On the original cover of her classic memoir-cookbook The Taste of Country Cooking, Ms. Edna Lewis stands, lithe and muscular, in a green field looking over the fruit shc's selected for making a meal. Her face is serene and contemplative. She's magnetic and seems to beam though she is not smiling. Her hair, perhaps lightly hotcombed, is as natural as the food she puts on her table. She wears the long, cottony silver strands brushed away from her face and tucked in a neat chignon gathered in back of her head. Contrasting with her simple, starched cotton dress Miss Edna's only flourish is a pair of dangling ornate silver earrings that lend a little of the Far East to her look.
Music. Food. Writing. It's said that all of these absorb all of the elements and energy that go into the making of them. When I see Ms. Edna's face and read what she has to say, it brings me calm because I get a sense of some of those things that went into the making of her. She is earthy and elegant, full of culture, memory and vitality. The kind that Alice Walker writes about in "Longing to Die of Old Age" (from Living By the Word). A foremother to ones like Dori Sanders.
A friend who knows how much I take to heart Jessica Harris' words that "There is history in the pot," recently sent me this "What is Southern?" piece, a prose poem/letter written by Edna Lewis and published a couple years back in Gourmet magazine. I'm sharing with the hope that we all enjoy, remember, preserve and do all we can to pass forward these traditions. Even if it's just telling the story that begins with the words, "There once was a time when..."
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