market in the 1970’s to have a “bitter aftertaste.” If you like, seek out non-aluminum double-acting baking powder (such as Bob’s Red Mill), or make your own: Combine 2 tablespoons cream of tartar with 1 tablespoon baking soda, and then measure out 4 teaspoons for the recipe and proceed as instructed.

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Edna Lewis’ Brandied Peaches

Peaches occupy an exalted position in Edna Lewis’ seminal cookbook, “The Taste of Country Cooking.” First published in 1976, the book chronicles her upbringing, filled with seasonal recipes from rural western Virginia in the early 20th century. This recipe for brandied peaches, adapted from the reissued 50th anniversary edition (Knopf, 2026), combines the sweet, firm flesh of peak summer peaches with a brown sugar syrup spiked with brandy. To really experience its full complexity of flavor, you should source the fruit in the summer when they’re at their best. The original recipe calls for 7 pounds of whole peaches stored in Mason jars, while this version has been scaled down for easier storage in your fridge and calls for halved fruit instead. Delicious warm or chilled, brandied peaches make an elegant presentation served alongside vanilla ice cream or a simple vanilla cake like Lewis’ Busy Day Cake, still warm from the oven. Finish with an additional splash of brandy if desired.

Recipe from Edna Lewis

Adapted by Korsha Wilson

Yield: 8 to 12 servings

Total Time: 45 minutes

Ingredients:

1 cup/220 grams light-brown sugar

3/4 cup bottled or purified water

1 1/2 pounds yellow peaches (4 to 6 peaches), ripe but not soft, with no blemishes

1/4 cup good-quality brandy

Vanilla ice cream or Busy Day Cake (optional), for serving

Preparation:

1. In a 5-quart Dutch oven or other large heavy pot over medium-low heat, mix the brown sugar and water together using a wooden spoon. Let cook gently, stirring occasionally, until the sugar has dissolved, about 5 minutes.

2. In the meantime, rinse the peaches and dry using a kitchen towel, rubbing gently to remove any fuzz. Halve the peaches and remove the pits.

3. Place peaches into the pot, cut side down and bring the liquid to a gentle simmer, then cook gently for about 8 minutes. Carefully flip them over using tongs and cook on the other side until they’re tender but not mushy when pierced with a paring knife or toothpick, about 8 minutes more. (If your peaches are big or underripe, you may need to cook them for up to 30 minutes in total, using tongs to gently turn the peaches to ensure all parts become soft.)

4. Using a slotted spoon, remove the peaches to a plate in a single layer and set aside.

5. Continue to cook the peach syrup over medium-low until mixture is slightly reduced and syrupy, about 5 minutes. Add brandy to the syrup and heat until hot. Return the peaches to the pot as well as any accumulated juices and heat until the entire mixture is hot, not boiling.

6. Let the brandied peaches cool slightly, then cut into wedges if desired before serving with its syrup over vanilla ice cream or your favorite cake. (Store peaches and syrup in a glass jar or airtight container in the refrigerator for up to 5 days; bring to room temperature before serving.)

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Copyright 2026 The New York Times Company