She was known as the Grande Dame of Southern cuisine.
Over the course of a career that spanned nearly 6 decades, Edna Lewis published influential cookbooks, served as head chef of a number of iconic restaurants, and endlessly championed the fresh, seasonal cooking of the American South. On Tuesday, Knopf, the publisher behind Lewis’ most famous cookbook, The Taste of Country Cooking, will release a 50-year anniversary edition to honor the author’s legacy as a true proponent of farm-to-table cooking. The book features a new design and a foreword by Toni Tipton-Martin, an award-winning food historian who was personally inspired by Lewis to explore African-American cooking
In our recent podcast series, Seasoned, which explores the women who helped to define American food culture, we explored the life and legacy of Lewis in episode four of the series.
Born in 1916 in Freetown, Virginia—a community founded by formerly enslaved people—Lewis grew up immersed in seasonal, farm-to-table practices long before the concept became fashionable. Her cooking reflected a reverence for fresh ingredients, simplicity and cultural memory. Through her work as a chef and author, she brought regional Black culinary traditions into the national spotlight.
Her landmark cookbook, The Taste of Country Cooking, first published in 1976, is widely regarded as a classic. More than just a collection of recipes, it reads like a memoir, guiding readers through the rhythms of rural Southern life across the seasons. Each chapter highlights dishes tied to specific times of year—spring greens, summer fruits, autumn harvest, and winter preserves— challenging the existing stereotypes of Southern food as something heavy or fried. Lewis’s prose is elegant and evocative, capturing not only how food is prepared, but how it was consumed.
“Foundationally, her food was brilliant in its simplicity,” says chef Alexander Smalls, who met Lewis when she was the head chef at Gage & Tolner in Brooklyn, New York, and who we interviewed in our episode about Lewis. “Long before there was Alice Waters from Berkeley, there was Edna, who essentially brought us to the fields.”
Many who knew her described her as regal. “She didn’t look like anyone else. She seemed to be 10 feet tall. It was just a majestic and also quiet presence,” recalls Scott Peacock, Lewis’s longtime friend, who also joined us in the episode.
As readers return to her work decades later, they will find not only recipes, but also a philosophy towards food — one rooted in respect for ingredients, the land, and for the simple act of sharing a meal.