Edna Lewis

News Obituary Article

A PASSION FOR FOOD: EDNA LEWIS 1916-2006: First lady of Southern cooking dies

By WENDELL BROCK

The granddaughter of a Virginia slave, Edna Lewis created a gastronomic temple out of a tiny New York cafe and served such 20th-century luminaries as Truman Capote, Greta Garbo and William Faulkner.

A culinary purist, she milked her own cows, walked blocks to find the perfect peach and could tell when a cake was ready by "listening" to it.

By the time of her death early Monday at 89, she had become the South's answer to Julia Child, influencing a generation of cooks and writers who were eager to preserve the region's vanishing food culture.

Foremost among her students was Scott Peacock, executive chef of Watershed restaurant and her caretaker for the past seven years. He was at Lewis' bedside when she died in the Decatur apartment they shared.

"It was very peaceful," said Peacock, who said his mentor had grown "increasingly frail" in recent months. While acknowledging his loss, he added: "What I feel mostly is gratitude. I am so humbled and incredibly fortunate to have had a friendship that was so tremendously deep. She gave me serenity to the end."

Judith Jones, Lewis' longtime editor at Alfred A. Knopf in New York, responded to the news of the death with happy reflection. "She lives on every time I taste fried chicken or in little memories of how she listened to the sound of a cake baking in the oven. So she's with me all the time. That's a great gift."

Lewis --- who turned New York's Cafe Nicholson into an artists' mecca where Garbo and Capote dined on oysters and chocolate souffle --- was considered by many to be one of the best cooks in America.

As an author, she penned the classic "The Taste of Country Cooking" (1976) and, with Peacock, "The Gift of Southern Cooking" (2003).

Long in the making and finished by Peacock in Lewis' later years, the latter volume received a coveted James Beard nomination and reams of publicity that focused as much on the duo's relationship as it did their recipes.

He is white, gay and in his 40s; she was African-American, a widow and nearing 90. Together they shared an irrepressible passion for food.

After Peacock opened a community trust account to help pay for Lewis' home care in 2004, Lewis' family called his appeal for money a "disgrace" and asked that Lewis move home to Virginia. But she remained in the art-filled Decatur apartment she shared with Peacock. According to Peacock, the relationship has since become "more cordial."

"She and her family had been through so much together," said Lewis' niece, Nina Williams-Mbengue of Aurora, Colo. "It would have been great for them to all be together at the last."

More a great spirit and authentic cook than a food maven, Lewis acquired a cult following among chefs and writers determined to revive the lost glories of the region's table.

"Edna Lewis had the hands and soul of a great artist, and like all great artists, she had something of which the rest of us know little or nothing," said Alice Waters, the famous Berkeley, Calif., chef whose farm-to-table philosophy echoed Lewis' lifelong pursuit of flavor and honesty in food.

"She was who she was," said Southern food guru John Egerton. "She was truly an enormous figure, a giant in the culinary world, and she didn't go around with a neon sign flashing that."

On a 1990 visit to the Southern Food Festival in Atlanta, Lewis befriended the Alabama-born Peacock.

"He met me at the train station and we cooked for three days straight," Lewis said in a 1992 interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. She persuaded him to learn about his native foodways, and despite their age difference, the two became inseparable.

"She saw things in me I never saw in myself," Peacock said. "I slowly began to see some of those things."

Before Lewis became too ill to go out, the two were in demand as a social couple, trading bon-mots with food writer Richard Olney in the south of France, lunching with poet Nikki Giovanni, going to a Nina Simone concert at Chastain Park.

Until the end of her life, Lewis was strikingly beautiful and wore dramatic jewelry, ankle-length African-cloth dresses that she made herself and a corona of silver hair that sat on the nape of her neck like an exotic seashell.

As the photographer John Hill put it, Lewis' face concealed "a guarded and complex personality."

In 1999, as Lewis' health grew fragile, she and Peacock moved in together. When they weren't rendering lard or baking biscuits, Peacock squired her around in his red Volvo. She ironed his shirts, wrapped them in paper and labeled them with safety pins.

Even if Lewis had never become a celebrated chef or written a word, she would have had a life that was remarkable by any measure. Born on April 13 (Thomas Jefferson's birthday), 1916, in Freetown, Va. --- a community of former slaves --- Edna Regina Lewis sat at her grandfather's knee listening to stories.

"We had a big fireplace and we would sit and talk about what happened when they were slaves," Lewis once wrote. "It made me very sad." Both her father and grandfather had died by the time she was 8 or 9, leaving her mother to support the family.

Those early years became the wellsprings of her "The Taste of Country Cooking," a lyrical celebration of dandelion-wine making, hog killing and blackberry picking.

"I think it's one of the gems," said Jones, whose literary stable includes John Updike and Anne Tyler.

Jones remembers coaxing the book out of the shy, self-deprecating Lewis by interviewing her, then sending her home to put down her memories on a yellow legal pad.

"Breakfast was about the best part of the day," Lewis wrote in the book of stories and recipes. "There was an almost mysterious feeling about passing through the night and awakening to a new day. ... If it was a particularly beautiful morning it was expressed in the grace. Spring would bring our first and just about only fish --- shad. It would always be served for breakfast, soaked in saltwater for an hour or so, rolled in seasoned cornmeal, and fried carefully in home-rendered lard with a slice of smoked shoulder for added flavor. There were crispy fried white potatoes, fried onions, batter bread, any food left over from supper, blackberry jelly, delicious hot coffee, and cocoa for the children."

Lewis never graduated from high school. After her father died, she went to live with family in Washington and eventually landed in New York. Following a series of jobs that included sewing clothes for Bonwit Teller's Christmas window displays and working in a mail-processing center, she found herself the accidental chef at Cafe Nicholson, started by her longtime friends John Nicholson and Carl Bissinger in 1948.

"It was unbelievable," she remembered. "I had never cooked professionally." But soon there was a steady clientele of writers, artists and movie stars.

"We had everybody that was anybody," she said: Howard Hughes, Salvador Dali, Marlene Dietrich, Eleanor Roosevelt, Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett.

The night that William Faulkner came in, Lewis said, "I went over to him and said, 'Welcome, thank you for coming.' And he said, 'Oh, everything's delicious. Did you study in Paris?' I liked that better than anything. I said, 'No, I've never been out of the States.' '

Tennessee Williams lived nearby, so he walked her home at night. Garbo dropped in with her two little poodles. "She came on a Monday night when we were closed. They dined by themselves. But by the time they got ready to go, the sidewalk was lined because the word had spread that it was Garbo."

Truman Capote was a regular. "He was a big mess," Lewis recalled. "He had on these little pumps. If he got something new, he would come in and say, 'How do you like my beloved pants?' He was cute."

At the time of her death, Peacock was helping Lewis write her memoirs.

"Edna Lewis' story would be one of the great culinary biographies of the 20th century," Egerton said.

Lewis' husband, Steve Kingston, died in the '70s. Late in life, she adopted an adult son, Dr. Afeworki Paulos, a native of Africa who now lives in Ann Arbor, Mich. She is also survived by three siblings --- George H. Lewis and Ruth Lewis Smith of Unionville, Va., and Bessie Jones of Philadelphia --- and four nieces and nephews.

Funeral arrangements are pending. Lewis is to be buried in the family plot in Unionville.

As Lewis grew older, the accolades rolled in.

In 1995, the James Beard Foundation gave her its first Living Legend Award. In 1998, Saveur magazine placed her at No. 9 on its list of 100 favorite things, calling her its "favorite Southern cook and national treasure." And in 1999, she received the Southern Foodways Alliance's Lifetime Achievement Award and was named a grande dame by Les Dames d'Escofier International.

In 1996, Peacock put on an 80th birthday party at Roswell's historic Bulloch Hall. Alice Waters sent produce. Peacock cooked the meal over an open hearth. And there was a commemorative booklet including greetings, poems and material gleaned from the writings of everybody from James Beard to Laurie Colwin, the late novelist and food essayist.

Giovanni sent a poem, which read in part

Could there be spring with/out wild asparagus or Summer without homegrown ... green beans ... and tomatoes on the vine ... why/ever would we allow Jack Frost ... if not to kiss the collard ... mustard ... and turnip greens ... before the rest ... snow offers ... Earth.

For a woman who foraged for wild 'cress and berries, and listened to cakes to see if they were done, it seems the perfect epitaph.

Food editor Susan Puckett contributed to this article.