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her profession in the 1990s. As a child in Freetown, she was entranced by the flavors of the foods that she and her relatives had grown and harvested, and her taste memories of those meals informed her cooking decades later. Lewis said: “As a child, I thought all food tasted delicious. After growing up I didn’t think food tasted the same, so it has been my lifelong effort to try to recapture those good flavors of the past.” Lewis moved to New York at age sixteen and held a variety of jobs until she found her calling in 1949, when she became the cook at a small clublike restaurant in Manhattan called Café Nicholson. The restaurant, opened by antiques dealer John Nicholson, became a gathering spot for the bohemians of the day and soon “Miss Edna” was cooking her fresh-tasting honest country food for Tennessee Williams, Diana Vreeland, Marlon Brando, Truman Capote, and other members of the literati of the period.

As had many others before her, Lewis made her fame preparing food for whites in a setting where few if any blacks ventured. But while she might serve deceptively simple roast chicken, lemony-dressed salads of Boston lettuce, Gallic mussels with herbed rice, or cheese soufflés, the food that she cooked was always inspired by the country tastes of her Virginia home, demanded fresh ingredients, and used time-honed culinary skills. Lewis left Café Nicholson in the 1950s and cooked professionally at a number of other places. She gradually slipped from the growing culinary mainstream. Instead, she wrote, worked at the Museum of Natural History, and became a fixture at Manhattan’s annual Ninth Avenue Street Festival, an early celebration of the diversity of the city’s food. Food, though, was always a driving passion, and by the 1970s Lewis could add cookbook author to her résumé; her Edna Lewis Cookbook was published in 1972, followed by A Taste of Country Cooking in 1976 and The Pursuit of Flavor in 1988. Each extolled the virtues of the fresh, seasonal ingredients that she had always championed.

Lewis, although long known to the culinary cognoscenti, joined the ranks of the gastronomic superstars in the 1990s, when she was lured out of retirement and named chef at Gage and Tollner, a venerable Brooklyn eatery. There, in the gaslit restaurant, which dated to the last decades of the nineteenth century, Lewis again wowed New Yorkers with her delicate hand with cornbread and biscuits and her deft way with the pickles and condiments that are such a part of the Southern table.

By the mid-1990s Lewis left New York, but she continued to cook, first in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and then at Middleton Place Plantation in the South Carolina Lowcountry. At each spot, her insistence on fresh ingredients simply prepared remained primary. Throughout the 1990s and virtually until her death, in 2006, Lewis became a culinary fixture, always speaking with quiet authority With her African-fabric dresses and her regal bearing, she garnered accolades and awards and became one of the most visible African American chefs. For years, she journeyed only by train, preferring the pace of the era of her birth to that in which she was widely acclaimed. In her later years, Lewis found an apprentice and soul mate in Scott Peacock, a young Southern white chef, and controversially, they lived together, cooked together, and collaborated on her last book, The Gift of Southern Cooking, a work that attempts to bridge the divide between the differing styles of black cooking and white cooking in the South. Lewis’s food represented one facet of the African American culinary repertoire—one that emphasizes the freshest-available local ingredients and the studied preparation of simple foods. A soul food resurgence brought the traditional diet back to tables, and later the neo-soul movement would join both tendencies.

For much of the twentieth century, virtually every city in the United States large enough to have an inner city had its “soul food” restaurant. These black-owned restaurants still occupied pride of place in black neighborhoods, where they flourished