My sister passes along the sad news that Edna Lewis, refiner and promoter of Souther cuisine, has passed away. From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution obit (reg. req.):
The granddaughter of a Virginia slave, Edna Lewis created a gastronomic temple out of a tiny New York cafe and served such 20th-century luminaries as Truman Capote, Greta Garbo and William Faulkner.
A culinary purist, she milked her own cows, walked blocks to find the perfect peach and could tell when a cake was ready by "listening" to it.
By the time of her death early Monday at 89, she had become the South’s answer to Julia Child, influencing a generation of cooks and writers who were eager to preserve the region’s vanishing food culture.
What the article doesn’t say is that in contradistinction to "fine" Southern Cooking (including the sort AJC lifestyle pages and Southern Living magazine were fondest of) that slanted heavily toward the aristocratic milieus of Charleston or New Orleans, Lewis’s cooking was that of the rural and poor South, and she showed how food with integrity had its own refinement. Undoubtedly, too, her more recent popularity among Southerners represents a middle-class "back-to-roots" culture that’s taken place at the same time that homemade Southern food, for the first generation, has lost ground to chain restaurants and processed food among most Southerners.
I couldn’t begin to catalog the silly aversion that New Englanders have of Southern food (eating polenta but not grits, say). Let me recommend Edna Lewis and Scott Peacock’s cookbook Gift of Southern Cooking.
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