This August, Knopf is bringing out the 20th anniversary reissue of Taste of Country Cooking. The book features Alice Waters’ introduction and a remembrance by Judith Jones. On the new book’s cover is a beautiful portrait of Lewis by John T. Hill, who shot the covers for Pursuit and Taste. For the original Taste cover, Lewis was photographed in a white dress. “It made her look like a servant,” says Jones, who never let them shoot another cover without her present and insisted they tint the dress pink to lessen the effect. Pursuit and The Gift of Southern Cooking’s covers more accurately depict her dress and the clothes she designed, for which the fabric all came from Africa. “I used to tease her,” says Peacock—“anything that was good, she would try to attribute it to Africa or Virginia.”
“Edna always came home for Revival,” says Smith. “We cooked the entire weekend. We made preserves together, and we’d share in relish making and pickling.” Lewis’ favorite contribution was blueberry cobbler. “She’d add to this a freezer full of ice cream,” remembers Smith. Revival was the highlight of summer and the first time since school let out that many of the children wore shoes.
Nobody tells the story of Edna Lewis better than Edna Lewis. In Taste of Country Cooking, a chapter introduction warmly describes Revival Sunday. Her mother made white muslin outfits for her six children, two adopted cousins and herself, “usually finishing the last buttonholes and sashes late Saturday night in between the cooking that she would have begun for the next day’s noontime dinner at the church.” When the children went to bed that Saturday night, no cooking would have begun, but they woke to find the long rectangular dining room table laden with pastry-lined pie dishes waiting for filling and cakes for icing. The children would be dressed and instructed to wait on the front porch until noontime, when they would head to the church. “There would be two more days of feasting during the week besides a round of visiting and entertaining in every home in Freetown. Festivities ended for us on Friday, when the visitors stopped by to thank us and say good-bye, promising to return the next summer.”
August 13 is Revival at Bethel Baptist, the church where Lewis’ funeral was held some seven months earlier. After a lifetime spent in many spots, she came back to Unionville to be buried, and the crowd that came to honor her came hungry.
“Afterward, I invited everyone to come home,” says Mrs. Smith. “And they did.”
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