Early Life
Lewis was born on April 13, 1916, in Freetown in Orange County to Daisy and Eugene Lewis. Freetown was founded by formerly enslaved people, including Lewis’s paternal grandparents, Chester and Lucinda Lewis.
Lewis’s family produced most of its own food, and her mother and aunts taught her to cook on a woodstove using fresh, seasonal ingredients. The Central Virginia area where Lewis was raised had a rich culinary heritage. French-trained enslaved chefs such as James Hemings, who cooked for Thomas Jefferson at Monticello, influenced local foodways, as did generations of Black cooks, resulting in a melding of African, European, and Indigenous cuisine in a way that was unique to the region. In nearby Gordonsville, a busy railroad hub, Black women known as “waiter carriers” had for decades sold fried chicken and pies to passengers on trains passing through.
Lewis later described her childhood, with its focus on food and family, as nearly idyllic, yet the realities of the Jim Crow South were never far away: “When I was a girl, they used to hang Black men,” she recalled.
Lewis’s father died in 1928, when she was twelve, and within two years, she, like many of the area’s Black women and girls, worked in domestic service for a white family. In the early 1930s, when she was about fifteen, Lewis left Virginia as part of the Great Migration of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North: “That was the Depression,” she later explained, “what kind of work was I going to do on the farm?” In Washington, D.C., she cooked at the Brazilian legation and became politically active, campaigning for Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Within a few years, Lewis moved to New York, where she worked briefly in a laundry and as a seamstress. By 1941, she was working in domestic service as well as for a Communist newspaper, the Daily Worker. She joined the Communist Party, which, she said, was “encouraging the Blacks to be aggressive, to participate.” Her communist friends also fed each other, which, she said, is where she “started to get my reputation for my cooking.”
Lewis, who was a skilled dressmaker and “loved beautiful things,” also dressed department store window displays and made copies of high-end dresses. She recalled that she once “whipped up clothes” for a magazine cover shoot “for a young model, real cute” named Marilyn Monroe.
In 1947, Lewis married Stephen Kingston, a Guyanese-born shipfitter and merchant marine who was a prominent Communist Party organizer and speaker. They had no children and remained married until his death on October 16, 1974, at age eighty.
Café Nicholson
In 1948 photographer Karl Bissinger and his partner, antiques dealer Johnny Nicholson, decided to open a restaurant and hired their friend Lewis as kitchen supervisor. She became the chef and co-owner of Café Nicholson after the white chef quit rather than work with a Black woman. The eclectically decorated restaurant became popular among New York’s New Bohemian set, attracting artists, writers, actors, and celebrities such as Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, Marlene Dietrich, Richard Avedon, and Gloria Vanderbilt. Bissinger termed Lewis’s cooking for the cafe “Virginia-style French,” and she became known for her perfect roast chicken and a chocolate soufflé that New York Herald Tribune restaurant critic Clementine Paddleford called “light as a dandelion seed in a high wind.”
According to Nicholson, Kingston berated Lewis for cooking in a “bourgeois” cafe, telling her, “You’re catering to capitalists.” She left Nicholson’s in 1954. Lewis and Kingston tried pheasant farming in New Jersey, but the venture failed, and by the 1960s, they moved to Harlem, then the heart of the Black Arts Movement, where artists and writers like Nikki Giovanni promoted Black joy and empowerment. Lewis opened a restaurant there in 1967, but it closed the following year.
The Taste of Country Cooking (1976)
Lewis returned to domestic service and private catering and offered cooking lessons. She also worked as a lecturer in the Hall of African Peoples at the American Museum of Natural History. Around 1970, Lewis’s catering work brought her into contact with Evangeline Peterson, a socialite and philanthropist, and the two women collaborated on The Edna Lewis Cookbook, which was released in 1972. It featured a wide range of recipes, from southern fried chicken to poulet à la crème (chicken in cream sauce), but failed to receive widespread attention.
In 1971, Lewis and Peterson met Judith Jones, Julia Child’s editor at Alfred A. Knopf publishing, and proposed another cookbook. Jones was fascinated by Lewis’s stories of growing up in Freetown and the southern foodways intimately connected with her family and encouraged her to include them in the cookbook. The project faltered for a time but regained steam after Peterson stepped away and Jones began asking Lewis about her culinary roots, with Lewis writing out the answers in longhand each evening. Lewis also returned home to Freetown, as she did every summer to help with canning and attend homecoming, and there she dug through local archives to flesh out historical detail about her family and the local Black community. She tested recipes meticulously in the kitchen of her South Bronx apartment. The result was The Taste of Country Cooking, published in 1976. Part memoir, part cookbook, it revolutionized views of southern cooking. New York Times food critic Mimi Sheraton praised its “rare combination of simplicity and sophistication” and mixture of “style and precision.” It was especially influential with up-and-coming chefs such as Alice Waters, who opened California’s pioneering farm-to-table restaurant Chez Panisse in 1971. “She showed the deep roots of gastronomy in the United States and that they were really in the South … I had never really considered Southern food before, but I learned from her that it’s completely connected to nature, totally in time and place,” Waters told the New York Times.
More than a cookbook, The Taste of Country Cooking presented a historical narrative of the long arm of slavery and the fierce independence and creativity of the Black communities living in its wake. “If you look at the way the menus are organized, the holidays that are being celebrated, like Revival or Emancipation Day, this is a work of African American history in the American South, and of giving dignity to that culture as its own entity in a lot of ways that’s separate from white American culture,” noted food historian Sara B. Franklin.
In Pursuit of Flavor (1988)
Writing earned little money, and Lewis continued cooking professionally. In 1982, Lewis adopted Afeworki Paulos, a young man from Eritrea who worked at the American Museum of Natural History. In 1983, she became chef at Fearrington House in Pittsboro, North Carolina; two years later, she was recruited to become chef-consultant at Middleton Place, a Charleston, South Carolina, plantation where hundreds had been enslaved. In 1987, she met New York restaurateur Peter Aschkenasy, who hired her as chef at Uncle Sam’s.
The following year, Lewis published In Pursuit of Flavor, written with Mary Goodbody. In “trying to recapture the taste of a simple, old-fashioned dish,” Lewis wrote, “I have the memory of good flavor to go by.” Lewis also patronized farmers’ markets, including the popular Union Square Market. “She’d walk fifty blocks for a peach,” Jones recalled.
Also in 1988, Aschkenasy purchased a famous Brooklyn chophouse, Gage & Tollner, and made Lewis head chef. She gave the menu a distinctly southern flair: her Thanksgiving debut featured Smithfield ham as well as pecan, lemon meringue, pumpkin, and Tyler pie. She retired from Gage & Tollner in 1992, when she was seventy-six.
The Gift of Southern Cooking (2003)
Lewis met Scott Peacock, then chef at the Georgia governor’s mansion, in Atlanta in 1988. “I was not particularly interested in Southern food,” he recalled, and wanted to study in Italy, but Lewis introduced him to the richness of southern cooking, telling him, “Some good cooks have to stay in the South.” The two collaborated on projects throughout the 1990s and became known as the Odd Couple of southern cooking—an older Black woman and a twentysomething gay white man. According to Peacock, “she saw me as someone who didn’t need to change” and “helped me, eventually, see myself as who I already was.”
In the mid-1990s, Lewis and Peacock founded the Society for the Revival and Preservation of Southern Food, a forerunner of the Southern Foodways Alliance. In 1996, Peacock threw a food-focused party for Lewis’s eightieth birthday, with Waters sending produce and Giovanni contributing poetry. Lewis received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Southern Foodways Alliance, the inaugural Living Legend Award from the James Beard Foundation, and was named a Grande Dame by Les Dames d’Escoffier International, an organization of women leaders in the food industry. Her name and image were used in Angela Mulloy’s Celebrating the Chestnut (1999) and Plantation Feasts and Festivities: A Celebration of the Grandes Dames of Virginia and Food Hospitality (2001), though her involvement with both books was limited.
Lewis and Peacock lived together in Georgia beginning in the late 1990s and cowrote The Gift of Southern Cooking (2003) in collaboration with Jones. Gift blends Lewis’s and Peacock’s perspectives on southern food and was Lewis’s final book published in her lifetime.
Though Lewis began to decline cognitively by the early 2000s, she remained, her doctor wrote, “still quite aware of what she wants.” Lewis died on February 13, 2006, at the home she shared with Peacock. Her funeral, attended by family and community members, was held at Bethel Baptist Church in Freetown, and Lewis was buried in the nearby Lewis family cemetery. Jones and Giovanni were among the attendees at a May 2006 memorial in Atlanta that included a dinner at which Peacock served Lewis’s recipes. She was honored with a postage stamp in 2014 and a Virginia Historical Marker near her childhood home in Freetown in 2024.
Legacy
In 2008, Gourmet magazine posthumously published Lewis’s essay, “What Is Southern?,” in which she described her work as “picking up the pieces … so the present-day young generation can see what southern food was like.” In her New York Times obituary, Kim Severson and Eric Asimov wrote that Lewis dispelled the “cornpone image of Southern food,” imbuing it with grace and dignity and emphasizing seasonality and simplicity. The light that Lewis shone on southern food showed it—and her—to be more than a stereotype. As fellow chef and writer Nathalie Dupree summed up Lewis’s impact, “Edna was the most important southern restaurant cook—male or female, black or white—from the late 1940s to perhaps the 1980s.”
Major Works
The Edna Lewis Cookbook (1972)
The Taste of Country Cooking (1976)
In Pursuit of Flavor (1988)
The Gift of Southern Cooking (2003), coauthored with Scott Peacock
“What Is Southern?,” Gourmet (January 2008)
