Just before the book was published, Peterson and Lewis showed it to Judith Jones of Alfred A. Knopf, the editor responsible for getting Julia Child into print. “In talking to them, I encouraged Edna to tell me about who she was and where she came from,” says Jones. “I encouraged her to write in her own voice. And, sitting down with yellow legal pads, that’s exactly what she did.”
Knopf published Taste of Country Cooking in 1976. “It was her love letter to Virginia cooking,” says Peacock. “It’s a masterpiece. Before Taste, people weren’t looking to her for Southern food. Then she became the voice of American food.”
In Pursuit of Flavor followed 12 years later. “She was always pursuing, say, the perfect peach,” says Jones. “Once she walked all over New York for a white peach.” The pursuit begot the book’s name. “It was a tremendous job to work the way we did on the first book,” says Jones as to why a co-author was put in place for Pursuit, “but because Edna didn’t write it, she didn’t feel it was her book. Plus her eyes were sort of failing and I don’t think she really read it.”
The last book, The Gift of Southern Cooking, published two years ago, was written with Peacock, who was Lewis’ roommate and cooking companion. They met in 1989, when he arranged to be at a sold-out dinner party for her at the Southern Food Festival. He was chef for the governor, and she was one of his heroes—the two fell into conversation over pet topics like the benefit of cross-pollinated versus hybrid vegetables. Their friendship developed long-distance, over the course of several other meetings. Then, seven years ago, she moved to Decatur.
Jones describes the last book as a “real collaboration, a partnership. I would be with them, and Scott would say, ‘What’s that you’re doing, Miss Lewis, over there in the corner?’ and she’d say, ‘These tomatoes don’t taste sweet enough, so I’m putting some sugar on them.’ Scott tapped every nuance and got it all down.”
In the book, they temper each other, and the beautifully written introductions detail delicious results like cornmeal soufflé and the time Lewis smuggled potatoes home in her suitcase from their trip to Italy. Red rice that she uses to stuff a suckling pig, he pairs with duck.
Pork chops layered with sugared cranberries she made at Café Nicholson need no tinkering, and okra and collards are Peacock’s department. “Miss Lewis will eat collards when I cook them but seems to have no interest in preparing them herself,” writes Peacock. On the topic of grits, he laments the pesto, sun-dried tomato and lemon grass grits that have come along. Miss Lewis says, “People should really leave grits alone.” They print a formula for homemade curry powder and one for their own baking powder.
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