Edna Lewis
Edna Lewis was born in 1916 in Freetown, Virginia, a rural community of freed slaves founded by her grandfather in the late nineteenth century. Growing, harvesting, and cooking with fresh foods was a way of life she has celebrated in four exceptional cookbooks on "Southern cooking" which have brought her numerous culinary awards and international celebrity.
Now known as the Grande Dame of Southern Cooking, Edna Lewis has given us books which weave memoir and recipe into delightful histories of Southern food, rural life, and cooking. Her devotion to the use of fresh vegetables and fruits presaged the contemporary "fresh foods" movement in American cooking. She has lived and worked in Chapel Hill, North Carolina; Manhattan, New York; Charleston, South Carolina; and currently resides in Decatur, Georgia, a vibrant intown community of Atlanta, Georgia.
In 2003, at age 87,Lewis published her fourth book, The Gift of Southern Cooking, with Scott Peacock, a noted Alabama chef. To read the full text of an article describing her fascinating life and cooking legacy, use the E-Journals search to find "Southern Secrets from Edna Lewis," by Gwendolyn Glenn in American Visions, Feb/Mar 1997. This article is cited in the International Index to Black Periodicals Full Text, available as a VCU research database.
The Black History Month link on the Epicurious website gives another biographical look at Edna Lewis: http://www.epicurious.com/cooking/holiday/black_history.
--Phyllis Jennings, Reference Librarian.