EDNA LEWIS - CENTENNIAL

They’ve called her The Julia Child of the South, but in my book – and I do have several of hers, she is in a class by herself. I’ve many of Julia’s books too, but I see the difference in them as Julia being classically Cordon Bleu trained, and Edna being classically home trained. More aptly, she was called The Grande Dame of Southern Cooking. I’ve written about Edna Lewis and my other favorite cooks and their books in one of my blogs. My favorite Edna Lewis book is In Pursuit of Flavor, and isn’t flavor the bottom line in cooking and eating?

Edna Lewis was born on April 13, 1916, in Freetown, Virginia, a community founded by eight families of freed slaves, including her grandparents. She believed in the basic connection of food to the farm, where everyday life revolved around the raising of food and its seasons, from the chickens and pigs to the fields and forest. Like many cooks of her generation, she learned how to cook in measurements of coffee cups, soup spoons, tea spoons, and the amount that would fit on a nickel or a dime. She learned to know what was available and fresh at the moment. This knowledge of what’s readily available has developed in to the current “locavore” trend in which chefs create the day’s menu from what meat and produce they can get close to home. As it was in the days before speedy, refrigerated transportation when Edna Lewis was learning to cook, this is usually means it is from within a hundred miles, and has been raised sustainably.

Lewis left Virginia when she was just sixteen. She wound up in New York where she worked as a seamstress, another skill learned in Virginia and carried on for her own wardrobe throughout her life. She became known for her wonderful food, and in the late 40’s she became the cook, and an instant success, at the Café Nicholson. When she broke her leg and had to give up cooking professionally for a while in the late 60’s, she was persuaded to turn her handwritten notes into what became The Edna Lewis Cookbook. The book has been called, by Craig Claiborne, no less, “the most entertaining regional cookbook in America” The rest, several cookbooks, many awards, and a U.S. Forever stamp later, is American culinary history.

One of Edna Lewis’ best loved recipes is the one for Yellow Vanilla Pound Cake. You can find the recipe on line at the Saveur website. Any readers familiar with Jan Karon’s Mitford series of books will remember Esther Bolick’s secret recipe for Orange Marmalade Cake. In the books, the controversial, perennially award-willing cake almost became a character itself. Working with Edna Lewis and her apprentice, Scott Peacock, Karon developed a recipe for the Mitford Cookbook & Kitchen Reader. Thus fiction became a delicious fact.

An Edna Lewis Pound Cake  Wonderful!

HOW MANY COOKS? TOO MANY COOKS!



The French Chef - Julia Child - ran on PBS from 1963 to 1973

Television is rife with cooking shows these days. From the BBC to PBS, from Kimchi Chronicles to New Scandinavian Cooking, food shows are on – and ‘in’. When I was a kid there was just one: The Dione Lucas Cooking Show.  My Mother was a great fan of hers, so I got to watch that quite often.  After looking at many of today’s cooking shows I’ve come to realize that how and what you do in the kitchen may depend on what chef you saw on the TV, or on which one you think best – that is if any of today’s chefs do appeal to you. Few of the newer ones appeal to me. The Food Channel might as well not exist as far as I’m concerned. I’ve checked it out and found it wanting. Old curmudgeon that I am, I am of the Julia Child, Jacques Pépin school of cooking. 

Julia Child was meticulous where she needed to be, say, with soufflés or in folding and rolling the pastry, again and again, for perfect croissant. She was less so where exactitude (great word!) didn’t count. A pinch of this, a dab of that. She knew that she wasn’t doing the kitchen equivalent of building a Swiss watch. Once, in the days of live television, when she dropped a potato pancake on the counter instead of flipping it back into the trash, she remarked “You just scoop it back into the pan. Remember, you are alone in the kitchen and nobody can see you.” From Julia I learned that cooking should be a pleasure, not a chore.



Jacques Pépin, always smiling

I know of those who crack eggs with a spatula and then clean out the shells to get every last drop. I wouldn’t call that frugal because isn’t stretching the food to feed one more mouth, it means nothing in a recipe, and when I’m adding a dozen eggs to a huge mixture for a French toast casserole, I haven’t got the time for it.  Jacques Pépin would call that practice a no-no.  He says you should tap the egg on the counter and pull it open so that you don’t get egg bits into the food. So what do I do? I do it Jacques’ way, of course.  What I don’t do his way is separate the egg: he uses his hands and lets the whites fall through his fingers. Eeew! Slimy! Germy!  You keep what you think are good ideas, ones that work for you, and discard the rest – of course.

Pépin is the champion of “Fast Food My Way” and some of his recipes seem more like elaborate suggestions than recipes: take some of this and some of that, but if you don’t have any of this or that you can use whatever you have on hand. From Jacques Pepin I learned improvisation and refinements, especially for cooking for two.

One on my favorite cooks - one of my favorite cookbooks!

I once had a fairly good collection of cook books, but I before moving here to SCCL I pared them down to a precious few: those by my favorite cooks. I’ve several by the doyenne of delicious Southern cooking, Edna Lewis. From her I learned that the most important thing in cooking is flavor. Her pound cake is simply the best.






Sinfully rich - sinfully delicious recipes



Of course I’ve got books by Julia and

Jacques, but the oldest one I have is from Dione Lucas, the first female graduate of Le Cordon Bleu. I cherish my copy of Gourmet Tips for Better Cooking. This last is a little twenty-eight page booklet from the 50’s. It was an advertising premium sent out by one of her show’s sponsors. I have The Cordon Bleu Cook Book, but a newer edition of her 1947 major work. Fifty years or so later I wouldn’t tackle many of her sinfully rich dishes, but she had great advice for any cooks of any age, especially the importance of proper tools. From Dione Lucas I learned, and I can still remember seeing her demonstrate this on TV, to frost the sides of a cake first. You’ll always have enough left to finish the top.

Find yourself one of these - you won't be sorry.

And do you know Edouard de Pomaine?  He wrote Cooking with Pomaine, and the handiest thing I have on my shelf: his little volume from 1930 called French Cooking in Ten Minutes: Adapting to the Rhythm of Modern Life. (Cooking in ten minutes? - It can be done! But he doesn’t count the time it takes for a pot of water to boil.)  He wrote the book for busy Parisiennes and it is very handy for busy Americans too. From Pomaine I learned the value of having on hand a good range of basic staples, including eggs, onions, pasta and olive oil.

Before my granddaughter’s wedding I made up for her a flash drive full of family pictures and recipes.  There are four generations of recipes in the collection. These have become my standbys, of course, and now they’ve been handed on down again. From my Mother I learned that cooking for those you love is one of the most satisfying things in life.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ and...

...from this guy I've learned only the F word.
What a waste of time! Stick to PBS.