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ORAL HISTORY
Edna Lewis
Edna Lewis was born in 1916 in the African American community of Freetown, Virginia, near Charlottesville. Raised in a family that grew and prepared all of its own food, Lewis devoted much her life to cooking the simple, Southern cuisine that she loved. Her work took her from New York to Atlanta and many points in between. As the cook at Cafe Nicholson in New York, she served many fellow expat Southerners, including William Faulkner and Truman Capote. Later in life she authored several cookbooks, the most famous of which was The Taste of Country Cooking, first published in 1989. She spent her last years in Atlanta with the chef Scott Peacock, and they collaborated on Lewis’s last book, The Gift of Southern Cooking, published in 2003.
Edna Lewis passed away in 2006.
