Happy Birthday, Edna Lewis

April 13 marked what would have been chef and author Edna Lewis’s 109th birthday. To celebrate her life and legacy, the Library of Virginia will host a screening of the new VPM documentary, Finding Edna Lewis, on Thursday April 17, followed by a discussion with film host and producer Deb Freeman and culinary historian Leni Sorensen.

Lewis was born in 1916 in Freetown, a “community of farming people” in Orange County, Virginia. “It wasn’t really a town,” Lewis describes in the introduction to her 1976 book, The Taste of Country Cooking. “The name was adopted because the first residents had all been freed from chattel slavery and they wanted to be known as a town of Free People.”¹

Lewis’s grandfather, with whom her family lived during her childhood, was born enslaved and became one of the original founders of the community. “The spirit of pride in community and of cooperation in the work of farming is what made Freetown a very wonderful place to grow up in,” Lewis writes.²

Lewis’s success in New York only strengthened her connection to her Virginia roots. Following the publication of The Edna Lewis Cookbook in 1972, Lewis published The Taste of Country Cooking in 1976, working with editor Judith Jones, who also served as Julia Child’s editor. The book, which became a bestseller and made her widely known, is part-memoir part-cookbook and tells of her upbringing in Freetown through the food they ate throughout the seasons, illustrating “how her community made a life from the land, taking pleasure in the doing of many things,” as food journalist Francis Lam describes in his essay, “The Black Roots of American Cooking.”⁴ In the book’s introduction, Lewis writes: “Over the years since I left home and lived in different cities, I have kept thinking about the people I grew up with and about our way of life. Whenever I go back to visit my sisters and brothers, we relive old times, remembering the past. And when we share again in gathering wild strawberries, canning, rendering lard, finding walnuts, picking persimmons, making fruitcake, I realize how much the bond that held us had to do with food.”⁵

Lewis played a transformative role in modern food history and culture as a pioneer of the farm-to-table movement; in her elevation of Southern food to a gourmet, world-renowned, and quintessentially American cuisine; and for her broadening of what Americans think of as Black cooking, and what that means for Black history. This advocacy resonated with the cultural shifts happening in the 1970s but was also deeply rooted in Virginia’s past. “She spoke of the creativity of black women in the kitchen, how that represented some measure of freedom when they otherwise had none,” Francis Lam writes. Quoting Lewis’ niece, Nina Williams-Mbengue, his essay continues, “‘She always talked about how, in spite of these people being slaves, they created a cuisine that would become world-renowned.’”⁶

These roots can be found in Lewis’s recipes, many of which echo those found in The Virginia House-Wife, written in 1824 by Mary Randolph, including French-influenced dishes like beef à la mode and blancmange. Although enslaved people would have been essential to the development and cooking of these recipes, Randolph, who was white, only mentions enslaved people once in The Virginia House-Wife.

This omission, as food writer and producer of Finding Edna Lewis Deb Freeman highlights in her foreword to the new 200th anniversary edition of the book, “meant that their material and creative contributions were effectively hidden from generations of readers. Yet it is not difficult to imagine that many of the recipes listed draw inspiration, if not direct instruction, from the enslaved people who were toiling in the kitchen from dusk until dawn each day.”⁷

Edna Lewis’s life and work continues to resonate and inspire in the years after her 2006 death, perhaps now more than ever. Her legacy can be found in the still-growing popularity of both farm-to-table and Southern restaurants; the celebration and success of America’s Black chefs and Black-owned restaurants; and in the continued exploration of the Black roots of American cooking through books like Michael Twitty’s The Cooking Gene and Jessica B. Harris’s High on the Hog, which inspired a Netflix series of the same name. Lewis also influenced writers like Nikki Giovanni, who dedicated a poem to her, and Crystal Wilkinson, whose memoir/cookbook Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts: Stories and Recipes from Five Generations of Black Country Cooks explores her family’s history and Appalachian upbringing through food, much in the vein of The Taste of Country Cooking. (Wilkinson will speak about her book at the Library of Virginia on August 14 as part of the 2025 Weinstein Author Series.)

Restaurants from Virginia to New York and beyond have been highlighting and celebrating Lewis’s legacy in recent years as well. In Richmond, The Roosevelt hosted an Edna Lewis dinner last year (which is featured in Finding Edna Lewis), and Floris, the VMFA’s tearoom, hosted an Edna-Lewis-inspired Southern Harvest tea last summer. In 2022 and 2023, restaurants across Orange County participated in an Edna Lewis food trail.⁸ Brooklyn restaurant Gage & Tollner, where Lewis famously cooked in the 1980s and 1990s, reopened in 2021 after closing in 2004.⁹ Their menu pays homage to Lewis through dishes such as she-crab soup, which was one of her specialties at Gage & Tollner, and their host stand offers postcards featuring Lewis.

Despite her enduring influence, many feel that Lewis has not received the recognition she deserves. “Edna Lewis is a major figure in American culinary history and her fascinating story and contribution to how we look at Southern food is one that deserves to be celebrated and held in the same esteem as other chefs such as Julia Child,” Deb Freeman states.¹⁰ Finding Edna Lewis seeks to rectify that as the first feature-length documentary about Lewis, exploring her legacy through the places in which she lived and cooked.