Eat in

Award-winning chef Edna Lewis had four cookbooks and two New York restaurants to her credit: remarkable achievements for anyone, but even more so for a Black woman from the rural South. Every August still brings Revival at Bethel Baptist Church in her native Unionville, Virginia. That tradition may be the wellspring from which those achievements of hers arose. This August also marks the reissue of her classic Southern cookbook, Taste of Country Cooking, a 20th anniversary edition with an introduction by fellow acclaimed cook Alice Waters.

Edna Lewis brought discipline and taste to the kitchen—her books debunk fast food notions of Southern food as limp, greasy or fried to within an inch of its life. A soft-spoken lady with a regal bearing and an incredible face, Edna Lewis cut a swath through New York many decades long. “You couldn’t walk down the street without people stopping [her]: ‘You’re so beautiful I want to paint you, photograph you,’” says Scott Peacock, executive chef of Watershed Restaurant in Decatur, Georgia, and her last co-author. She suffered no fools but was exceedingly generous. “She looked after people,” says Ruth Lewis Smith, Lewis’ sister, “like our grandfather.”

Lewis grew up one of eight children on an Orange County farm near Freetown, a village of former slaves where her grandfather and two other men built homes on land granted to them. “My grandfather had the first school for blacks,” says Smith, who lives near the old family home in Unionville. “When he built his house, he put an extra room on.” Her equally industrious grandmother was a slave who worked as a brickmason; a landowner bought her for $950 to build two houses.

The family’s lives revolved around food and farming. “Everyone came here to eat,” says Smith. “Whoever you were, you came here if you were hungry.” Around Unionville, all the families had hogs, dairy cows, chickens and turkeys and crops. “Basically, we provided our own food,” she says, “and nobody had a chance to be lazy.” Their mother sold chickens to a man in D.C., raised and sold eggs and kept the house, farm and kitchen humming. “There wasn’t anything she couldn’t do,” says Smith. Or cook, it seems. “Whatever they got their hands on,” she says, “whether it was rabbit or squash from the garden—how did they learn to do everything so well?”