“Once the corn was all cut and stacked in shocks, a group of high school students who loved my mother would come on the first moonlit night and help us with the corn shucking. They thought it great fun, boys and girls with their favorite friends. After the shucking they would return to the house and be given a festive meal that my mother had had in preparation all afternoon: one of fried chicken, baked ham, roasted, newly dug sweet potatoes, baked tomatoes, green beans, cake, and apple pie. The next morning the corn field was dotted over with mounds of yellow corn, ready to be picked up and hauled to the corn crib.”
The respect we have for Edna Lewis is intense. (Aioli-intense. Aris-intense. Tahini-intense.) She’s the official queen of the south: a spokesperson whose food is so deeply rooted in a time and place that it’s almost unnecessary cook it yourself. Rather, it’s best devoured in written form, by way of spooling stories of her idyllic, hard-won childhood in a closely knit farming community Freetown, Virginia — therein lies the pleasure of The Taste of Country Cooking.
Lewis’ life was no joke. Her grandfather, a freed slave, was one of the founders of Freetown. Together with her grandmother, the Lewis’ built a life of sustenance, abundance, love and hard-ass work.
This book provides rare insight into what it’s really like to provide for oneself. You think you’re self-sufficient? You’ve probably never gathered snow for your dessert, planted crops in accordance with the signs of the Zodiac, or spent three weeks preparing for a Christmas dinner for an entire community. Edna did all of this — starting when she was 6 years old.
But her secret — and what makes us love her most — is that she doesn’t come at the work begrudgingly; it’s simply her way of being. Her family works tirelessly, but at the beginning, middle and end of each day, there are feasts. Big feasts. Bountiful feasts of pork-laden greens, scruffy biscuits, blueberry pie and dandelion wine. For Lewis, there is pleasure bound into that work; one cannot exist without the other. After years of enslavement, that sounds like freedom.
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