OP: The Edna Lewis Cookbook

One of the most recognized figures of modern American cooking, Edna Lewis (1916–2006) played a major role in establishing the view that the rural southern Black cooking with which she grew up was not just a local phenomenon but a strongly rooted tradition that had much to offer. Her great Taste of Country Cooking (1976) gave a presence to greens, corn pone, and pork cracklings, showing such foods to be much more than vaguely interesting regional novelties. Less well known is that Lewis did not come to serve this role directly from her country roots. She was, in fact, a highly accomplished restaurant cook, co-owning and cooking at New York’s celebrated Café Nicolson until the late 1950s and later at Brooklyn’s Gage and Tollner.  After teaching cooking for some years, she undertook this, her first cookbook, aided by one of her students, Evangeline Peterson. It was published in 1972. It is a wondrous amalgam of the foods of her Virginia childhood and the sophisticated restaurant food of N