ABSTRACT
In the “Introduction” to 2016 edition1 of The Edna Lewis Cookbook , originally published in 1972, Hunter Lewis quotes James Beard as saying: “Edna Lewis makes me want to go right into the kitchen and start cooking” (xiii). After the publication of The Edna Lewis Cookbook, Lewis authored three other cookbooks: The Taste of Country Cooking (1976), In Pursuit of Flavor (1988), and The Gift of Southern Cooking (2003), which she co-authored with her student and friend Scott Peacock. Throughout these texts, Lewis emphasizes the “great care” that should be taken with food, both in its preparation and in the ingredients and materials used to prepare it, as she also insists on seasonality, locality, and freshness. “I feel fortunate to have been raised at a time when the vegetables from the garden, the fruit from the orchard, and the meat from the smokehouse were all good and pure, unadulterated by chemicals and long-life packaging,” Lewis writes in the introduction to In Pursuit of Flavor. “As a result, I believe I know how food should taste” (vii). Such belief is communicated throughout her oeuvre of literary cookbooks, of which hers are both accessible to home cooks—recipes clearly written and meant as, in her words, “a welcome introduction to good food simply and lovingly prepared” (Pursuit viii)—and which present a challenge to the ubiquity of mass-produced food available in contemporary American culture. In so doing, Lewis’ works expose some of the ways in which food production technologies obscure the histories, geographies, and individuals who create and curate the culinary. “Southscapes,” a word Thadious M. Davis uses to describe “the claiming of the South by African Americans in theory (as in literary production) and in practice (as in physical movement)” (18) is one way to access Lewis’ embrace of the Southern table, in particular, and of hospitality in general. Her recipes and cookbooks reflect this claim of the South: seasonally organized, many collaboratively created (as is the case with the recipes of The Gift of Southern Cooking, co-written with Scott Peacock), and meant to be shared.
