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I'm Francis Lam, and this is The Splendid Table from APM.
You know, for a bunch of years of my life I spent a fair amount of time living in and traveling the South, from the Gulf Coast of Mississippi and New Orleans to short stints in Nashville and annual visits to Atlanta.
I've edited books on Southern food and count among my friends some of the greatest Southern chefs and food writers of three generations really.
But even with all that...
I'll never feel like I know everything I need to know about this rich and complex and complicated region.
One person who really showed me that was the late great Edna Lewis, whose beautiful writing and mastery of technique totally changed my imagination of what rural Virginia cooking was.
A recent documentary on her from Virginia Public Media by Deb Freeman gave me even more to think about with her.
And we'll have Deb on later in the show.
We're going to start with another child of Virginia, Michael Twitty.
Michael is one of my favorite people to talk to, about anything really, but certainly about the culture and history of food.
A scholar chef, writer and artist.
He's known for his iconic blog and book The Cooking Gene and its follow-up, Kosher Soul all works that deal with culinary history and his own identity.
For his newest book, though, he takes on the whole region he calls home –
It's called simply Recipes from the American South.
Hey, Michael, it is great to see you.
Hey, brother, how are you?
I am well, thank you.
Congratulations on yet another magisterial work.
And so you know, given its scope, I think it's probably no surprise that this book has been years in the making.
But you know, I think for you it's not just oh, years in the making for writing this book, but it's really many, many years of your interest in what makes the South the South right.
And I think back.
You even referenced this a bit in the introduction, but I think back to a particular period in your time that you write about as being really educational and important for you, a road trip that you called your Southern Discomfort Tour.
Tell us about that tour.
What are some of the moments when you went through the South that really opened up your idea of what the South and Southern food is?
I'm glad you asked.
The Southern Discomfort Tour was a pilgrimage that I made to find my food and family roots and routes from Maryland to Texas, Missouri to Florida.
And for some people I understand, like their notion of the South not including some of those boundaries I just laid out.
But the bottom line is that you know, I started with the premise of my family history and the story of American slavery beneath the Mason-Dixon line.
And it's really important for people to understand that.
You know, the Confederacy is not the South point blank.
The Confederacy is four years in an 11000 year history of human interaction in what we now know as the American South.
So that's not going to work for me.
But I guess, to answer your question, I remember you know the edges of Southern identity that don't often get spoken about.
One example would be going into a community, Mexican immigrant community in Georgia.
I'm not going to say where because I don't, you know, the current political situation.
But this community was a really good test for, you know, Southern identity.
I mean, these kids are living in the South.
Their garden was a lot Mexico, but also a lot the American South.
Different kinds of chiles, different epazote corn and different types of beans, but also okra and collard greens and things like that.
And melons.
And I just thought, okay, yeah, this is what the Las Americas is really all about.
The South is no different.
But these kids also started to talk with a twang.
I mean sure the little kids were like One foot in the Mexican heritage and the other foot was in Georgia.
I mean one of the things that the woman who worked with the social worker who worked with him I don't know what you're supposed to call her community organizer I should call it, not social worker who worked with this community said that you know these kids are two thirds home food, but also one third Bojangles.
And I understood what that meant.
I understood like the depth of that.
And I mean going to Midnight Community in Tennessee to see the McSorghum which used to be an everybody thing and now it's predominantly made on the edges of Southern rural life.
It's not common anymore.
It used to be very common.
My grandfather and his father did that.
Sorghum being like the syrup, almost like a molasses type of syrup.
Yes, from a variety of sorghum that's dug up just because its sap can be turned into a syrup.
It's all of that.
I mean it's wild to understand the South beyond just these salt and pepper bubbles and boundaries that were created to give us a stereotype and not really the truth.
So, you know, the first thing you mentioned in your book is the diversity of the South.
Here, you're talking both a bit about the recent immigration, you know, that doesn't seep into the consciousness enough of like what, quote unquote, the South is.
But also, of course, like the communities that have been there for maybe several generations or maybe even hundreds of years.
And I want to pull the lens back a little bit, because not only have you traveled through the South, like you talked about, but you've also traveled a lot in West Africa, to Britain, to Ireland, to Germany.
A lot of these places where you know these, like sort of previous generations of southerners came from and you know their descendants now you know are are in the region.
What are some of the links that you saw, like going back to sort of the, the origin place, and then seeing how those different places come together in the South.
So when I was in the UK I went to um Edinburgh and Glasgow and um The lowlands and also Ireland, and not just, you know London, but Somerset and Oxfordshire and Liverpool.
And then, of course, in West Africa, all over the place Senegal Gambia, Sierra Leone Ghana Togo Benin Nigeria, Cameroon.
And so I'm looking for what's in the markets.
I'm looking for this before this book was even a thought.
It was just my own education. and i feel like it's been a lack sort of a lack between people understanding this there's a south in its own terms the south didn't arise out of nowhere it's an ex-hilo it's it's a product of its ancestors and that would also include indigenous culture in the south people don't understand indigenous southerners still exist and exist both in those states and oklahoma um so when you understand that and put all those things together francis What you get is a much deeper, broader picture.
I mean, the best example I can give you is going to Senegal and after being at the fish markets in Charleston and Savannah many times and seeing all the same fish and people are like oh wait, a minute, that makes sense.
No, not exactly.
You know, when you go to the fish market in Somerset, most of the fish are completely different.
You're not the same ocean.
When you're talking about the Southern Atlantic, and also like these african people who are fishing who are cooking who are doing a lot but not all of the work you begin to see the connections between the cultures and the people and what defines the southern seafood table so it was like wow okay or nigeria where you go to like the you know anyone catching fish in the in the fresh water and it's predominantly catfish and tilapia and eels and you begin to see all those connections you go wow this really does matter I want to get to some of the specific points in the South.
You live in Virginia.
Much of your family has Virginia ties.
Deep roots, yeah.
Yeah, and as we learned from Ed Lewis, for instance, Virginia has its own cuisine.
How would you describe Virginia cuisine?
So I think it's important for people to understand that Virginia was the mother of.
There are people in the Deep South today who jokingly or seriously say Virginia ain't the South, which is hilarious in saying that Richmond was the capital of the Confederacy.
It was the legal and financial directive after Montgomery, Alabama, where my ancestors were also enslaved.
But here's the thing.
Virginia was where slavery started in America.
Right.
In British North America at least 1619, slavery was where the laws were codified to control the lives of enslaved people but also create economies based on monocultural cash crops.
And Virginia had a lot of people.
Virginia used to be Virginia, West Virginia, also part of Kentucky, part of Tennessee.
It was huge, along with its sister state, Maryland. sent out thousands of people.
In fact, it's incredible to think about how many people would have been born, or their grandparents were born, in Virginia before they became Kentuckians Tennesseans, Missourians and beyond.
I mean, it's just most of those states, Alabama, all they had Virginia roots.
So what does Virginia contribute to the story?
Virginia contributes a, first of all, the Southern Garden, right?
I did a lot of work in the hooking jeans to list these out and describe it.
There's a really, really powerful and interesting reference from George Bagby, who was a local colorist, kind of like Mark Twain, who spoke about the humor of local life.
And George Bagby was actually a business associate of George Saunders, who was somebody who owned my family.
Let's put it that way.
And George Backby says a Virginian cannot live.
I'm doing this off the top of my head without his bacon and greens.
And he talks about fried chicken and snapping turtle eggs and persimmon beer and all these other things.
Of course, whole cake and cornbread and spoon bread and Sally Lund.
And that's the reason why a lot of the recipes are up in the recipes in the American South, because there were people who traveled and who knew their, their locales themselves intimately and said we are the bacon and greens people, we are the country ham people, we are the you know, all those things are very signature to how virginians eat and ate.
Um, and it's something just to even get the genealogy a lot of the foods in the south going back to those old virginia roots.
Essentially it's Virginia and Maryland and South Carolina and Georgia.
And that pretty much those.
Those people take those foods with them and they start to morph and change as they push towards Texas and Oklahoma and South Florida.
Somebody could say, well, Florida has its own thing and it does.
But I mean, essentially these migratory patterns give you the keys to how Southerners eat.
And I'll give you something really cool for, for example.
So look, By the time people get to Missouri, where's the ocean in Missouri?
There's no ocean.
In Virginia, a classic holiday dish would be turkey and oysters.
By the time they get to Missouri.
William Wells Brown talks about his narrative how a holiday dish was turkey and clams.
The clams came from the Mississippi and the Missouri rivers.
These were freshwater clams.
So they had changed how they ate, but essentially the recipes stayed the same.
That's so interesting.
Freshwater clams were an industry for both the pearls and for the clam itself.
Michael Twitty's latest book is Recipes from the American South.
We'll be back with more with him in just a minute.
I'm Francis Lam, and this is The Splendid Table from APM, American Public Media.
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My name is Lily.
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I'm Francis Lam and this is The Splendid Table, the show for curious cooks and eaters.
We're talking with Michael Twitty right now about the vastness of Southern food.
Let's get back to it with him.
I didn't realize that succotash the word succotash comes from an indigenous word from the Chesapeake region.
Algonquin.
Either in Virginia or, yeah.
And so that is a dish of beans and corn.
But then there are so many different kinds of sauteed corn dishes that seem to relate or at least look like they're related throughout the South.
So maybe you can start with succotash and sort of take us in this sort of like corn kernel cooked off the cob kind of journey around the South a little bit.
So succotash is from the Algonquin language family and it's one of many signature dishes to that particular part of the indigenous coloring tradition.
But as you move across the map, it starts to pick up different ingredients.
So makshu on the other side in Louisiana was from the people who live there, the Choctaw, the Natchez, the Chittimacha.
And it's a Gallicization.
It's a French version of an indigenous word.
They're basically the same thing.
Now, okra, corn, and tomatoes is very beloved in most of the South.
So is okra and tomatoes or okra and corn.
I mean, you just keep on flipping the, you know, the different ingredients.
And it's basically the same kind of like principle.
Long cooked, sauteed vegetables that are easy to eat, especially in a time period when, quite frankly, all America's not just Southerners
Let's say they didn't have the best dental health.
So you cook things for a long time.
They were soft.
But also the fact that you didn't have time to always manage that pot.
Right.
So it shows you those indigenous African, and then at the end European, roots of of these one pot dishes.
Which a lot of argument about that.
But I think it's I think it's silly.
I think everybody had those like long cooked one pot meals.
But the corn in particular.
You know, the Natchez people were one of the larger Native American groups.
They were the last culture that was part of the mound building culture.
And the French decimated them in Louisiana and Mississippi.
And get this before they killed them all off or they had to escape to other people.
The Natchez were an incredibly well-organized and intellectual society.
And they had the Natchez, Bienville, Bienville says the Natchez have 42 different dishes for corn.
Think about that, the French going, okay, let's understand these people through a gastronomic lens.
They take this weird thing we've never seen before and turn it into 42 different dishes.
That number always got to me, that 42.
But then again, it's the key to life, right?
It's according to Douglas Adams.
Yeah.
And the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Yeah.
I want to get to then another place in the south.
So collard greens, as you said, oh, in the southern garden, right?
Like this sort of hearty green that can be long stewed, like you said, cooked until tender, super nutritious.
Collard greens are certainly, you know, a southern staple almost in any region in the south, or some kind of braised green.
Mm-hmm.
You write about the Mississippi Delta, which some people call quote the most southern place on earth, right.
But you have a recipe from there of Chinese Mississippi collard greens.
Tell us how these are prepared.
It's stir-fried.
And I came by that recipe, honestly, because I worked with the Chows.
They were a family, Sally and Gilroy Chow.
The husband worked for NASA.
He was actually part of the Apollo 13 team group.
Chinese American man from Mississippi, born and raised.
And they did a presentation at the Smithsonian, the year that Joe Nathan did American cooking.
And they did these collard greens that were amazing.
And I had never heard I heard of the Mississippi Chinese community.
But I'd never actually met anybody from there.
Absolutely.
These collard greens and Sally had a very particular Mississippi way of speaking.
She said, All right, y'all.
We have to have, remember, the keys to Chinese cooking is salt, oil, garlic.
And it was very southern living, the presentation, right?
It was wild.
It was like you know, some ginger, some garlic, some collard greens and chiffonade and boom boom boom, boom boom.
And then they start frying it glorious.
Oyster sauce, right.
Things that they had.
You know they were able to bring some things from China and other things that weren't as common.
So, for example, at home that might have been a different type of green or bok choy.
In the south it was collard greens, you know, they might have had freshwater shrimp or crabs.
In mississippi they had tons of crawfish.
You know, in miss in china they might have had a lot of carp or other kind of fish.
Maybe they had catfish.
So they adjusted to all different traditions.
But they call it the most southern place on earth, francis.
Here's the thing that makes me laugh.
Anybody who knows history the delta knows that the delta wasn't even settled until the 1870s.
And when it was settled, Chinese, that's right, there was nothing there.
Cotton plantations moved over because it was rich land.
They finally drained and cut down the trees and everything and drained the swamps and it was ready to go.
You have Syrians, Lebanese, Mexicans, Chinese, you know, Poles, Greeks, everybody showed up.
And then, of course, African-Americans and white folks from Mississippi.
So it really was a melting pot, even though it was called the most southern place on earth.
And that's the ultimate truth, right?
You can't make the South without these salad bowls and melting pots.
Yeah, it's so interesting.
The other sort of Mississippi Delta food tradition that I was aware of and always thought was super interesting was hot tamales.
That's right.
I think they actually do have that sort of – history of of first being produced by a mexican um cook and then adopted by the black community there.
Yes, and it's exciting because you can see how the lines the, the branches keep going back and forth across the atlantic and up and down the american south and the americas period.
Both people, both indigenous Americans, particularly Mexico and beyond, and West Africans, have that same thing about wrapping something in leaves and cooking it.
That's an old thing in both places.
And of course corn, which had been in West Africa long before the development of the plantation complex in America itself, was cooked in very similar ways.
Not the exact same way, but enough that when people got here they could understand and have a whole culinary conversation without saying a word.
Okay, this is super interesting.
I want to ask you about the rice tradition of the South, particularly in South Carolina, Charleston.
I think pretty famously that rice tradition exists because of African migration, right?
They brought the knowledge of rice cultivation, and so they were the people responsible for cultivating the rice and turning that into an industry, because rice was cultivated in West Africa.
So they came with that knowledge, right?
Right.
But there are so many of these Southern ingredients, or ingredients we think of as being, you know, Southern or new world ingredients, even tomatoes, chilies.
And I thought that when these people came from Africa, they encountered those things here and then they created cuisines, you know that incorporated those ingredients.
But you actually tell me that that's not the case and that those new world ingredients are had actually already made their way to Africa before the era of enslavement.
Tell me about that.
How were those ingredients already adopted in Africa before those people were brought to the South?
So the Spanish and Portuguese are really responsible for a lot of the transfer.
In fact, we even know that there were even, as they say, in South America, Amerindian or indigenous people of South America who actually accompanied the Portuguese probably not by will to places like angola, central africa, where cassava became big and brought with them the process of making cassava um edible um, and then cassava, of course, takes off, and what's what's really?
It's, what's really sinister is that corn, maize and cassava, along with other foods, result in a population boom that creates a kind of like um Malthusian thing, where more people become the commodity.
So people become a commodity system where human beings are hunted for their ability to be labor and their skills.
And that feeds the Atlantic slave trade, transatlantic slave trade.
But peppers, yeah, all those foods have these little stories.
It's interesting, like, for example, in Ghana, the word for white people is obroni.
But the word for corn is aburo.
Okay, you can hear it.
Obroni, aburo.
Foreign, from overseas.
So the term was shortened from the millet of the Europeans to, because corn and millet and sorghum are grasses.
They look kind of similar in their sprouting form to the, just aburo, the foreign millet.
Okay?
Or in southeastern Nigeria.
We just recalls the yam of the white people okay, or even the rice, because rice in africa was brown or red or streaked the white people's rice, the asian rice that they, that they were moving from place to place, even from southern europe and the middle east and other places, that was called the beans of the europeans, you know.
So this is a very consistent theme.
Um, I think it's Stanley Alpern.
He does a really good job of talking about the linguistic roots of this period of introduction and these foreign goods and foreign foods and what the impact was.
But yeah, peppers, tomatoes, you know, things you need to make jollof rice with.
That comes over.
And then we get red rice and we get arroz mexicano and we get arroz bahiana in Brazil.
And we get all these, forgive my pronunciation, y'all.
And all these different foods that basically come from this one pot rice dish.
You know, Benachin in some places.
There's many different names.
And, you know, contemporary food is jollof rice.
But it has all these historical roots that keep crisscrossing the Atlantic.
And I mean, I blow your mind one more time.
Black people didn't just show up and go across the ocean once.
A lot of communities from every single major slaveholding society or formerly slaveholding society would make their way back across the Atlantic with Brazilian American, Caribbean ideas about food that have long been apart, for 150 years at least part of West African cooking.
So it wasn't a one-way street.
It's incredible history.
I mean, like everything you think you know about history, if it's just like this happened and then that happened, that's probably not how it happened.
Nope, not at all.
There was always some back and forth and some circling.
I'm going to get to another dish that you put forward as an iconic Southern dish as important as fried chicken, according to the great Alabama writer Eugene Walter.
And that's crab cakes.
You're also very careful to say Maryland crab cakes.
You're not going to try to say Maryland crab cakes are like the ultimate crab cake or like the ur-crab cake.
Sure.
Forgive me.
Tell us about the importance of crab cakes.
First of all, it's Merlin.
It's M-U-R apostrophe L-A-N apostrophe Merlin. so um merlin crab cakes thank you so much um i mean it's it's it's funny because it's like you look at all the all the stories are there you know europeans the british love their everything was a cake or a pie right um okay the africans fritters but they're like croquettes right they're basically croquettes yeah of course they're good though Anglo-French kind of thing going on in the Croquette, right?
And then you have fritters from West Africa.
Love those fritters.
And then indigenous people who I'm sure had their own sort of like, like the idea of like cornmeal and crab meat.
I mean, it's got to be in there somewhere.
And so I look at that and go, this is like a signature thing.
It was sold in the streets of Annapolis and Williamsburg by enslaved women.
And then, of course, I didn't notice this when I first, when I was writing, because I was, I was in a different mental space.
But I noticed like, oh, wow, I did red rice, Sephardic pink rice.
I did jambalaya.
I did this.
Then I did crab cakes and I did crab chop.
And I will say this much, the crab chop.
There is a beautiful in not Eugene Walter's book, but the other book uh, creole and acadian.
Peter s civilman from time life as well, captures a time in american food that we'll never, ever see again food, the foods that are either going extinct, have gone extinct or endangered, or don't look the same.
So wait, what's the crab chop?
A crab chop is a linton dish from louisiana.
It's very similar to the crab cake, but not exactly the same, and the picture that i i think this is, you know had me in rapture all these years is a beautiful crab chop with a crab claw in place of the bone that would have come off a rib chop like a pork chop.
So it's a crab cake shaped like a pork chop with a claw.
Yes, with a claw attached to it.
It has to be beautiful red and blue, right?
And then it was on a plate.
That was the actual menu back in old New Orleans in Creole French, on the edges of the plate, which I thought was gorgeous.
But I mean the fact that somebody took the time to sort of like do this, you know, trick of the eye for Lent was just amazing.
But I just noticed how many foods I was including in the cookbook that had their parallel within the same region.
And as I have said before, there were similar recipes with different accents.
But they're telling a very similar story.
Because remember, Maryland was originally a Catholic colony.
And that there were two states in the old South that had a high Catholic presence.
It was Maryland and Louisiana.
So you can go all day with these sort of like extra layers of storytelling and meaning.
And the bottom line, for instance, is that nobody is writing the authoritative book on anything.
Maybe Natalie Dupree did, I don't know.
But what I'm saying is that It's exciting to know that there are all these blueprints that future generations will be able to look back on and be able to come up with their own narrative about what the South was, is and means to them.
Yeah.
Well, then I got to ask you, what's in your crab cake?
Okay, so my crab cake in my house doesn't exist because I keep a kosher kitchen.
But if I'm cooking for somebody else, I often make things that I don't eat, by the way.
Or used to eat, but don't eat anymore.
So I guess the easy answer is a little sprinkle of kitchen pepper.
What's kitchen pepper?
Kitchen pepper is a spice mixture that I've helped to popularize out of historical cooking.
I call it the all-purpose seasoning of the colonial era, because it would blend in all the different what we consider sweet spices into a mix.
And I throw a little red pepper in there and a white pepper in there.
And I think it's just fun because it makes people...
Kind of like, yes, oh, my God, that flavor is so familiar, but I can't really put my hands on it.
And it's actually a very old Southern flavor.
You know, when you write a book like this, you have to find a way to incorporate things that tell your story or your contribution.
I've tried to really keep most recipes as not authentic, but as traditional as possible.
And at the same point in time, add my own part to the story.
Yeah, that sounds so good.
So sweet spices like cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice.
Mace.
Mace, but also a little chili.
Yeah.
That sounds delicious.
Well, all right.
Well, I'm going to go.
I know you're not going to eat the crab cakes, but I'm going to make some for myself.
That's good.
Well, thank you, Michael.
It is always a pleasure talking with you.
Oh, thank you, sir.
Always a pleasure.
Michael Twitty's new book is Recipes from the American South.
And on splendidtableorg you can find his creamy recipe for the classic Louisiana sauté of corn and peppers makchou.
That's M-A-Q-U-E-C-H-O-U-X.
We'll be back in just a minute to talk with Deb Freeman on her documentary, Finding Edna Lewis.
I'm Francis Lam, and this is The Splendid Table from American Public Media.
I'll see you next time.
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I'm Francis Lam, and you're listening to The Splendid Table.
One of the most influential non-household names in American food has to be Edna Lewis.
We've talked about her a number of times on this show over the years, but I mean you have to understand that a person who single-handedly changed the perceptions of what Southern food is, what Black food is and what even food writing can do.
She really just deserves the airtime.
And yet most cooks and eaters in our country have not heard of her.
Helping to spread the good word is Deb Freeman, who recently made a documentary on Miss Lewis's life and especially how her home state of Virginia influenced her cooking.
It's on PBS and it's called Finding Edna Lewis.
Hi, Deb.
It's so great to talk with you.
Thanks for having me.
Okay, so you have spent years of your life researching, telling the stories of Black food, but this is your first film project.
So what led you to focusing on Edna Lewis's story?
Yeah, it's interesting that you know.
Before I started writing about Black Food Waste, I did not know who she was.
And I'm ashamed to say that.
And I'm from Virginia, right?
No, no, no.
So that's just horrible.
I had no idea.
I think you're being hard on yourself.
But once I learned about her, you know, I was immediately angry.
I'm like, why is no one talking about this woman who really was a pioneer in so many ways?
And so throughout the years, you know, in every interview I did, every chance I got, I would always mention Edna Lewis.
I would always talk about her because I just felt like her legacy was so important.
And so when the opportunity was available from Fuel Studio, I spoke with Hannah and Lance.
They had an idea already.
They said hey, we listened to you on a podcast and you said that there should be a film about Edna Lewis, and we agree.
And I said, say less.
I'm in.
What do I need to do?
Let's go.
And it was just really off to the races at that point.
Cool.
Well, for those who don't know her, tell us who she was and why she matters.
We'll talk about why she matters in great detail, but how would you introduce Edna Lewis to listeners?
Yeah.
Edna Lewis, she's often referred to as the grand dame of Southern cooking.
She really, with her work, really changed the way Americans looked at Southern food.
She was a pioneer in the farm-to-table movement that we all know that verbiage today.
But she really was someone who spoke about Virginia food and Southern food in ways that a lot of people were not talking about at the time.
Well, you've mentioned several times the Virginian-ness of Miss Lewis.
And yeah, you're right.
I mean, when people talk about her, she is the grand dame of Southern cuisine or the person who really showcased Southern food in a new light, particularly in the sort of high-end chef restaurant world.
But in the film and in our conversation it seems like you're really excited to talk about her not just as a Southerner but specifically as a Virginian.
What does that mean to you?
Yeah, I mean, I think Virginia gets left out of the food media conversation quite frequently, not just in American food but in Southern food, which is troublesome to me.
One not only as a Virginian but also as someone who studies food, because there are so many quintessential Southern foods that happen here in Virginia that have you know.
We are the birthplace of American barbecue, of American fried chicken, of macaroni and cheese.
We created all of these dishes and there's very little conversation about that happening in the food world.
When you talk about Southern food,
And that bothers me.
And so what that means with Edna Lewis's work and the food that she was cooking.
I was very struck by wherever she went.
When she was cooking in New York, when she was cooking in Charleston, wherever she was, she was cooking Virginia food.
She did not shy away from the food in Freetown, Virginia.
She really was intentional about cooking the food where she was from.
She was very proud of that.
And so that's something that was a lesson to me to not look to North Carolina or Georgia or somewhere else when I'm talking about the roots of Southern food, but really to emphasize Virginian food.
Yeah.
You mentioned Freetown, which is the community that she grew up in.
It's called Freetown, but it's not even really a town.
Tell us a little bit about that community and how it influenced her.
Absolutely.
So Freetown, which is what was known at the time, really was a community that was created by free, you know, emancipated Black people.
So after slavery, this group of people came together and created their own school.
They created a church.
They really created a community of their own.
And Miss Lewis's grandfather was one of the founding fathers, if you will, of the town.
And so it was a very close-knit community and one that really influenced her.
You can see in her work, particularly in Taste of Country Cooking, where she talks about going to her neighbor's house for blackberries or for a different ingredient.
And so that kind of tight-knit community where food was communal.
That was something that you could tell was important to her and was a through line throughout her culinary career.
Yeah.
You mentioned The Taste of Country Cooking, which is, to my mind, one of the most iconic American cookbooks ever written.
Absolutely.
It's incredibly beautiful.
And she describes life in Freetown.
And one thing that really struck me when I read it was the degree to which.
Okay, so if you tell me like, here's a story of life in a settlement essentially established by a few families of formerly enslaved people.
And I guess automatically I would have assumed, oh, it was a tough life, a hard life, very rural.
They're growing their own food.
It's about subsistence.
And it was that, but she never described it in those terms.
She described it in terms of beauty and her cooking, right?
Even though they had to grow all their own food, and she describes having to slaughter their own animals and so on and so forth.
But she describes the cooking and the cooking style in this very elegant and refined way.
And at some point you realize, oh, it's because they were enslaved previously.
And many of the people in the community when they were enslaved, they were enslaved not just in the fields, but they were enslaved in the houses of the aristocracy, the well-to-do in Thomas Jefferson country.
So they were taught and they mastered this very French style of cuisine.
And then they brought that into their own homes and their own community.
And I love that in the film.
Let me get back to your film.
The first scene you have yourself cooking with a chef a contemporary chef, who was inspired by Miss Lewis, and she's making this dish that she felt was an homage.
And it was this beautiful pan-fried quail with country ham and grapes.
You know, it's not this hardcore, rustic country food.
It's country cooking, but a different idea of what country cooking really is than what people assume.
No, absolutely.
And you know, as I think, we would be remiss to not mention James Hemings here, just for a brief second.
And for folks who may not know, James Hemings was an enslaved man, enslaved by Thomas Jefferson, and was trained in France to basically cook for Jefferson and Jefferson's family and the household.
And so when he comes back, he brings back all of these French techniques.
That he is cooking at Moncello and Freetown is not far from Moncello.
It's 20, 25 minutes.
And so you can see a direct connection between the food that was going on in Charlottesville and up at Moncello and that kind of like dwindles down.
To your point where you just said folks who are bringing that back to these techniques back to their own communities.
And so again, when we think about country cooking, it almost sounds like a dirty word when we talk about, or less than I should say, when we think about Southern food.
And there are so many different types based on region of Southern food and the way that folks eat.
It is not just...
Something greasy, something fried.
There are other components to it.
And I think what Miss Lewis did really was show that it can be elegant, that it can be seasonal, that it can be vegetable driven and not necessarily have to be kind of those stereotypes of what you think of when it comes to Southern food.
So actually, let's take her out of the country.
She moved to New York City at a fairly young age, I want to say as a teenager.
Yeah.
And she eventually became a restaurant chef.
Tell us about that restaurant and her restaurant experience in New York.
Yeah.
So Cafe Nicholson was the restaurant that she was cooking at.
She was the head chef there, but a lot of people may not know she was also a partner in 1949 as a Black woman to be a partner in a restaurant.
Absolutely extraordinary.
But the food that she was cooking there she was cooking for kind of, you know, the in crowd, if you will, of the time.
So Truman Capote was there.
Eleanor Roosevelt ate there.
You know, it was the trendy place to go.
I guess it's the, you know, The Polo Lounge of 1949 or something.
And so, you know, she and her sister Ruth both cook there.
And you know really, once the New York Times article that comes out that talks about her roast chicken, which is done perfectly, and a chocolate souffle, and just, you know, really just skyrocketed um, that restaurant.
What's interesting to note unfortunately, is that, you know, when folks were talking about cafe nicholson, they were not necessarily talking about her, they were talking about the food.
But the face, as uh, sarah franklin says in the film, the face of the restaurant was white, but the food was decidedly black, but that's really where she started to get named for herself um, and you know, and in new york city she's becoming, you know oh, this is the person you go to if you want to have a good meal.
And you know, in my mind that's incredible that in that day and time there's a Black woman who has a financial you know, invested stake in a restaurant and is not just cooking for the restaurant, not to diminish that, but there's an additional piece of ownership that you don't often see.
Yeah.
I love that you mentioned that her sister Ruth cooked there as well.
And I think that story is.
You know, Edna Luce's own story is, to my mind, not sort of well known enough.
And her sister's, you know, is even sort of like a sub story to that.
I just want to tell you this.
I once actually had the opportunity to talk to Miss Ruth in her home.
Like I called her and she was in her kitchen.
She was, you know, quite advanced in age at the time.
I think she was in her 90s, maybe.
And I love that the first scene, again, in your film is that chef cooking the quail.
Because when I was talking to Miss Ruth in her kitchen, I could hear quails cooing.
Like in a cage.
Ready for dinner.
And I'm like, oh yeah, here you are.
Is there going to be dinner?
But yeah, it's country cooking.
Absolutely.
But they're going to be elegant and beautiful.
Very hands-on approach.
Yeah yeah very uh, very artisanal, very artisanal yes um, so okay.
So uh, miss lewis cooked at cafe nicholson, new york city.
Uh again, hot spot for the literati.
Uh, that was like in the 50s.
Interestingly, she continued cooking in restaurants to you know, quite an advanced age.
Many years later She takes a job in Charleston, South Carolina, at a place called Middleton Place.
And she was almost 70, I think, at the time when she took the job as like the chef there.
Tell us about that place and what it was like being there.
Gosh.
So Middleton Place, as you mentioned, in Charleston, South Carolina, is a former plantation.
And, you know, there's a little restaurant there.
And so she was asked to basically recreate plantation cooking there. for patrons of the restaurant.
And going there was such an emotional experience, not only for myself but Chef Anthez Ganaway, who we talked to there, and even for the crew members as well.
There was, just as soon as you step on property, just an overwhelming feeling of heaviness.
I think is the right word.
And so you know, I cannot even imagine, as Miss Lewis is asked to take on this role, and she's the grandchild of enslaved people
So, you know, What is that like?
I am so far removed from these generations of enslavement.
So there is some sort of detachment that I have.
And I felt incredibly emotional for the three, four hours that we were there.
So what must that have been like for her?
And she stayed there for a couple of years and even lived on property.
So I...
It must have been an incredibly emotional experience for her.
She didn't talk much about that, to my knowledge, in the research that we did.
But I'm sure that was definitely in the corners of her mind when she was recreating these kind of standard plantation dishes.
But what's really cool though, I think is, you know, After she leaves Charleston she takes those recipes for red rice and shrimp and grits and incorporates that into her culinary repertoire, so to speak, later in life.
So at 73, I think right, she moves back to New York City and becomes a chef at this very elegant, fine restaurant called Gage and Tolner in Brooklyn.
It was sort of like the jewel of Brooklyn.
Do you know why she moved back?
Do you know what the story was behind her going to that restaurant or-
Yeah, so the bit of research that we have is that she was lonely.
She didn't really have her core set of friends and family around.
And so I think that might have been part of the move.
And I think that part of it probably is a chance to challenge herself as well.
You know certainly, cooking on a plantation is completely different than you know, a legendary steakhouse in Brooklyn.
Two completely different things.
And so when she got to Gage and Tolner she kept a lot of the kind of chop house kind of things on the menu.
But she was able to change the menu in her way.
So you see Virginia fried chicken, you see Virginia ham, you see the she-crab soup, you see all of these kind of seasonal dishes on the menu that were not on Gage and Tolner's menu for decades, for years and years and years.
And another thing that I learned that I thought was really interesting was every morning she would get up and go to the market and see what was fresh and see what was seasonal.
She went to the Greenpoint Market and she's up there choosing produce.
You know, 73 years old.
Not only is she on her feet in the kitchen all night, she's up that morning, being that intentional about what is being cooked in the kitchen later that day.
What years were these?
So this is early 80s.
So we're talking like 84-ish, somewhere in there.
Okay.
So to hear you say that, and I know earlier in our conversation you said she's one of the sort of founding figures in the farm-to-table movement.
This is so far... before that phrase existed, farm to table.
At that point, American restaurants were not set up to run that way.
We were set up to have your produce delivered, that whole industrial system.
And so to this day you talk to chefs like oh, it's hard to source the very specific prudence I want, because I've got to find the right farm and the farmer will sell it to me.
And in 1984, she's doing that.
It's revolutionary.
You know, almost 50 years ago, that was unheard of.
And I think it just really harkens back to the way she grew up because she talked about there's nothing like eating a tomato or strawberry or blueberry when you're supposed to.
You know, it was very important to her to eat seasonally, because that's when she thought food or ingredients were at their best.
Mm hmm.
What an amazing, amazing person.
Well, thank you so much, Deb.
It's been so fun talking with you.
Thanks.
I always love talking about Miss Lewis, so anytime.
Deb Freeman's documentary is available on PBS, and it's called Finding Edna Lewis.
And that is our show for this week.
Thanks for listening, and we'll talk to you again next week.
The Splendid Table was created by Sally Swift and Lynn Roseto-Casper and was made this week by technical producer Jennifer Lukey, producer Maria Wartell and managing producer Sally Swift.
Jordan Turgeon is our digital producer, with help from Delonix Wynn, and Lauren Humper is our senior podcast production manager.
Thanks for listening.
I'm Francis Lam, and this is APM, American Public Media.
