Taste Of Country Cooking
Edna Lewis’s The Taste of Country Cooking (Knopf, 1976) is not just a cookbook. It is a cultural document, a record of rural Black Southern life told in its own voice and on its own terms. Written by a woman who grew up in Freetown, Virginia—a community founded by formerly enslaved people—this book remains one of the most important texts in Black American foodways.
Lewis wrote not from nostalgia but from lived experience. She gave us recipes, but more importantly, she gave us context: the land, the seasons, the rituals, and the values that shaped every meal. Organized by season rather than course, the book follows the natural rhythms of agrarian life. It honors the food traditions passed down in families and celebrates the deep knowledge Black communities developed over generations.
“We did not grow tired of the season’s foods, for the variety was great and each food was enjoyed in its season.”
—The Taste of Country Cooking, p. 4
This is not a performance of Southern food for white audiences. Lewis centers a Black rural world where fried chicken is reserved for Sunday, spoon bread is treated with care, and Emancipation Day is celebrated with strawberry shortcake and neighborly pride. Her storytelling is quiet but firm. It makes no apologies, and it does not translate Black life for outside comfort.
Lewis was the first widely published Black woman chef to write in her own name and her own voice. Her editor at Knopf, Judith Jones—who also worked with Julia Child—recognized her brilliance. But unlike Child or James Beard, Lewis did not need to borrow from French technique or culinary theory. Her authority came from memory, land, and lineage.
As food scholar Jessica B. Harris writes in High on the Hog, Lewis offered a model for Black culinary authorship that was full, intellectual, and rooted in self-definition. Her book paved the way for writers like Bryant Terry, Michael Twitty, and Toni Tipton-Martin, whose The Jemima Code documents the long history of Black culinary excellence and erasure.
“Fried chicken was always a special treat. We only had it on Sundays, for company, or on holidays.”
—The Taste of Country Cooking, p. 129
Lewis’s work is a reminder that Black food has always been intentional, resourceful, and full of care. Long before “farm-to-table” became a trend, her community lived that way out of tradition and sustainability, not fashion.
Nearly 50 years later, The Taste of Country Cooking still stands as a declaration of Black rural life—its elegance, its labor, and its memory. For those of us working to preserve and advance Black culinary heritage, Lewis remains a guide. She didn’t just preserve the past. She wrote it into history.
