We're sitting in the small kitchen of the three-bedroom flat in Decatur, Georgia, that Edna Lewis shares with her housemate (and best friend and protégé), a young chef named Scott Peacock. It's Lewis's birthday, and Peacock is at the counter, working on a celebratory supper. I'm the first guest to have arrived.
"Whatcha makin' there?" Lewis calls to him, half winking at me.
"Never you mind, mother," Peacock answers tartly. "You just sit and talk."
"I haven't much to say," she says, smiling her famous, ever-girlish smile.
Peacock, deftly slicing the opaque demiglobe of a crisp Vidalia, murmurs, "I'm sure."
They parry a bit more, laying on a little extra, perhaps, for their interested visitor. None of it is put-on or showy, just playful and mischievous. It's kitchen talk, girl talk—gentle and cleaned up, of course—and I'm feeling as if I've stopped by at the next-door neighbors' party and invited myself in. For now, Peacock has me slicing up local organic strawberries for the shortcake dessert. Lewis is relaxing, watching my slow work with the paring knife. Red juice is dripping all over the table. No one seems to mind.
This is my second visit to Lewis and Peacock's household. The first, a few months ago, was for a formal interview with this woman who, in a quiet fashion, as a chef, cookbook author, and champion of southern cooking, is as legendary in the food world as Julia Child. On that occasion, I knock on the door, and Lewis answers it. I introduce myself, and after a brief, awkward pause she lets me in. The expression on her face is a little unsure, dubious. Peacock, who worked very late the night before, is still sleeping.
We sit in the small living room, its furniture antique and eclectic. Everywhere around us are books and old jazz LPs. Conveying an impression of whole lifetimes distilled, mementos and tchotchkes crowd the shelves. It's midafternoon, and after a few moments of pleasant but hesitant conversation, Lewis asks if I would like a drink. I happily agree, and she brings out a tray with two crystal Sherry glasses and a bottle of Jack Daniel's.
The apartment, in a complex 20 minutes from Atlanta, is not at all what I'd expected. In food circles, the 85-year-old Lewis is a luminary, mention of her name always accompanied by superlatives. She, more than any other cook, is responsible for creating a nationwide interest in southern cooking, for giving it a respectability it had never known before. I'd envisioned a chef of Lewis's stature spending her late-in-life years in something closer to prosperous—a big, rambling house, maybe, with a huge country kitchen outfitted with butcher-block counters and a deep soapstone sink. Or perhaps something in the polished-brass mode of the New South, but still grand and stately.
She and Peacock actually live in a patch of low-rise, older brick apartments surrounding a central parking lot, deep in a leafy suburban wood. It's not by any means awful, but the landscaping is tired, and it all seems plain and unspecial, like a small college dormitory. The apartment is, in fact, rather collegiate in spirit, with Lewis and Peacock in their own bedrooms and sharing everything else. The feeling of the place is of an ongoing project. Peacock has been painting the walls in vibrant, funky colors (the bathroom is Day-Glo pretty-in-pink), Lewis casting rich fabrics over the sofas and chairs, the collection of paintings and prints growing in the wake of their many travels.
Lewis pours us each a small shot, and we sit quietly, sipping the whiskey. Soon enough, our conversation comes more easily, especially when the talk turns to our mothers. Of course I'd read and admired Lewis's books, including The Taste of Country Cooking, first published in 1976, and In Pursuit of Flavor, which came out in 1988. They're full of great stories and scenes of rural southern life, as well as recipes, but it's the regular mention of her mother's work in the garden and kitchen, the great care with which she cooked and canned each season, that charms me most.
Lewis asks me about my own mother, and I reply that it was through her that I came to develop an interest in food and cooking, spending many late afternoons lingering in the kitchen while she prepared spicy casseroles and little dishes of Korean vegetables. Lewis wonders if I still cook with her, and when I say she died quite some time ago she seems to skip a breath, her expressive eyes locked on me.
"She must have been young. You're so young."
"I guess she was."
"That's awful, awful. But you have good memories."
I nod, and Lewis pours us another sweet thimbleful each. I ask about her memories, not just the ones she's written about, but others, the moments that she'll always hold on to.
She recalls her family's life in Freetown, Virginia, a village whose first inhabitants were freed slaves—among them her grandfather. It was, Lewis says, "a wonderful place to grow up," a tight-knit, self-sufficient community of farming people, which, she recalls, was especially important during the years of the Great Depression.
"We all helped one another," she says. "We got along on what we grew ourselves, and whatever was left was canned or cured for another day. We didn't have a lot, but we didn't go hungry."
At that time, many other people did encounter extreme hardship, and Lewis recalls the day a man came riding up to their cluster of eight small houses. He climbed down from his horse and stepped up onto the porch of her mother's house, his hat in his hands. He was a white man. They all thought he was some kind of county official, or maybe a salesman, or worse. He knocked on the door, and Lewis's mother cautiously answered it. The man greeted her politely, and then he asked if he could have a little food. Lewis's mother came back inside, gathered a few things, and gave them to him. He quietly thanked her and rode away.
"I realized then how bad things had become," Lewis says. "For a white man to ask us for something to eat."
I wonder aloud how it was for her growing up black in rural Virginia in the 1920s and '30s. Whether there were difficult times or incidents. But Lewis just lowers her gaze, the corners of her mouth lifting slightly, in what I think of as a near-Buddhist lilt. Something has come, a sudden bloom of remembrance, though the only thing she mentions is her late husband's efforts on behalf of the Scottsboro Boys, the eight young black men who were sentenced to death for allegedly raping two white girls on a train near Scottsboro, Alabama, in 1931. Theirs was a national cause célèbre, and due to the organizing and fund-raising efforts of people like the Lewises, the death sentences were commuted. Eventually the guilty verdicts were overturned, and one by one—over many years—the men were freed.
"My husband, Steven, was always out marching, rallying for the Scottsboro Boys. At night we'd gather in somebody's apartment and debate how best to go about helping them."
"You must have been involved, too," I say.
"I was, but mostly I was helping my husband. I cooked a little for everybody sometimes. But Steven was out front. He did everything he could. He was a good man."
"Was he a lawyer?"
Lewis shakes her head. "He was a Communist. We all were."
"Are you still?"
She smiles. "I suppose so. Yes."
I ask her what it means to her to be a Communist (in spirit, if not formally affiliated), especially now, during these supercharged, moneyed times. Lewis doesn't really try to explain, except to say that her life has always been about work and people. With gentle pride she says that her days have consisted of simple efforts and that her lifelong political activism has been closely tied to her work with food.
It was a vocation that evolved naturally. She left Freetown at age 16 and, after a brief stay in Washington, D.C., moved to New York City. There, she supported herself with odd jobs in service positions and, later, landed work dressing windows at Bonwit Teller. Her circle of friends were artists and writers who would periodically crowd into each other's tiny apartments and hold raucous dinner parties. The hosting and cooking rotated, everyone doing a turn, though it soon became clear to all where the dinners should always be held. In Freetown it had been her mother and older sister who prepared all the meals, but Lewis had watched carefully. She cooked the same kinds of dishes for her friends that she herself had eaten all her life: spring chicken with watercress, scallions in cream, fruit cobbler, everything simple but deeply flavorful. When one of those friends, an antiques dealer named John Nicholson, decided to open a restaurant, he proclaimed that Lewis would be the chef and an equal partner. The year was 1948. She agreed, and Café Nicholson was born on East 57th Street, with Lewis (and only Lewis) manning the kitchen.
The first night, she recalls, took them by surprise. She ran out of food by 6 p.m., and had to send Nicholson out for more ingredients. But by the end of the week they were fully stocked and ready, and her on-the-job training as a professional chef began in full. The restaurant soon became known for such classics as broiled oysters, roast chicken, filet mignon, and a legendarily ethereal chocolate soufflé. It was a magnet for actors, writers, composers. Marlon Brando and Tennessee Williams would come by late, after a performance of A Streetcar Named Desire. There were regular visits from Truman Capote, the Ira Gershwins, Muriel Draper (wearing her signature wide-brim hat with little balls hanging all around), and Stella Adler, who'd step into the kitchen first thing and take down her own bottle of a favorite wine (the restaurant had no liquor license).
"We always had a fabulous room in the way of regulars," Lewis recalls. "It was a crazy scene, but, you know, people also came for the food. It wasn't fancy food, really. They would call ahead before driving back from the Hamptons to say they wanted me to save a couple of chickens for them. People loved that roast chicken."
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."
"You'd do just the same," Lewis says.
"Oh please," Peacock retorts, though a moment later he whispers to me, "You know, I probably would."
They worked well together, and soon enough they were arranging meetings at conferences and food festivals whenever they had the opportunity. In 1993, the two helped found the Society for the Revival and Preservation of Southern Cooking. The relationship has grown to become far more personal than professional, though, and if the two share ideals concerning cuisine—they are working together on a new cookbook—it's easy to see that the expressions of this bond are mostly of the kind a mother might share with her favorite son—the details and intimacies of time, a way of doing this or that, a special dish here or there.
In a quiet moment, I ask Lewis whether, after all these years of effort and work, she considers herself to be an artist.
"An artist?"
"Work can be art," I say.
"Gee, I don't know." Then, after a while, she says, "I don't think I am an artist. I don't worry about that kind of thing, I guess. I never really have. I don't have regrets. I just think about doing things right. I do what I feel like I should do, and the way I should do it. Then I go on to something else. If that's art."
I nod, thinking it is. Peacock comes by, bearing plates of dessert. Enough talk, for now. We each take one, and just eat.