Just over a week ago, the first episode of “Finding Edna Lewis” premiered on VPM’s Culture YouTube channel, and I’m thrilled to see so many of you have watched, commented, and shared it with your friends (and if you haven’t watched it, now is a perfect opportunity)!
I wanted to share a bit about how the Edna Lewis dinner that was featured came about.
In 2023, I was fortunate enough to work with Leah Branch, the executive chef at The Roosevelt, to put together a dinner honoring the legacy of African American culinarians in Virginia. When Branch messaged me that she wanted to do a dinner honoring Lewis, I immediately said yes.
Lewis is often referred to as the grande dame of Southern food, and for good reason. Her seminal cookbooks, “The Taste of Country Cooking” (1976) in particular, were significant for several reasons. They highlighted the importance of eating seasonally, dispelled myths about Southern food by showing the breadth of recipes honed for hundreds of years, and presented a first-person narrative about African American life in Virginia at odds with the often stereotyped and simplistic view of African American Southerners.
It was incredibly important to me to help bring Lewis’s legacy to life through food, and the work began of pouring over Lewis’s cookbooks, along with Branch, to choose dishes that were indicative of not only her early life in Freetown, Virginia, but to also show how her repertoire expanded from her time in New York and South Carolina.
Ultimately, there were seven courses, including her famed chocolate souffle from her time at Cafe Nicholson in New York (lauded in The New York Times), red rice and spare ribs to mark the time she spent in South Carolina, and a homage to Freetown, Virginia dishes with chicken and dumplings and Brunswick Stew.
Before the dinner, I was able to cook pan-fried quail alongside Branch and was struck by the small number of ingredients that became a complex and layered dish. Following the recipe, as Lewis intended, gave me the first bit of insight into her world. Like many of her recipes, this dish was presented without ego and unnecessary fuss, allowing ingredients that paired well to shine through.
It was my first peek into discovering more about who Lewis was.
The dinner was the first step in a deep dive into Edna Lewis’s life, and in retrospect, I had no idea how complex she was. The more I learn, the more clear it is that her cookbooks and her life parallel seminal points in American history, from the Black Arts and Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s and 1970s to the changing demographics and conversations about the South in the 1980s and 1990s.
In the next episode, we’ll celebrate Lewis’s birthday with a moving and special moment in what was Freetown, Virginia, as well as make another recipe with a special guest. I hope you’ll join me on a journey to discover how a woman from small-town Virginia became a culinary trailblazer whose professional work still impacts chefs, even now.