Deb Freeman:  The first thing that I thought of, is barbecue. You know, a lot of people think that barbecue, first of all, started in other places. It starts in Virginia. First of all, let's, let's put that out there.

Dan Pashman: Okay. All right. Uh, anyone who disagrees can send emails directly to Deb.  

Deb Freeman: I've gotten emails before. I've gotten them before. I'm not, I'm not new to this.

MUSIC

Dan Pashman: This is The Sporkful, it’s not for foodies it’s for eaters, I’m Dan Pashman. Each week on our show we obsess about food to learn more about people.

Dan Pashman: And before we get into it, we’re getting ready to tape another call in show, so if you have a food related disagreement with a friend or loved one, or a food hot take to share, I want to hear from you! Email me at hello@sporkful.com by February 26th and you might be in the episode! Thanks! 

Dan Pashman: On today’s show, we’re continuing Sporkful’s month in the South. We’ve already driven across Alabama and Mississippi, eating at gas stations. We did a live show in Memphis. And today we’re focusing on Virginia… with someone who’s not afraid to say that barbecue was invented there. That’s Deb Freeman you heard at the top, she’s a food writer and podcast host who’s spent most of her life in Virginia and lives there today. She’s written about the history of yellow cake, and the tradition of eating black-eyed peas on New Year’s. And she always has an eye out for any connection to Virginia.

Dan Pashman: Deb started writing about food a decade ago. She wanted to learn everything she could about African American foodways, which led her to a fellow Virginian who she hadn’t heard of before: Edna Lewis. Deb read that Edna was most famous for a book that’s considered a seminal work in food circles, but less well known elsewhere: The Taste of Country Cooking. 

Deb Freeman: So, I went to the bookstore that day. Picked up the book, and was just reading it in the car like a novel. And there were very few cookbooks that I had seen at the time that really reminded me of my grandmother's cooking, that really spoke to how I grew up. it was just really off to the races once I started reading that book.  

Dan Pashman: Were you like driving home reading the book? I'm picturing you in the, in a car…

Deb Freeman: Well I was in the parking lot.

Dan Pashman: Oh the parking lot, okay. I picture you like stopped at the red light, people behind you were honking, and you're like, but wait! What's going through your head as you're first leafing through those pages?

Deb Freeman: What's going through my mind is what is this? In my mind, I thought it was just a cookbook with recipes, like I would find something cool in there that would be interesting, but I didn't expect to find these descriptions of where she was from and what makes, you know, what makes a good chicken. And, you know, how do you make eggs? Like, I did not expect that and was just so shocked by reading this prose that I was just like, did I buy a memoir or did I buy a cookbook, you know? And so I was instantly enthralled.  It's been nearly a decade of trying to delve into her life and try her recipes and get to the source of who she was and why she decided to write about Virginia food.

Dan Pashman: In the past year, Deb’s interest has gone a step further: She made a documentary, called Finding Edna Lewis, which airs on PBS this month. In it she talks to people who knew Edna personally. She digs up what little archival footage there is of Edna. And she visits places where the author lived and worked, talking to different chefs today about how they’ve been influenced by Edna’s legacy. 

Deb Freeman: It's really interesting to me that she's not a household name like a Julia Child is or Alice Waters is. She's not quite on that pantheon. She's on my personal pantheon of culinary figures, but, you know, for the average household name, she's just not on that list. And that's just really unfortunate considering the profound impact she's had on food. 

MUSIC

Dan Pashman: Edna Lewis was one of the first Black women to write a successful mainstream cookbook about the South. She talked about seasonality and farm to table cooking long before it became trendy, and tied that approach to the way she grew up in Virginia. As I said, she’s well-known among insiders in the culinary world, so her work has probably influenced meals you’ve eaten. But as Deb points out, she’s not a household name.

Dan Pashman: Today, with Deb’s help, we’re asking, Why isn’t Edna Lewis better known? And who exactly was this person who changed the way Americans think about the food of the South? 

Dan Pashman: Edna Lewis was born in Freetown, Virginia in 1916.

Deb Freeman: Freetown, Virginia, is about 20 minutes away from Charlottesville, which is where Monticello is. So…

Dan Pashman: Thomas Jefferson's estate slash plantation.

Deb Freeman: Exactly. What's really interesting about Freetown is it was created by a group of formerly enslaved people and aptly named Freetown. So these were people who were very familiar with the land and working with their hands and all of that sort of thing. But they wanted to create a place that belonged to them. Formerly enslaved Black people who wanted to live life on their terms.

Dan Pashman: Here’s Edna Lewis talking about Freetown in an episode of The Kitchen Sisters radio show from 1983:

Edna Lewis (CLIP): “It was like one big family. I always felt loved and unafraid because everybody was your parent. Everybody loved you. Never lived in a community like that since. It’s unforgettable.”

Dan Pashman: Edna’s grandfather was one of the formerly enslaved founders of Freetown. These founders had little education, because learning to read and write was illegal when they were enslaved. But they built a church, hired a teacher for the children. And they created a farming community. So Edna grew up foraging for wild berries, nuts, and greens.

Deb Freeman: When it comes to food, she's eating what's available at the time. So before, you know, we think about seasonal cooking now, and it's kind of this phrase that we're all familiar with.

Dan Pashman: You mean seasonal cooking wasn't invented in San Francisco in 1972?

Deb Freeman: It was here in Virginia. No.

Dan Pashman: I thought… That's when I thought they had that idea!

Deb Freeman: That's called marketing. That's what that's called. Um, but yeah, I mean, but before that kind of becomes a catchphrase, farm-to-table, you know, really, Ms. Lewis is on the front end of that in the seventies because that's how she grew up in the, you know, her parents and etc. 

Dan Pashman: One of the points that one of your early guests in the documentary makes that struck me was that It seems like she had a pretty good upbringing.

Deb Freeman: Mhmm.

Dan Pashman: And a pretty good life and that that is it makes her story different from the stories of a lot of the Black American protagonists that we hear throughout our history. How is her story different from those and why was it important to you to include that in the film?

Deb Freeman: Well, I think what's so interesting, and that was Chef Leah Branch, who is the executive chef at the Roosevelt here in Richmond. Why I think that's so important is a lot of, there's no other way to say this I suppose, but there's a lot of Black trauma porn out there, if you will. 

MUSIC

Deb Freeman: And these are true stories, and there are horrible stories about what African Americans went through in this country. On the flip side, there are also stories of triumph and also everyday life, you know? Being able to live your life on your terms, particularly in that time frame for an African American, that's a victory. You know, and that should be celebrated in and of itself. There are so many different stories of the African American experience that are not based on slavery, that are not necessarily based on segregation. Not to say that these things were not happening around them. I want to be very clear. Lynchings were happening in the next county over. It was just really important for me to show the different sides of the Black experience.

Dan Pashman: As I said, Freetown was a Black farming community. But it was also heavily influenced by European cuisine, because it was near Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s estate slash plantation. Jefferson made Monticello a center of power and culture in the earliest days of America.

Deb Freeman: And obviously, because Thomas Jefferson was a Francophile and everyone says he's America's first foodie, but who was cooking that food, you know? And so I think that that is a key thing to talk about when you send an enslaved person off to get trained in France and to learn French techniques and come back and cook those things, it trickles down.

Dan Pashman: And in particular, we should say James Hemings, the brother of Sally Hemings...

Deb Freeman: Yes, yes.

Dan Pashman: James Hemings, the enslaved man, he went with Jefferson to France, lived in France with Jefferson, trained under French chefs there, brought back a lot of that food to Monticello. Anyone who was invited to eat at Monticello would have a taste of France. But James Hemings also kind of combined French technique with Black Southern cooking and Southern cooking more broadly. In fact, you could argue that mac and cheese is a French-Southern hybrid dish, am I right?

Deb Freeman: Oh, you're, you're talking to me, you're talking to me right now. I have, I have written articles about this.

Dan Pashman: Yes, yes. 

Deb Freeman: Because without Hemings, one, there's an English version of mac and cheese, if you allow me to go into a deep dive. 

Dan Pashman: Let's, yeah, let's take the time here, Deb. This is good. Yeah, we need to get into this.

Deb Freeman: [LAUGHS] There’s an English version that is a, what we would call kind of a stovetop, kind of a creamier mac and cheese versus when it's being cooked in a hearth, the way that Hemings did, that becomes your baked macaroni and cheese with the crust. And so that's why, you know, there's two types of mac and cheese that folks are familiar with.

Dan Pashman: That's… So the, like the sort of two canonical styles of mac and cheese — you're telling me that they go back to England and France, like one is sort of an English and one is sort of a French?

Deb Freeman: Absolutely. 

Dan Pashman: The crucial point here is that French and European cuisine was in Virginia. 

Deb Freeman: Yes.

Dan Pashman: And was brought to Virginia by James Hemings and other enslaved people and spread throughout the region going back to the 1700s. How did that influence the food that Edna Lewis saw growing up?

Deb Freeman: When you think about the way that she's cooking, I think a lot of people have a misconception about southern food and Virginia food as well, where it's just kind of these fried chicken, you know, collard greens, like kind of the big hits, right, the standards. But there's a lot of technique involved in many dishes that are Southern.

Dan Pashman: Many of the women in Freetown worked in Washington DC, just 130 miles away, cooking for white families. And they brought this French-inflected food with them.

Deb Freeman: That would not have been strange to them to be able to create a souffle or to create, for example, a cake that required a special technique of the way that you beat it, or, you know, creating a mother sauce. All of these things were not new. They just weren't talked about and they weren't written down. And so it just doesn't come out of nowhere.

Dan Pashman: Right. Are there other, a couple other specific examples that come to mind of some of the dishes that Edna Lewis would have seen cooked in Freetown, or would have cooked herself as a girl or young woman, that are indicative of that?

Deb Freeman: The way that she cooks asparagus, the way that she's handling vegetables.

Dan Pashman: So what, so, so I want to hear the details. 

Deb Freeman: Sure.

Dan Pashman: What exactly about the way that she cooked asparagus would have been French or European in its style?

Deb Freeman: Yeah, so for example, with asparagus, her recipe, the sauce that's used is a beurre blanc sauce. But that's not what it's called. It's just called a white sauce, right? Or an herb and lemon sauce in some instances. And so that is directly French. However, no one calls it that, right? But those are things that were just kind of handed down. It was just an everyday thing. You know, we're going to make the sauce with herbs, with butter, and with what we have available to us.

MUSIC

Dan Pashman: As idyllic as Edna’s childhood in Freetown was, things would take a turn. By the time she was a teenager her father had died and the Great Depression hit. As with many places around America, times in Freetown got tough. 

Deb Freeman: Freetown kind of limps along, to be honest. It was, it was there for several years, several decades after that, but it's no longer there. People moved to where jobs are. So eventually it kind of dwindles out, unfortunately. The land is there. There's a historical marker for it, for Ms. Lewis, that stands where Freetown would have been.

Dan Pashman: At age 16, Edna and her sister moved to Washington DC, in search of work. Edna became a seamstress, then a typist. 

Dan Pashman: After a decade or so there, she made her way to New York City, arriving in the early 1940s. That’s where she met her husband, Steve Kingston. He was a cook with the U.S. Merchant Marine. It’s in this period, when Edna’s in her mid-20s, that she really comes into her own as a cook.

Deb Freeman: During this time in New York, so she begins to actually cook for dinner parties around the city. And so she had a reputation as being this incredible cook for wealthy families in New York.

Dan Pashman: Predominantly for white people, is that right?

Deb Freeman: Correct. Yep.

Dan Pashman: As she’s making the rounds, people are talking about this incredible chef Edna Lewis – and a guy named John Nicholson hears about her. John Nicholson is an art dealer, a white guy who’s the type to frequent the parties that Edna’s catering. He’s decided that he wants to get into the restaurant business… and then he hears about Edna. Her food has been creating a buzz – exactly the kind of buzz John wants for his fledgling restaurant. And even though Edna has never cooked in a restaurant, John hires her as executive chef. He calls the place Cafe Nicholson.

Deb Freeman: And this is the first time you see kind of the Freetown food and the Virginia food on the news. She was known for her chocolate souffle, for example. The New York Times wrote about that dish. And so that's not something that you, she was on a plate readily in Freetown. But she takes her experiences from learning from cooking for all of these white families and these white dinner parties and marries that with the tradition of cooking that she had back in Virginia and creates this menu. It really became the hot spot for bohemians to use that word of the time. And so folks, very famous people would show up there. Eleanor Roosevelt showed up there and all of these dignitaries show up there for her food. And unfortunately, there aren’t a lot of photos, but you can kind of see her in the back, kind of in the shadows in one photo. That was her first professional job cooking.

Dan Pashman: What other menu items do we know of from that restaurant? You said chocolate souffle.

Deb Freeman: Yeah, And this is where seasonality starts to happen. Because she's going to the market every single day and choosing what's fresh, what is actually there, what's available to create a menu. So the menu actually varied depending on what was in the market from day to day. There was chicken on the menu. It was not fried chicken. Truman Capote would ask her to make biscuits, and she would, she would kind of push him away and say, “No, no, I'm not making biscuits for you. That's not what I'm here for.” But as they established a little bit of a relationship, she would make a couple and, and give it to him. 

Dan Pashman: Why didn't she want to make biscuits?

Deb Freeman: I think, honestly, my opinion is that she didn't want to be pigeonholed. You know, I think that's something that even today, a lot of Black chefs wrestle with, with being pigeonholed into cooking very specific things. And I think that at that point, because she was able to cook some things that were not necessarily Southern, that were not necessarily stereotypical, I think that she was enjoying kind of expanding her culinary palate and her culinary talents. And I think she wanted to not necessarily show off, but show range.

Dan Pashman: So, so the food that she's making at Cafe Nicholson is really, it really is kind of like the next chapter in this centuries-old story of the confluence of Black Southern cooking and French cooking.

Deb Freeman: Absolutely. And I think that it's notable that the, you know, when The New York Times, for example, comes and they write about all of these different food, they, if you go back and read, you know the writer seems a little surprised, I think, because she knew who Edna Lewis was and knew what she looked like. I think that was a little surprising.

Dan Pashman: You're saying that writer from The New York Times was surprised not that Edna Lewis was Black, but surprised of the type of food.

Deb Freeman: Exactly. She shows a variety. She shows that we are, are different. You know, heck, people in Alabama are cooking different than people in Virginia. We're not monoliths here in the South, and particularly not as Black people.

Dan Pashman: How did the New York restaurant scene react to this restaurant and to Edna's cooking?

Deb Freeman: It was a huge success. Honestly, I'm not sure she expected that, because she's just kind of cooking the way she's always cooked in a lot of ways. And so it was received incredibly well, and I think that really is where she's starting to get legs under her and her name underneath her.

MUSIC

Dan Pashman: Edna left Cafe Nicholson in 1954, after five years as the executive chef. We don’t know why she left; she never said anything about it publicly. In the decade or so after, she and her husband opened a pheasant farm  in New Jersey, but all the birds got sick and died. She opened a Southern restaurant in Harlem, but it went bankrupt. At one point she got a job as a teaching assistant at the Museum of Natural History in New York.

Dan Pashman: Edna seemed to be struggling to get a foothold in food, or anywhere. 

Dan Pashman: Coming up, she gets the opportunity to write a cookbook -- but it doesn’t go the way she hopes. Then later, long after many folks would have retired, she returns to restaurant life. That’s after the break, stick around.

+++ BREAK +++

MUSIC

Dan Pashman: Welcome back to The Sporkful, I’m Dan Pashman. It’s not too late to catch up on our month in the South! We did a live show in Memphis with local restaurateur Karen Blockman Carrier. She has stories about everyone from Nina Simone to Tom Cruise. Then last week I hit the road and sampled a bunch of gas station eateries in Alabama and Mississippi.

Dan Pashman (CLIP): This is the last of their chicken spaghetti today. He was reluctant to serve it to me, but I think he could tell by the look in my eyes that I desperately wanted it. So he said, he said he would sell it to me at a discount. So I'm eating some discount, several hour old chicken spaghetti at a gas station in Tupelo, Mississippi. And I am having a blast.

Dan Pashman: You’ll have to listen to find out what I thought of it — let’s just say I was quite shocked! You can find that episode and the live show in Memphis in your feed right now.

Dan Pashman: Okay, back to Deb Freeman and our conversation about Edna Lewis.

Dan Pashman: After struggling for fifteen years to find a career foothold, Edna gets an opportunity. A white socialite named Evangeline Peterson takes a liking to Edna, and wants to write a cookbook with her. In 1972 they publish The Edna Lewis Cookbook.

Deb Freeman: A lot of people actually don't talk about that cookbook or even know about that cookbook. It feels like any other cookbook. That cookbook really pulls from a lot of her dinner parties that she was cooking for. It's a lot fancier kind of cooking, and I feel like there's a disconnect there. And I think that's because she was writing things that she could do and do well, but I don't think she was passionate about it.

Dan Pashman: It wasn't personal.

Deb Freeman: It wasn't personal. And so that cookbook did not have a lot of commercial success.

Dan Pashman: Oftentimes, that's the end of your cookbook career.

Deb Freeman: Yeah.

Dan Pashman: And yet, just a few years later, she gets a call from who?

Deb Freeman: From Judith Jones.

Dan Pashman: Judith Jones, legendary cookbook editor who we actually did a whole episode featuring her story this past fall. So I'll encourage listeners to check that out for a deep dive on Judith Jones, but most famous for sort of discovering and editing Julia Child's most seminal cookbooks. So, this is in the 70s. So this is 10 years after Julia Child's first cookbook comes out. Judith Jones now is a huge figure in publishing after that success. She takes an interest in Edna Lewis.

Deb Freeman: Absolutely. So she takes an interest. I mean, Judith Jones was interested in kind of creating this series, this kind of types of cookbooks. So a French cookbook and all of these sort of things. And she wanted a cookbook that really taught to the American South. And so she, you know, meets Ms. Lewis and Ms. Lewis comes in with a yellow legal pad with all kinds of notes. And so they had a series of meetings and Ms. Lewis decided she wanted to do this cookbook. And I think that what she saw in Ms. Lewis was something, a perspective that was not necessarily heralded. I think that she saw a versatility in Ms. Lewis, because she can do both, right? She can do the expected, quote unquote, Southern food, but she can also do, you know, more experience, the things that I was mentioning earlier that aren't necessarily typical. Also, you know, in The Editor where I was reading the book by Sara B. Franklin, you know, there's a passage in there where Judith Jones is so taken by what Ms. Lewis looks like, you know, that she was so tall and graceful and dressed in African attire. And I think that might have sparked something in Judith Jones's mind as well, that there's, there's something a little different here.

Dan Pashman: Yeah, I have that quote and that struck me too. Judith Jones said, “When Edna swept into my office in this beautiful garb, her hair piled up, she was just such a presence that you were a little awed by her.” Now first of all, Judith Jones was known to be a somewhat intimidating figure. 

Deb Freeman: Right.

Dan Pashman: So for Judith Jones to be awed by someone…

Deb Freeman: Yeah.

Dan Pashman: …already tells you something about Ms. Lewis’s presence. But I also feel like, reading that quote, it really made me think, Edna Lewis couldn't possibly have been the only Black woman in New York who was a great cook at that time.

Deb Freeman: Oh, of course, of course.

Dan Pashman: I'm sure there were many. And yet, she was the one who got all this buzz around her from the dinner parties. She was the one who was picked to be the chef at a restaurant. She was the one who got two cookbook opportunities in the 1970s. What do you think it was about her that made her the person that did all this?

Deb Freeman: Yeah, I mean, I think that's a good question. I, I think… Is it fate? Is it that the way she carried herself and that people were not used to seeing Black women carry themselves in that particular way? I mean, Ms. Lewis was also quite tall and she looked like a model. So many people say, “Oh, I thought she was a model.” So I wonder if it's her countenance. And so the way when people interact with her, if people are kind of taken aback, then there's something different. I think she stands out in a way that other Cooks at the time don't, you know, and not to say that they weren't great cooks of their own. But I think that Ms. Lewis had a little something extra. that folks had not seen yet. Um, and so I think that uniqueness is what made her stand out and what led to these opportunities for her.

Dan Pashman: Yeah, there's something about the way that she speaks and the way that she carries herself. You can even see it in photos that it's almost sort of regal.

Deb Freeman: Yeah. And not in a kind of snobbish way either. Just “I am what I am” kind of thing. I think that her upbringing in Freetown has a lot to do with that. I think that because that community was so tight-knit and because it was an all Black community, I think that her sense of self really comes through in a way that perhaps someone in a more populated area who has to deal with segregation on a daily basis… perhaps that might be a part of it.

Dan Pashman: So Judith Jones was very impressed with Edna Lewis, and wanted to take Edna’s second book in a very different direction from the first one. No more New York dinner parties. Instead, Judith encouraged Edna to think back on her childhood in Virginia and put those experiences into the book. It would be called The Taste of Country Cooking. This is the book that Deb couldn’t put down in the bookstore parking lot.

Deb Freeman: When she's writing it, she is absolutely recalling things from her childhood: what she's experiencing, what the steps are, all the recipes. 

Dan Pashman: Edna made frequent calls back to Freetown to confirm the details of certain recipes. She would write the prose and recipes on yellow legal pads, and then her niece Nina Williams typed up the manuscript. Deb spoke with Nina for the documentary – Nina says her aunt cooked some dishes over and over again to be sure the recipes were just right.

Deb Freeman: I think what was important for her was just to represent her community. I think that's what her niece kept saying was that her intentionality and wanting to make sure that she did justice to where she came from. That was the driving focus for her. And so what stands apart is because she's putting all of herself into it. I think that Judith Jones knew that if she could convey that on the page, other people would be very interested in it and it would be received well. And she was absolutely correct.

Dan Pashman: So in The Taste of Country Cooking, Edna didn’t just share recipes like the other cookbooks of the time did. This was an early version of a genre that’s become common: a cookbook memoir. Edna wrote about hog butchering time in Freetown, and reminisced about the dishes she remembered from Christmas. I asked Deb to read an excerpt, which illustrates Edna’s vivid storytelling.

MUSIC

Deb Freeman: “A stream filled from the melted snows of winter would flow quietly by us. gurgling softly and gently, pulling the leaf of a fern that hung lazily from the side of its bank. After moments of complete exhilaration, we would return joyfully to the house for breakfast.”

Dan Pashman: To me, that really shows you how evocative this book is of a specific place.

Deb Freeman: Absolutely. I'm right there with her. The way that she does that really invokes the reader in, and it also gives a sense of place that surrounds all of these recipes.

Dan Pashman: In 1976, when Edna Lewis is 60, The Taste of Country Cooking comes out. It gets good reviews, but it’s not a massive hit. 

Deb Freeman: But I think what's more important than how it was received is that it was respected. I think that made people in the culinary world really start to sit up and go, Oh, wait a minute. This is this is something different.

Dan Pashman: In other words, the book’s biggest impact was among chefs and other insiders who recognized it as a new addition to the American canon. That said, it didn’t make Edna all that much money.

MUSIC

Dan Pashman: She’d write two more books in her lifetime, with long stretches of time between them – In Pursuit of Flavor came out in 1988, and The Gift of Southern Cooking came out in 2003. She also got back to working in restaurants. When she was almost 70, she got a job at Middleton Place in South Carolina. It was a wedding venue… and a former plantation.

Deb Freeman: She was cooking at the restaurant that was on property, and she actually lived on the top floor of the millhouse, and the millhouse is where enslaved women and children would basically mill rice, and it overlooks the rice paddies. So she's constantly surrounded by thoughts of what this place was, right? Even though it's no longer a working plantation, it's very clear that it was a plantation. What's interesting about her time there, though, is that she starts to kind of learn different ingredients. For example, red rice, she comes up… that's a very popular addition in Charleston that's not found in Virginia, but she's expanding her culinary repertoire. She remarked that she was lonely there. She did not have a lot of friends there. So it was a very lonely time for her.

Dan Pashman: Did she wrestle with the decision to go in the first place?

Deb Freeman: Yeah, we don't have any public knowledge of that. I think that that's one of the biggest questions I have personally, is: How did that feel being there for that amount of time, knowing what that place was, and living physically above where enslaved people were working? What was that like?

Dan Pashman: Edna stayed at Middleton for about three years. And then in 1989, she got a job that brought her back to New York – this time at the oyster and chop house Gage and Tollner. Gage and Tollner has had its own wild history. It first opened in the 1800s. When Edna came on board she changed their menu for the first time in more than 100 years. She added dishes from her own repertoire like pan-fried quail and she-crab soup. Several years after she left, the restaurant closed and became a TGI Friday’s, among other chains. It only recently reopened after a big renovation, under the leadership of Chef Sohui Kim, friend of the show. Sohui put the she-crab soup back on the menu.

Dan Pashman: Anyway, while Edna was at Gage and Tollner, she finally started to get her due, after decades cooking in restaurants and writing cookbooks. It seems the respect she earned with Taste of Country Cooking slowly permeated the whole food world, and over time the book influenced a new generation of chefs. Edna won a Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Association of Culinary Professionals. She won the James Beard Living Legend Award. She was named a Grand Dame by Les Dames d'Escoffier. So I asked Deb Freeman: What did all of that recognition mean to Edna?

Deb Freeman: I think that she was actually a little surprised. She definitely was grateful and loved it. But for her, she was still just cooking what she knew. And so she was not someone who was interested in celebrity or interested in accolades. I think that she was far more interested in being true to who she was as a chef. But I think that it's also interesting that all of these accolades happened so late in her life.

Dan Pashman: Was she ever resentful that she didn't get the credit she deserved, more credit, and earlier?

Deb Freeman: I'm sure there had to have been some sense of, come on now. You know? I think there did have to be some sense of, it took this long for y'all to see this? But I think that, you know, everyone describes her as gracious and humble. And so I think that, of course, who doesn't like to be told that they're really great and get pats on the back? But I don't think that was a primary focus. But I do wonder if it might have been too late for it to matter in the way that it could have, say, twenty years prior to that when she was 59 versus 79.

MUSIC

Dan Pashman: Edna spent the last years of her life with a perhaps unlikely friend – a chef from Alabama named Scott Peacock who was fifty years younger, white, and gay. They became not just friends but also co-authors of Edna’s last book, and eventually roommates. He took care of her until she died in 2006, at age 89.

Deb Freeman: He really admired Ms. Lewis and the work that she did. And I think that he really does work to make sure that folks still know who she is. And really, you know, talks about his time with her in, in a way that's, that's not only fond, but almost puts her on a pedestal.

Dan Pashman: In the documentary, you spend time with the chef Mashama Bailey in Georgia. She's the chairperson of the Edna Lewis Foundation. She also has a very well known restaurant called The Grey. And you cooked the braised lamb shoulder from The Taste of Country Cooking. You also met up with a friend of the show, Nicole Taylor, at Gage and Tollner and ate some dishes there inspired by Ms. Lewis's cooking.

Deb Freeman: Yeah, the she-crab soup, first of all, which I think is a really lovely tribute. They have fried chicken on the menu, but, you know, there's a spin on it with kimchi. So, but that is still a nod to Ms. Lewis. And when you walk in and you’re greeted at the hostess stand, there's a postcard with Ms. Lewis's portrait on it.

Dan Pashman: What does it feel like for you to cook those dishes, to eat those dishes today, having gone through this journey of learning so much about her?

Deb Freeman: It makes me feel a bit closer to her. I mean, in a lot of ways, she is still very much an enigma for me because there's not a lot of documents that I can look to and definitively say what she was thinking. thinking or point to about how she felt in a particular moment. That definitely was the challenge in this documentary. But I think that Ms. Lewis really was talking to us through her food and the way that she wrote about her food. And so I think tasting those recipes made me feel closer to her and that she was just kind of out of focus, just kind of in the background somewhere. Her cookbooks still speak to so many people, because her life and the way that she desired to write about food, because it impacts people today, she's still here. She lingers. 

Dan Pashman: There are very few recordings of Edna Lewis still around today. But the documentary ends with a clip of her, sharing her philosophy on food: 

Edna Lewis (CLIP): “You spend just intensely, intensely working on something and it is eaten and gone. [laughs] But I think some foods linger, which although they’re eaten and gone, if it’s good it’ll be remembered. So, it is gone but remembered.”

MUSIC

Dan Pashman: That’s Deb Freeman. Her documentary, Finding Edna Lewis, airs on PBS on February 18, which is also when it will be available on demand on the PBS app and website.

Dan Pashman: Next week on the show – we complete our month in the South with Devin Pickard. He’s a Tennessee pitmaster from Monday to Saturday… and a preacher on Sunday. That episode is out next week. 

Dan Pashman: While you’re waiting for that one, check out last week’s gas station road trip across Alabama and Mississippi, where I sample tacos, sushi, and a very specific regional pasta dish. It’s up now.