By Leah Asmelash, CNN
(CNN) — In the first chapter of Edna Lewis’s “The Taste of Country Cooking,” she focused not on food, but on a time and a place.
The cookbook, published in 1976 and continuously in print ever since, is divided seasonally. While introducing spring in Virginia, Lewis saves ingredients or instructions for later, opening with a description of the season’s first warm morning, marked by the sight of freshly hatched chicks, “chirping and pecking in the snowy slush.”
In those local, specific details was an approach that would revolutionize food culture across the country. Lewis grew up in Freetown, a farming community established by former slaves in central Virginia. To her, food was inherently tied to the seasons and to the land — a view of cuisine that Americans were used to applying to the fabled terroir of European wine and food, not their own.
Lewis died in 2006, but the ideas she shared 50 years ago in “The Taste of Country Cooking,” out in a new anniversary edition, define how the nation eats today. When the book first appeared, the South was still considered backward, and its food too salty and too fatty — a “heart attack on a plate,” in the words of the Southern chef Scott Peacock, who co-wrote a 2003 cookbook with Lewis and took care of her in her final years.
Lewis’s account of Southern cooking established what are now basic premises of American fine dining. Restaurants build menus around the turning of the seasons; online influencers preach the value of foraging and eating locally.
“She is certainly laying down the marker that says, ‘This is who we are,’” said author and journalist Toni Tipton-Martin, who wrote the foreword for the 50th anniversary edition, “‘and this is what our food is and has always been.’”
“The Taste of Country Cooking” at times reads more like a personal history than a cookbook. Lewis details the amount for which her enslaved grandmother was bought, and notes the poetry readings, children’s plays and other community events that shaped her early years. Her memories of food are tied to the changes of the year. There are summer thunderstorms and the joy of fresh turtle soup followed by late afternoon ice cream-making, a “family affair.” Later in the year comes the Emancipation Day celebration — no Thanksgiving here — and December’s hog butchering. In another book, the image of hogs hanging from scaffolds might be horrific; here, it is a thing of beauty, a visible representation of a community’s labor.
Lewis gives instructions on roasting one’s own coffee beans, decades before the third-wave coffee movement; she describes foraging for morel mushrooms and emphasizes the “great flavor” of local beef. Long before farm-to-table was a trend or expectation, before bakeries touted locally grown and milled flours or chefs and home cooks alike sourced directly from farmers markets, Lewis’s book provided a blueprint based on the cycles of Black farming.
While the book was “unquestionably” ahead of its time, Peacock said, it was less a runaway popular hit than a sensation among her fellow chefs and people “in the know.” The godfather of American gastronomy, James Beard, praised Lewis’s work in 1976 in his syndicated newspaper column, specifically applauding her rich descriptions of everyday communal living.
“I was extremely moved by the book,” he wrote, “and immediately wanted to cook many of these earthy American recipes that depend for their excellence on the bounty of our good soil.”
Using “good soil” to describe American food, particularly Southern food, marked a change of perspective. Southern culture wasn’t presented as refined, Peacock said. By using the language of French wines to write about Southern food, Beard was placing the latter on the same footing that European food held in the American imagination.
Still, “The Taste of Country Cooking” didn’t immediately