Home from Boston (which I loved) but I felt a little like a guest in a good friend’s home so I didn’t spread out in the kitchen and cook like I usually do. Every day I would walk through the South End neighborhood where I stayed, visit the local shops and restaurants, and bring home something nice for the Mister after he had finished a long day of work on “Ghostbusters.” Now that I’m home in L.A. I’ve scheduled three dinner parties in eight days and my guiding light will be Edna Lewis. How delighted I was to see this article appear in the New York Times Magazine!

Edna Lewis and the Black
Roots of American Cooking

The chef and author made the case for black Southern cooking as the
foundation of our national cuisine. Does she get the credit she deserves?

By FRANCIS LAM

OCT. 28, 2015

 

As a girl, Lewis busied herself with gathering berries, sewing and other home-taught skills. She watched the older women intently, learning to cook alongside them. After leaving Freetown, she made her way to New York City, where she took a job at a laundry and was fired three hours later: She’d never ironed before. She became a Communist and bristled at having to enter employers’ buildings through the back door but nonetheless worked for a time as a domestic, helping to put her baby sister Naomi through art school. At one point, she became a sought-after seamstress, making dresses for Doe Avedon and Marilyn Monroe, and dressing windows for the high-end department store Bonwit Teller. Surrounded by bohemians and fashion figures, she gave dinner parties for her friends, channeling her memories of her mother and aunt at the stove.

In 1948, Johnny Nicholson, a regular at Lewis’s table, was getting ready to open a cafe on the Upper East Side. As Nicholson used to tell it, Lewis walked by, about to take another job as a domestic, when she looked into her friend’s place and said it would make a terrific restaurant. A week later, Lewis was cooking lunch at Cafe Nicholson. She offered a tidy menu: herbed roast chicken, filet mignon, a piece of fish, some cake, a chocolate soufflé. The restaurant was a smash. It had a dining room like a fabulist’s dream: floral displays and soaring palm fronds dipping down to kiss the heads of guests like Paul Robeson, Tennessee Williams and Gore Vidal. Truman Capote would come into the kitchen, purring at his new friend Edna for a fix of biscuits. William Faulkner once flattered Lewis by asking if she had studied cooking in Paris. But no, her sister Ruth Lewis Smith told me: She learned to make soufflés from their mother, back in Virginia. Smith, in fact, often made them herself, after the restaurant took off and she came to help out.

The restaurant critic Clementine Paddleford reviewed the restaurant in 1951 in The New York Herald Tribune, calling that soufflé ‘‘light as a dandelion seed in a wind’’ and noting a sense of pride in the chef: ‘‘We saw Edna peering in from the kitchen, just to see the effect on the guests and hear the echoes of praise.’’ But Lewis wasn’t just the chef. With Jim Crow in full effect and de facto segregation the reality in most of the North, this granddaughter of slaves had become a partner in a business that counted Eleanor Roosevelt among its favorite customers.

source: The New York Times Magazine

This is a photo of Cafe Nicholson’s back garden in 1949 by Karl Bissinger, from left to right: Tanaquil Le Clercq, Donald Windham, Virginia Reed, Buffie Johnson, Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal.

One of my favorite cookbooks/memoirs was written by Edna Lewis (details in the New York Times article above) and brought forward by the legendary editor, Judith Jones in 1976. If you’re beginning to think of books to give for Christmas, this is a winner.

The Taste of Country Cooking by Edna Lewis