After Café Nicholson, there were years of work as a caterer and as a much sought-after private chef, and at one point she and her husband moved to New Jersey to farm pheasants. But it was the publication of The Taste of Country Cooking, in 1976, that first brought widespread attention from her fellow chefs. (The book had been the result of a series of weekly meetings with highly regarded cookbook editor Judith Jones.) Until then, southern cooking had been largely dismissed as nothing more than fried chicken and greasy greens. The marvelous simplicity of Lewis's recipes, her impassioned championing of fresh, seasonal ingredients and pure, natural flavors, as well as her richly detailed accounts of everyday life in Freetown, were a revelation and created a surge of interest in this style of regional American food. Since then, the accolades and awards from the culinary establishment have never stopped.
But the more time I spend with Lewis, the more I begin to suspect that her well-deserved status and prominence in the field are our own wishful construct, and not necessarily hers. Over the years, she's declined dozens of chances to pitch products, do television shows. The idea for her first cookbook, The Edna Lewis Cookbook, came, in fact, simply from being laid up in the hospital with a broken leg. "I was bored of just lying there." She does her work, step by step by step, with little need for anyone to be watching or applauding.
I'm reminded of what Alice Waters noted about Lewis when they were cooking together at a food festival. Lewis was preparing her famous biscuits, which was not so unusual. What struck Waters was how she was making them—hundreds and hundreds of them—which was, of course, by hand. From scratch. Most any other chef would have premade the batter, taken other shortcuts, and had a handful of helpers, but Lewis was preparing the batter right there, in small batches, and then cutting the biscuits one by one, all by herself, exactly as though she were just making a couple of dozen for family or friends.
This is not to suggest that Lewis's work ethic is merely strict or mindlessly rigid. There's a deep well of the artistic in her, though this, too, is something she is happy to downplay. On this afternoon of her birthday, she's wearing a richly textured dress that she's made herself, its black and gold brocade set off by a black pashmina shawl wrapped regally about one shoulder, her signature dangly earrings tugging at her earlobes. She's coolly stylish and elegant, and I get the feeling that she quietly bedazzles whatever room she enters. Jean-Claude Baker, the flamboyant owner of Chez Josephine, in Manhattan, describes how his normally boisterous restaurant always hushes when Ms. Lewis comes by on her visits to town.
"Look at that lady!" he exclaims in his French-accented English, thinking aloud for the dining room. "She must be fa-mous, she must be a di-va!" A diva in attitude she's not, but, as Jean-Claude notes, a diva she is metaphorically: "This woman, you should know, she is a great jazz singer, elegant and full of soul."
I'm thinking this, too, as the other guests begin to arrive, and I watch them kiss and hug Lewis while she sits not a little bit majestically in an easy chair, her white pepper hair pulled neatly back, her posture straight but still natural. She's Sarah Vaughan, she's Nina Simone. It's a very casual party, the only other cook being Peacock, the guests a smattering of local friends: a couple of visual artists, a nice retired lady who lives downstairs, the manager and a grad student/waiter from the restaurant where Peacock cooks. They're mostly Peacock's friends, as Lewis has only recently come down to Decatur to live, but they are clearly her friends as well now, part of an oddly delightful little group, an instant family gathered to honor their soft-spoken grande dame.
Peacock, who is running it all, is trying to apologize for the growing mess in the kitchen, and for the "nothing" meal he's planned: freshly shelled English pea soup, spears of asparagus with Vidalia vinaigrette, pink-hued fingerling radishes to dip in sweet butter and sea salt, crusty peasant bread, blocks of feta and marinated olives, "deviled" eggs à la Marion Cunningham, and, finally, the sweet organic strawberries I've just finished slicing, to be served with shortcake and whipped cream. Peacock plays up the chaos of his apartment kitchen, his tone and cherub's face all plaint and surrender, but of course he's a professional underneath, and somehow everything comes forth with delicacy and order, the table richly laid, and lovely.
I ask Peacock what he first remembers of Lewis.
"Oh goodness!" he exclaims, glancing at her mirthfully. "Should I tell?"
"I guess you're going to," Lewis mutters.
It was in 1989, and Lewis was then chef at Brooklyn's venerable 122-year-old landmark restaurant, Gage & Tollner. For years she'd been back in the South, overseeing the kitchens first at The Fearrington House Restaurant, near Chapel Hill, and then at Middleton Place, a historic rice plantation 14 miles northwest of Charleston. Peacock was picking her up at the train station for the Atlanta Southern Food Festival, where he'd asked to serve as her assistant. "She was dragging what must have been a hundred-pound box of pastry dough for pies and cobblers, twine tied all around. The poor thing wasn't sure she could get the exact kind or quality of ingredients she wanted down here, so rather than take a chance she made it all in New York and brought it down."
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