Both parents had died by 1941, and the two youngest weren’t old enough to be on their own. Smith went with sister Virginia to D.C., and sister Naomi went with Lewis to New York.
Lewis put her sister through school and made everything they wore. “She inherited that from my mother,” says Smith. “Edna made all her own clothes, and she always looked wonderful.” An ironing job at a Brooklyn laundry lasted only three hours, so she went back to sewing, copying Dior dresses for Dorcas Avedon, then the wife of Richard Avedon. Mr. Peacock says she once made a dress for Marilyn Monroe. In 1947 she made costumes for Bonwit Teller’s Christmas windows, and about that time Upper East Side antiques dealer John Nicholson asked her to cook in a restaurant he was starting. Café Nicholson opened in 1949 on the ground floor and garden of a brownstone on 58th Street, and it was, in its owner’s words, “a place where truck drivers eat and the food is really great,” but the clientele was always more chic bohemian than man-on-the-street.
On opening day she manned her three-burner stove and portable oven; they started serving at 5:30 and were out of food an hour later. Word got out that if you wanted to eat at Café Nicholson, you had to get there early. Ruth Smith came to New York and helped out. “She loved soufflés,” says Smith, “and she loved Roosevelt”—the First Lady who dined there. Lewis’ chocolate soufflé made its mark, and the recipe appears in The Edna Lewis Cookbook and In Pursuit of Flavor along with its signature warm bitter chocolate sauce.
In 1953, Lewis gave up the restaurant and moved to New Jersey with her husband, where they tried, among other things, raising pheasants. She began catering dinner parties in New York and gave cooking lessons to an industrious young socialite named Evangeline Peterson. Peterson encouraged her to write down her recipes, and years later, after opening and closing another restaurant in Harlem, a broken leg kept Lewis marooned long enough to get a book down.
The Edna Lewis Cookbook was published in 1972. It’s a quirky cocktail of sophisticated fare and comfort food with some wholesome notes like spoon bread alongside profiteroles and baba au rhum. “It’s what was in vogue, like lobster a la Americain, and very much about New York in the ’70s,” says Scott Peacock. Today, out-of-print book dealers carry first editions in the $300 range.
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