- I'm Deb Freeman.

I write, I'm a podcast host.

Testing 1, 2, 3.

And I love to eat.

Man, That's delicious.

Oh my gosh!

[Laughs] I'm on a journey to learn more about the life and legacy of one of my culinary heroes, Edna Lewis.

Hopefully you've heard of her, but not enough people have.

This chef, a Black woman from Virginia, changed the way the world saw Southern food -- and the way we eat.

From Freetown, Virginia to New York City and beyond, throughout the 20th century Edna Lewis introduced many Americans to Southern food.

She's one of the great American chefs.

But Edna Lewis isn't a household name.

Not yet, that is.

I'm headed to The Roosevelt in Richmond, Virginia to meet my friend, chef Leah Branch.

We're hosting a dinner to honor Miss Lewis.

I want to talk about what her example means today.

We were talking about doing another dinner because we did the Juneteenth dinner, and that was just such a success.

When you said you wanted to do another dinner, why did Edna Lewis come to mind?

'Cause I think it was your idea.

Well, of course, Edna Lewis is the, really the originator of the farm to table movement.

And I, I don't think enough people really know that.

- Yeah.

You can't go to, you know, most restaurants without the, you know, we got our food from here, or, you know, the lettuce comes from this farm.

And so it is interesting to go back, you know, a few decades and there's one woman who's kind of touting this and writing about this.

So when did you first learn about Edna?

- I would say maybe five or six years ago, honestly.

We didn't learn about Edna Lewis when I was in school.

Moving back to Virginia after I'd been gone so long and starting to see that, you know, there were a lot of amazing chefs that invented a lot of things that are nationally recognized.

It's just been super eye-opening since moving back.

- As a Black woman from Virginia, from a small town in Virginia.

Really that's something that I always found really interesting because when people talk about Southern food, they're talking about Georgia or North Carolina or all these other places, and we have such a rich food history here.

I think it comes through in your food at the Roosevelt, quite frankly.

You actually tell a story on a plate, which is one of the things I really love about you.

[Music] So walk me through the menu and, and talk about the different dishes we're gonna do at the dinner.

We really wanted it to feel like you were just having like a dinner in Edna Lewis's home.

One thing I really loved about her oldest books is that there's always like a mug of coffee with a lot of the dinners.

So as soon as you walk in, we're gonna give you a coffee cocktail, and then we are gonna go right into Brunswick Stew, and then we're gonna move into that chicken and dumplings, which I'm so excited about.

Just 'cause it's like so -- - Rich!

- Rich and hearty.

and yet it's like just really light broth.

Baked filets that's gonna be served family style, serve each other at the table, and then we'll get into she-crab stew, your quail and Virginia ham, and then a big dessert buffet.

So.

- Man.

- Yeah.

- And so what do you want diners to walk away from when they get up from the dinner?

What do you want them to carry with them?

- I want them to feel that if they use beautiful food and they treat it well, then that's, that's fine dining, you know, that's the best sort of food that you can get.

And also just the story of Edna Lewis, which is inspiring in its own way.

That, that she didn't necessarily have all of the tribulations that some of the other historical Black chefs have, that she was just a person who had a beautiful, idyllic life and enjoyed it and shared it with other people.

And, you know, Black people can also have those stories too.

You know, it doesn't all have to be -- - Absolutely.

- Rising up from the ashes and -- - Yeah.

- That's awesome.

- After our chat, we headed into the restaurant's kitchen, so I could learn firsthand what makes Miss Lewis's cooking so special in the best way possible by cooking one of the dishes that Chef Leah will make for the dinner.

- Alright, so we are making Edna Lewis's pan-fried quail with country ham.

- Okay.

- So this is just quail, a little brown butter, country ham and grape juice.

If you just wanna kind of gimme a little press there.

- Okay.

While I pressed the grapes, Chef Leah browned some butter in a pan and diced the Virginia ham.

- And I'm going in - And so this has the herbs in it already.

- Yep.

So I've got some salt, pepper, and thyme on here.

- Okay.

- I'm just gonna let that hang out for a little bit.

- Okay.

You read it and it's super simple, but seeing it in person, it's so -- even I could do this, you know, and, and it would not allegedly taste bad - if I did it.

[Music] - So we're gonna give everybody one quail.

Some of our ham cooked in that butter, that grape juice.

- What a beautiful dish.

It's just really pretty.

- Okay.

You ready?

- I am ready.

I'm so ready.

- And grab a little grape there, some of that sauce.

- Oh man.

- You would so think there's like 30 ingredients in there.

- Yeah.

- Oh my gosh.

- Yeah, it tastes really complex, but it's just, just grape juice, butter, ham.

Man, that is flavorful.

- It's really nice and, love that kind of stuff.

I love obviously the feel of Edna Lewis's books and that, that there's no, there is no like chef's ego.

- Right.

- It's just all about the food and about like the beauty that taking care of food can bring to your life.

- Yeah.

[Music] I thought a lot about what Chef Leah said.

There was no ego in Edna Lewis's cooking.

And that's one of the many reasons that makes Miss Lewis stand out as a chef.

[Music] The night of the dinner, the sold out crowd showed up, ready to learn about Edna Lewis, through her food.

[Music] Chef Leah ran a tight kitchen to make sure all eight courses were delicious.

I had the privilege of guiding everyone through the incredible menu.

- because really, it's all about the food and letting it speak for itself.

Doing the research for this dinner led me to think more about Edna Lewis and just how much she contributed to culinary history.

- Another one to Edna!

Not only did she change the way many Americans thought about seasonal cooking, she changed how people thought about Southern food as well.

The food of the South goes so much deeper than fried chicken and macaroni and cheese.

At its heart, Southern food -- Virginia food -- is a cuisine that follows the seasons.

Edna Lewis was cooking the food she grew up on, and I realized I needed to do more than just read her cookbooks.

I needed to explore those roots and how that shaped her outlook.

And that's where we'll go next.

Freetown, Virginia, the birthplace of Edna Lewis, a place founded right after emancipation a place her ancestors could call their own.

When Edna Lewis cooked, she was writing a love letter to Virginia, to its food, to its people, and most of all, to this place, a village of free Black men and women.

Right about the time I started digging into Miss Lewis's story, I had a chance to see the dedication of a state highway marker near the site where she was born and raised.

- We humbly thank you for this really great honor on what would be today at Edna's 108th birthday.

So happy birthday, Aunt Edna!

[Applause] - Her niece, Nina Williams Mbengue, unveiled the marker before an adoring crowd.

[Cheers] - There we go!

A few days later, I had the real privilege of sitting down with Nina to learn about the bond they shared.

[Excited sounds] - Come on it, oh my God, this is wonderful to see you!

- So good to see you!

Nina and Miss Lewis were close.

For a time, they actually lived in the same apartment in the Bronx.

And I wanted to ask Nina about the Edna Lewis she knew.

- We read her books and we see the photographs, but you knew her.

Tell me about that.

- Tell me what she was like.

- She was funny.

She spoiled me.

So I loved that -- she paid attention to me.

And she was just a very warm and engaging person.

When I think of Aunt Edna, I think of her dedication and devotion to family, to her sisters and brothers.

I believe that she got that from the way that she was raised in Freetown, which she talked about frequently.

The old folks.

The old place.

The old house.

And I always felt protected by that.

That somehow gave me a, a sense of security, a foundation that only as a, an adult do.

I realize how important that was, especially with my, me and my mom on our own living in the South Bronx in the seventies.

I still had that Virginia in my mind.

And a lot of that centered around Aunt Edna.

- Can you talk about how she felt about Freetown and why that was so important to her?

- Freetown was the place where she learned how to cook and she learned how to cook from her grandparents.

And those grandparents had been born into slavery.

She always felt that the people of Freetown, their spirits were sort of behind her urging her onward, guiding her, directing her, watching her.

And I believe that she felt great responsibility to tell their story.

- Nina did more than witness her aunt's talents.

She played a direct role in one of Edna Lewis's most loved cookbooks, The Taste of Country Cooking.

- The most of the recipes were tested in our little kitchen, in our little railroad flat in the Bronx.

And part of that testing was Aunt Edna calling her sister Jenny, who was still in Virginia, and her brother Lew Stanley and rigorously going over the recipes.

Is this right?

Jenny, can you try this?

To make sure that she got it right.

She didn't cut any corners in her cooking and in her retelling of her memory.

- She tested a lot of these recipes in your kitchen, but you actually helped type the manuscript.

- Yes, yes.

- So I would love to hear what that experience was like.

- She would write the recipes out on these long yellow legal pads.

And her handwriting was difficult to read.

You know, it was very much chicken scratch.

And Aunt Edna did not like, apparently, periods or commas.

And I, you know, 12 years old, I thought I was all that.

And I'm like, Aunt Edna, you cannot have one sentence describing this whole -- on this whole page.

And I would break that up for her.

I had no idea of the, the history and the real legacy and how important this would be for the American culinary scene at all.

And I had no idea what a gift that would be for me, you know, as an adult.

And spending time with her was just the absolute best.

- We headed into the kitchen to make Busy Day Cake with Blackberry Compote, a recipe that Nina herself typed up years ago.

- I always think of them look like little jewels.

[Both laugh] - Then she walked me through the recipe.

- So we've got one stick of room temperature, butter.

- Okay.

- One and a half cups of granulated sugar.

Ooh, that's about right.

You can use your spoon to just break that up and get that mixed together.

Oh yeah.

It's, it's soft.

And remember they were doing all this by hand.

Aunt Edna had like, she had a special muscle here.

- I'm sure, I'm sure!

- Because she was like -- some of the cakes called for a hundred beats.

- Oh my gosh!

- And she was literally counting and I was watching her!

- While Nina simmered the blackberries for the compote.

I worked on the cake adding eggs and flour.

Nina added spice.

- I'm a little heavy with the nutmeg.

[Both laugh] - Then we put the batter in the pan.

This is so pretty.

- Yes - I keep saying that.

But it really is.

[Nina chuckles] [Birds singing] [Music] - The compote is hot.

- Okay.

- I will warn you.

I almost feel like we should do a blackberry toast to Aunt Edna.

Happy birth -- this is blackberry toast to you, Aunt Edna!

[Both laugh] Oh my gosh.

Ooh.

That's delicious.

Oh my gosh.

- Wow.

- Wow.

Oh boy.

The blackberries have become -- whoa.

- I don't even have a word for this.

- I don't either.

They becomes something in themselves.

This just tastes like these were liquered or something cured for a couple of months.

- Exactly.

Exactly.

And this took 15 minutes on the stove?

- Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

- But yet it's so rich and deep and flavorful.

This is a very elegant cake.

- This is a real elegant.

- Does it bring back memories for you?

- Oh my God.

- In Freetown?.

- Yep.

My mother sent me to Freetown for the summer.

'cause we were living in the Bronx, and Aunt Edna would come down when she was testing the recipes.

And we'd go there for a morning of blackberry picking.

- Mmm.

- And I was trailing along behind them, and it would be pretty hot.

They were talking about Freetown and the old folks.

They were laughing and giggling.

And I can just, these flavors, I can see them.

I can hear them walking along beside them.

Behind them and beside them.

And just the smells of being out in the country and the cow fields with all those smells.

It was wonderful!

- It's so interesting how food can bring back a very specific memory.

- Yes, yes.

And it sounds like you're saying that you can hear them and you can see them -- - Yes.

- Just from tasting this.

And so in a way, they're still with us.

- Yes, yes.

Oh yes.

Oh my God.

- Yes.

You're right.

They are still with us.

- Edna Lewis reflected on her life in Freetown and what it meant to her in a rarely heard interview recorded when she was in her sixties.

- It was like one big family.

I always felt loved and unafraid because everybody was your parent and everybody loved you.

And never lived in a community like that since.

And it's unforgettable.

[Music] - Edna Lewis left Freetown when she was a teenager.

She moved to Washington DC and then to New York City.

She joined millions of Black Americans leaving the South during the Great Migration, moving to where the jobs were.

But she brought with her the values of Freetown.

For her, it was important to buy fresh seasonal produce directly from farmers.

She became a regular at this very farmer's market.

There, I met Adrienne Cheatham, James Beard-nominated chef, cookbook author and market regular.

We met here to gather ingredients for an Edna Lewis-inspired summer lunch.

And when it's hot like this, you, you come here.

What do you think?

[Both laugh] - It's wicked hot.

- What are you thinking about buying?

- You know, tomatoes to make like a nice salad.

- Yeah, yeah.

- Radishes, melons, things like that.

It's funny, Edna Lewis in one of her books said that having a ham is like a basic black dress.

So I always keep like some sort of product in my fridge so that I don't have to do too much.

- That's true.

[Music] - Hey, do you have the nasturtium leaves today?

- Yes.

- Aww.

- Thank you, good to see you.

- Thanks for coming through.

Have a great day.

- You too.

Two buttermilk biscuits and two sourdough rolls.

- With the goods secured, we headed up to Adrienne's apartment in Harlem to prepare lunch Reading Edna's book, there are some French techniques I think that kind of come out.

Talk to me about your background and how you know there's that connection as well.

- Yeah.

So I, I really think that there's so much in common between Southern food and French cuisine.

- Mm-hmm.

- So when I went to culinary school, Adrienne, make a bechamel and I'm like, bechamel.

I was like, that's how we make mac and cheese.

You melt the butter, you add the flour.

- Yeah.

- Then you add some milk or water, then you add the cheese and melt it.

It's like, it's the exact same techniques.

- Right.

- They just have different names for it.

[Music] I have a piece of my Iberico ham here, so we are just going to throw a little piece in.

But we're kind of, kind of doing smothered scallions, a la Edna.

She is like, guiding light.

And not just in food.

In being a person navigating an industry where you're not that prevalent, you know?

- Right, right.

- You're, you're in an industry where people look at you like, what are you doing here?

As opposed to saying, you belong here.

- Mmm.

- So it's like, she's like this purity of what we should all aspire to in terms of how we treat each other, how we treat food, how we treat our craft, how we treat our ingredients.

Where we source from.

Like everything about her is just like aspirational.

[Music] Shall we literally and figuratively break bread?

- Yes, ma'am.

- Cheers.

- Cheers!

[Laughs] - While in New York City, Miss Lewis cooked from her Virginia roots.

But she made her mark not just in kitchens.

She worked as a typist for the Communist Party.

She started a pheasant farm and worked in a museum.

With so much to uncover about Miss Lewis's time in New York I met up with Sara B. Franklin.

Sara compiled a collection of essays about Miss Lewis, and she told me what brought her to New York in the first place.

- Illness befell her family.

And so at a pretty young age as a teenager, she ended up needing to leave Freetown to figure out how to make her way in the world economically, as did all of her other siblings.

And so there was this sort of exodus out of Freetown.

She first went to Washington DC as a later teenager, and she tried her hand as a laundress and famously flopped.

She was terrible at doing the wash because it's not what she had been raised to do.

- Right.

- But she did have a flair for style and an incredible way with a needle.

- Mm.

- And so when she eventually made her way even farther up into New York City, she had been part of the Great Migration out of the American South.

She was able to make her mark first as someone who sewed beautiful clothes.

She was dressing department store windows at one point.

She was sewing dresses for celebrities.

But she also made a name for herself as a really talented home cook.

And so that's eventually how she landed her job as chef and partner -- many people don't know, she was a partner at Cafe Nicholson in 1949.

- So, Cafe Nicholson.

So, this is an important moment in time for not only New York City, but for Edna Lewis as well.

- Absolutely.

- And so if you could set the scene for us.

- So we're in Manhattan in the late 1940s, right.

World War II has ended.

Money is beginning to flow back into the American economy, which means people are starting to go out, which means that there's an opportunity for restaurants to begin to kind of come back onto the scene.

But Cafe Nicholson is a special kind of a restaurant.

It's run by Johnny Nicholson and Karl Bissinger, who were partners both romantically and in business.

One a photographer, one an antiques dealer.

So you can sort of imagine, right, the post-war Manhattan scene already, we've got this sort of flamboyance, this opulence in this East Side restaurant.

And Edna Lewis had again just begun to make reputation for herself as a cook by word of mouth in the bohemian downtown scene.

She was a home cook primarily at that point.

Occasionally she'd cook for some friends for a dinner party, but these two men needed a chef.

Right?

They had the shell, they had the style, they had the flair, but they didn't know how to cook.

But they did know what was good and what was delicious.

And they knew that she could cook it.

- Miss Lewis remembered that time as audacious as she looked back on it fondly.

- We just opened a restaurant and without any experience in restaurants.

But we were lucky that people liked us and supported us, and we became successful.

But it was a great time to remember.

- Very quickly, it became a real scene for the sort of literati of the New York world at the time.

And the hangers on.

So you have Gore Vidal coming to dinner.

You have Tennessee Williams, you have Truman Capote, Eleanor Roosevelt comes to eat, Jackie Robinson comes to eat.

And in the kitchen with Edna Lewis is her sister, Ruth.

And they're working, they're tag teaming in the kitchen, and they're doing a mix of cooking things that they learned how to cook at home.

So you have a real sort of rural Virginia, French-inflected sophisticated, but home cooking, right.

That really refined comfort food.

So food that people want to eat, but done with such excellence of execution.

So you have a perfect roast chicken on the menu, but then you have Turman Capote sticking his head in the kitchen saying, "Well, can you make me some fried chicken and biscuits?

I'm missing home."

And she sort of famously would shoo him away, like, that's not what I'm doing here.

But as they became closer friends on occasion, she would make off menu items for people that became regulars of the restaurant who she began to trust a little more.

And because she became known as such a tremendous chef to those folks, again, pre-internet, pre really glossy food magazine, even what you have is word of mouth.

And she was so known and so beloved as such an excellent chef.

But really important to counter that is she was not the face of the restaurant in the way that celebrity chefs are today.

So she was not spending all of service walking around shaking hands.

She was actually the working chef.

The face of the restaurant was white, but the food was decidedly Southern and Black.

It was making a profit off her excellent food, offer her skill, her prowess, her embodied knowledge, but they weren't promoting her.

- If Cafe Nicholson was an early highlight of Miss Lewis' career in food, it also reflected what it meant to be a Black woman cooking in the 1940s in the shadows, behind the scenes.

Cafe Nicholson closed more than 20 years ago.

But I wanted to see the place where it all started, where Edna Lewis first wowed diners as a chef, what I found was -- not much.

An unmarked building with no sign of its former glamour, soon to be condos.

What does it mean that Miss Lewis is so hard to find?

She cooked here, she made her name here.

Why wasn't that enough to give it life today?

The reality is that Miss Lewis had a lot stacked against her.

New York City wasn't perfect, but it gave her a degree of opportunity that was much harder to find in the South.

[Music] For more than half her life.

When Edna Lewis traveled, she had to do so in segregated train cars.

Growing up in Virginia, racial violence wasn't only a threat, it was real.

And it's what happened the next county over.

Miss Lewis was nearly 50 years old when the Civil Rights Act made segregation illegal.

Until then, she would not have been able to enter this former Greyhound bus station through its front doors.

Today, this bus station has taken on new life.

Chef Mashama Bailey and her business partner renovated this space and called it The Grey.

Mashama told me what compelled her to uproot from New York City and move to Savannah, Georgia.

- A hundred percent of the reason why I'm here is because of the building.

That this was a segregated bus station and it was fully intact.

And so I decided to come down and take a look at it.

And it was before the renovations.

It was before any paint got on the walls.

- Wow.

You can still see where it said "colored waiting room."

- Wow.

- Like you could still see these ghost of signs.

- Yeah.

- And what I felt when I walked in this building, there was this sense of warmth.

I'm not alone.

I'm doing this with my ancestors, for my ancestors.

It, it's one of those things that I just immediately knew that I could do it.

- So, you know, your menu here at the Grey, it's sectioned off into different areas.

Talk to me about that decision making process to kind of mirror what Edna Lewis was doing.

- Right.

- And you know, why you decided to do that.

- So when I went to Savannah and started really writing the menus, I was writing it in a very Italian way of writing.

It was a good menu, but it didn't really tell a story.

And so someone was like, well, what would Edna Lewis do?

And in her book, In Pursuit of Flavor, it's really cool because she has, you know, from the gardens, from the farmland, from the lakes and streams and oceans.

And we just thought that that was such a cool way to remain inspired and focused on Southern cooking.

Right?

So our menu is broken up into four different sections.

And so it's dirt, water, pasture, and pantry.

In respect to Edna Lewis's book.

- So what stands out to you with Miss Lewis's life?

She's had this incredible life, seamstress -- - Right.

- You know, cooking for Truman Capote.

- Right.

- All this.

What stands out for you?

- I love how later in her life she wore a lot of African garb.

You know, a love that she sort of celebrated that part of herself that really connects her to her ancestors.

I love that she was a Communist.

[Laughs] I just kind like that she was different and she stood out and she had a different way of thinking.

I like the fact that she sort of pushed the envelope and got people's attention in that way where they were like, Hmm, let's keep an eye on her.

- I think that there's parallels between your life and Miss Lewis' life because of you know, the time in New York, back in the South kind of creating food that's not narrowly defined.

- Right.

- Because of the influences that happen.

Do you think about that?

- That's an, um.

No, I don't.

[Both laugh] I don't, I don't.

That would be an honor to compare myself to Miss Edna Lewis.

But I'm just inspired by her.

You know, I'm inspired by her yes, and.

You know?

And I feel like I have a little bit of that in me.

I'm like, yes.

And what's next?

I think taking an opportunity to move to a Southern city with someone that you don't know who's white, is very challenging in itself.

And to come up on a 10-year business together inspired by a Black woman who's inspired by another Black woman, I think is a pretty powerful thing.

[Music] - I couldn't leave the Grey without experiencing some of Mashama's cooking firsthand.

We went to the kitchen to cook a dish that connected to Miss Lewis, and to the very roots of African American foodways.

- So this is actually the first recipe in The Taste of Country Cooking.

And it's gonna be, mutton is the recipe that Miss Lewis has.

We're gonna do a braised lamb shoulder.

- Okay.

- And we basically pick it up in this sauce where it's based on her braising liquid recipe.

But it's actually a sauce out of Kenya called cané sauce.

- Okay.

- And I think with her, she really just lets the ingredients speak for themselves.

- Mm.

- And this is why I like a recipe like this, because it's not complicated.

It's really like, these are the ingredients.

- Yeah.

- That's it.

And lamb and salt and pepper.

That's all.

And I, I just adore how bold she is - Mm-hmm.

- With trusting the fact that the food is gonna taste good because it comes from a good place.

- To finish the sauce, Mashama charred the tomatoes and onions, rehydrated some ancho chilies and blended it all together.

[Blender whirs] - So Deb, with the lamb, we take the lamb and we smoke it.

And then about halfway through - Wow.

- We wrap it in foil.

- Okay.

That's beautiful.

- And we know it's ready when it, when it pulls, when the bone pulls out.

- Oh wow.

- After 16 hours of smoking, the lamb was ready to meet the sauce.

And Mashama heated it all together.

She added some lamb drippings in true Edna Lewis fashion, making sure nothing was wasted.

- Okay, Deb, so we have cornmeal.

- Okay.

I'm gonna put this down.

A little corn in there too.

Then we're gonna put down the lamb.

- This is such a gorgeous dish.

- This is one of my favorite sort of representations of what her food is to me.

- Why is it one of your favorites?

- I just, I think it's pretty, I like lamb.

I like that this sauce is in her book as a way to braise the lamb.

But it's also like a sauce that you would find on the continent.

- Mmm.

- So it's like there's a total parallel.

- Yeah, yeah.

- To how she cooks and how her ancestors cooked.

- Mmm.

And I feel the connection with this dish.

- Girl.

- Good?

- Oh my God.

And there's heat, but not too much heat.

- Yeah, not a lot of heat.

But enough to wake it up a little bit.

- I mean, I cannot imagine a better way of paying honor to Edna Lewis through this dish.

Absolutely beautiful.

- Thanks.

Thanks, Deb.

Thank you.

In a building that holds so much history, Mashama and her team are redefining what this space means.

They're celebrating the food of our ancestors and they're preparing the next generation.

As the head of the Edna Lewis Foundation, Mashama helps grant scholarships to up-and-coming chefs, farmers and storytellers who embody Miss Lewis's principles.

In food and in action.

her legacy endures.

But in Edna Lewis's lifetime, being a chef didn't have the same celebrity cachet as it does today.

She spent many of her working years moving from job to job just to make ends meet.

When she was almost 70, a former plantation reached out Middleton Place in Charleston, South Carolina is a popular site for weddings.

They offered her a job as chef in residence and asked her to develop a menu inspired by plantation cooking.

She accepted.

What was it like for Miss Lewis, a granddaughter of enslaved people to live and to work here?

A place where thousands of men, women, and children, worked under the most horrendous conditions you could think of.

To help make sense of it all, I went to the Middleton Place restaurant to meet Amethyst Ganaway.

Amethyst is a friend, food writer and chef who grew up and moved back to Charleston.

- Was it like, visiting this, I imagine you probably went on field trips here.

What is it like remembering that versus now?

Talk to me about how that feels.

- Being from here, I have a ingrained respect of what this place is and what it means.

It's beautiful, in its way.

It's like you, you look at this place and it's hard to imagine what was here.

And then you think about who created this, you know?

- Absolutely.

Is there also a sense of pride as well?

Because to your point, we built this, enslaved people built this - The entire landscape.

- Yeah.

So is there a sense of pride in that as well?

- Oh one hundred percent.

Craftsmanship.

The beauty to be able to make something so beautiful out of a tragedy.

We get to experience it in such a different way.

- Right.

- Right.

So I feel an an immense amount of pride.

- With Edna Lewis, she lived a couple buildings over right there.

And I'm trying to imagine what that must have felt like for her.

- Man.

- What do you think her impressions might have been?

- With her, especially growing up in a rural freed community I don't know.

I imagine it's a range of emotions, the way that we're feeling our range of emotions.

How can you not?

- I was doing some reading last night that she read the Carolina Housewife Cookbook by Sarah Rutledge and learning those recipes, which I imagine Black women were perfecting, cooking on a daily basis, yet no one knows their names.

- Yeah, absolutely.

And I think that's where Edna Lewis came in and she knew she had a responsibility when she got that call to come and be here and to take over for this restaurant.

And to specifically look back at those historical menus and those dishes that were created here.

She knew that it wasn't Sarah Rutledge who came up with those recipes.

And it makes me proud to know that someone of her stature would come here and understand and respect, more importantly, respect and learn from us and learn from our culture.

- Being from South Carolina, what do you take away from this?

- That I have a responsibility.

Right.

To accurately tell these stories or to, to give names to the nameless.

Right.

I think Edna Lewis, if she could be sitting in the, in the back corner somewhere in here looking at us, I kind of feel like she is right.

Like her, her presence is here looking at us like, look at these two babies.

You know what I'm saying?

Look at them.

- Yeah.

- Getting to come to a place like this and recognizing the impact of her work.

- Yeah.

- And the impact of the people that were here.

And I think Edna Lewis would be looking at us right now, and she would be overwhelmed.

Overwhelmed.

- Amethyst and I, we walked the same path that Miss Lewis walked back and forth to the restaurant every day.

She lived on the second floor of this millhouse overlooking the rice patties.

- But imagine, okay, you just got off of work at this plantation restaurant and this is what you can walk back up to as you come home.

Like that's crazy to me.

They made a little path right here and cut through.

And there's a window right there that would look out.

So yeah, she would walk up there.

- And she's like old when this is going on.

- Yeah.

- You you mean what I mean?

- Yeah.

Edna Lewis worked at Middleton Place for three years.

Friends recall that she left because she was lonely.

But everything she learned about the cuisine and the people stuck with her.

The next day, Amethyst offered to introduce me to Lowcountry cooking, starting with a trip to a seafood market.

- What are you most excited about?

- It's almost like, I don't know, it's almost like Christmas.

Like, I don't know what I'm going to get.

- Yeah.

- And I think that's what makes me feel real excited.

- Yeah.

Good afternoon.

Hello.

- How you doing?

- You wanna do some shark?

- Let's do it.

- Some shark?

- Absolutely.

- All right, let me get like a pound and a half a shark please.

And then we'll get some crab seasoning.

See, so it's like our mix of, like a Old Bay.

- Okay.

But everybody make they own.

- How would you like it?

- One mild and one spicy.

- I'm very much looking forward to this.

- You in for a treat!

- I'm very much looking forward to this.

- Thank you y'all.

- Thank you so much.

- You too.

- Next up, a backyard dinner, Charleston-style.

Digging a little deeper into Charleston's culinary heritage I mean, what -- how would you describe it?

- Charleston's culinary heritage is a painful - Mm-hmm.

- But beautiful story.

Charleston was created literally because of a food source, because of Carolina gold rice.

- Right.

- But from that, you know you have Gullah Geechee culture.

- Yeah.

- Which is the most retained West African culture that you can find here in the Americas.

Right, so you see that with dishes like okra soup, like red rice.

- So talk to me about the shark.

What, what is happening?

- Yeah!

I actually got some of our crab boil seasoning that we also got from the seafood market and I just threw it in here.

I'm gonna kind of do my own spin on something.

I actually saw Edna Lewis do while she worked at Middleton Place.

She did it with scallops.

I'm gonna do it with shark meat so I can bring a little bit of this back to, to Charleston and the Lowcountry.

- Yeah.

- And Gullah culture specifically.

- So are we gonna grill it?

That's what we're gonna do?

- We gonna grill 'em.

- Okay.

- We gonna stew 'em.

And then we gonna eat 'em.

- Alright.

[Music] - A little bit of chopped scallions and some green onions.

All right.

Let's drop our tomatoes in there.

All of them right in there.

Yeah.

You smell real good!

- It does smell good.

The seasoning smells insane.

You got me working hard, Amethyst.

- Good!

- You got me working hard.

- That mean the food gonna taste better.

[Deb laughs] [Music] - Oh wow.

- So we have here a little smothered shark with some greens.

We got our mustards, our turnips and our collards and some stewed-down heirloom South Carolina Lowcountry tomatoes.

- Thank you so much.

- Very welcome.

Well, I don't know about you, but my shark was fork-tender, so.

- Wow.

That is incredible.

- Pretty good.

- Oh my goodness.

- I be surprising myself sometimes.

I ain't gonna lie.

- When I'm looking at this plate, there's this full-circle kind of connection moment where you are so connected to the land here and to what you're cooking.

You have this relationship with that.

And so did Edna Lewis.

I would love to hear your thoughts on that connectivity.

- The, for me, the biggest thing about Edna Lewis was that she was cooking the food that she grew up with, literally growing in her community.

And it was all done very, very simply.

And it was all really delicious.

And for me, it helped me realize how special and how important my foodways were and how important my culture were and the ingredients that we had locally here.

So while it might not be ingredients that she would've had in Virginia, I was able to take those same principles and apply it to the food that we have here.

- For Miss Lewis, growing up with access to only seasonal ingredients, shaped her views on cooking and on life.

- Everything was in its own cycle.

So it, it made life more interesting.

'cause you only had spring food and then you had food of summer, corn and vegetables, and then the fall, the harvest.

You learn to discover food can be good without being doctored.

- Edna Lewis returned to New York City.

So I had to return as well.

After almost three years in Charleston, Gage and Tollner a restaurant in downtown Brooklyn called Miss Lewis and offered her the job of executive chef.

The restaurant had been open for more than a hundred years, and only a chef of her standing, 72 years-old, a stellar reputation, could match such a storied institution.

Today, Gage and Tollner sparkles after a beautiful restoration.

It's a place for comforting meals and for celebrations.

And some of Miss Lewis's dishes are still on the menu.

I met my friend Nicole Taylor there.

She's a cookbook author and chose Gage and Tollner for her latest book launch party.

We chatted in the private dining room, which is named for Edna Lewis.

And we had a meal in her honor.

- Beautiful.

Thank you.

- Thank you.

- Cheers.

- Stunning - Enjoy.

- I always knew that this was a spot that Miss Lewis gave the world more of herself.

Right?

So coming here is always, even though I may not say it when I'm coming with other folks, like, oh my gosh, this place is inspirational.

It's always in the back of my mind.

Always, always.

- Have you tried to cook any of her recipes?

Have you?

- Of course!

So talk, talk about that because I, I'm dying to hear what you've cooked and how that went.

- The Taste of Country Cooking is one of my favorites, but I also like the book that she did with Scott Peacock Later in life.

She has a cornbread dressing with pecans.

It's amazing.

It's just the way that she organized things, the way she organized her cookbooks really speak to me around seasonality, around connecting back to Virginia.

She laid out a, a blueprint.

- We have her cookbooks.

- Mm-hmm.

- But there's so little of her voice, her audibly that you hear or seeing her on video.

And so you kind of have to put together this picture of who this woman was in this time.

- There's one video of her that is later in life.

- Yeah.

- She looks great.

She's beautiful.

Her hair is like tight in a bun.

She has a beautiful caftan on.

- Mm-hmm.

- So when you see that glimpse of her, I feel like there's another piece of the puzzle.

- So then how would Christmas start?

What would your first Christmas meal be?

- It would be made up of what we had from hog butchering which would have taken place a week, a few days before.

And hunting season would be in that time too.

So we'd have pork from the pieces that wasn't salted down, such as spare ribs, liver pudding, hog jowl.

- And greens?

- And greens, of course.

No meal is without greens.

- And of course, John Hill's photos of her.

- Of course.

- Which are iconic.

- Of course, of course.

- She seems relaxed.

- Mm-hmm.

- But she also seems very much in tune to, I am working.

This, these portraits.

- Mm-hmm.

- Are going to live beyond me.

And they have [chuckles].

- Right, absolutely.

Her story is so unconventional, when you think about leaving Freetown, Communist Party, Cafe Nicholson.

Gage and Tollner happens later in life, much later.

It's almost larger than life.

When you really kind of look at her trajectory, and particularly as a Black woman, you don't often see - Yeah.

- You know, it's not your standard.

- No.

- Kind of story.

- And I wonder too, like she had to be thinking about legacy.

You don't keep writing cookbooks without that in your head.

You don't go to restaurants like this and not think about legacy.

Do I think she wanted money?

Sure.

- Of course.

- But I also think that there is a bit of, I want to leave my mark and this is the way I'm gonna leave my mark and I'm gonna do it not one time, but I'm gonna do it again and again and again.

I'm gonna leave my mark in Charleston.

I'm gonna leave it in downtown Brooklyn.

Black women who aspired to be writers, chefs, or wanted to tell their story, like to be storytellers about where they were from.

She, she left a blueprint for us.

For sure.

- Absolutely.

The idea of a blueprint made sense to me.

Thankfully, there's a much better understanding of what Black and Southern food is today.

Even if we have a ways to go.

We need to celebrate Miss Lewis for laying that foundation.

Much of eating together is about celebration.

And Nicole's newest cookbook just so happens to be about Juneteenth, a holiday that commemorates the end of enslavement.

In honor of that, we stopped by a Brooklyn café to get red drinks.

- Thank you.

Cheers to you.

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

[Deb Laughs] Then we head to Prospect Park where Nicole hosted her first Juneteenth celebration.

And she told me how Edna Lewis shaped her work.

- What I'm reminded when I pick up a Edna Lewis book is she writes about home in a way that paints a picture.

- Yeah.

- You can smell everything.

You can see everything.

You wanna go there!

- Absolutely.

The first time that I started celebrating Juneteenth was more than a decade ago.

- Wow.

- I threw together, I wouldn't even say "threw together."

I planned!

I like, it was a lot of work!

A Juneteenth picnic, right here in Prospect Park.

- Oh wow.

- We had pork shoulder cornbread, strawberry crumble.

We had like a slaw on the side.

- Mmm.

- The craziest thing is that I haven't been to this side of the park since that moment.

- Really?

- Yes.

So actually coming back here is literally a sign.

- Wow.

- Just seeing the Juneteenth sign here.

- Mm-hmm.

- And looking at the red, black and green benches that we are sitting on.

- Yeah.

- Like it is literally a sign from the ancestors.

Ancestors like Edna Lewis.

Right?

- Yeah.

- Ancestors in my immediate family saying, you know, to keep going, to keep doing it, it's literally a sign.

- Edna Lewis knew a life of hard work, but she always made time for celebration.

And one day in particular held a special place in her heart At Bethel Baptist Church in Freetown, for as long as anyone can remember.

Homecoming was on the second Sunday in August.

Miss Lewis lived hundreds of miles away.

But most summers, she returned.

She visited the church her grandfather helped establish, the church she attended as a child.

Bethel's Homecoming tradition goes on even today.

And the congregation warmly welcomed me to join.

♪ Jesus, the light of the world.

♪ [Applause] Another tradition that continues?

A lunch, cooked by the church community, enjoyed by all.

Very nice, thank you!

[Laughs] Miss Lewis and her sister Ruth always cooked.

Corn pudding, biscuits, sweet potato pie.

Many of the church members are related to Miss Lewis.

They take pride in their cooking.

And rightfully so.

[Music] 50 miles away, I visited Dr. Leni Sorensen.

Leni is a food historian and longtime farmer.

She teaches others the skills of canning, gardening and cooking.

And she has a motto: What would Edna do?

- Oh, look at this one, is that a beautiful.

- That's pretty, - That's a pretty one.

I'll stuff 'em with cheese and make chili rellenos out of 'em.

That's the other part that Edna gave me.

- Yeah.

- The courage to cook anything.

Just cook it.

It'll be okay.

And someone will like it.

Leni is part of a long tradition of Black farmers.

She helps others hone rural skills to be self-reliant.

If my mother could see me now!

[Laughs] In many ways, Leni is carrying out the goals that Edna Lewis had later in her life.

As Miss Lewis aged into her late seventies and early eighties she remained active.

She organized and advocated for change.

She moved back to the South and she co-founded an organization to preserve Southern foodways.

She wanted to start a cooking school to teach young and old what she learned in Freetown.

- Hey.

Oh, look at that.

Ooh!

Isn't that fantastic?

- That's pretty cool.

- Yeah!

- I've literally never done that before.

Leni offers historical dinners at her home, resurrecting recipes from centuries of women cooks.

She honors Miss Lewis, and the women who came before.

We prepared a recipe from the 1820s for curry chicken.

[Knife sharpening sounds] - Like I say, I'm a farmhouse cook.

I have never worked in a restaurant and I have never taken a cooking class.

- Mm.

- But I have been cooking since I was nine.

So I'm pretty loosey goosey compared to [chuckles] I'm just warning you darling, so that you don't feel like, what the hell is this woman doing?

- But you, you, you have said that you're not a recipe cook.

Right.

And so.

- Yeah, yeah.

- But when you discovered, you know The Taste of Country Cooking, you still related to that And.

- Oh yeah.

I could read and and get ideas.

Oh yeah.

Some, some fall squash.

I haven't, you know.

Mostly I think it was that notion of a person that really understood chopping firewood and putting it in the stove and carrying it in the house and going out and butchering the pig and then bringing all the stuff in and then da, da, da, dah.

That was so cool.

'cause I was doing exactly the same things.

- Mm.

- Her confidence in it, her admiration for it.

She never addresses farm life as a hardship, as an endurance, as just a way to somehow get by.

There's none of that.

It's, we farmed and it was fantastic!

[Laughs] [Music] - I wonder if with your work and your background, if you look at Taste of Country Cooking almost in an academic way -- - As a manual?

Oh sure.

- Yeah, as a manual.

- It's more than just, the food.

- Mm-hmm.

- But she gave me that particular kind of permission to cherish the fact that, oh, there are Black women farmers.

It just made me feel, okay, I can do this too.

- Dinner would include salad, Carolina gold rice, carrots and parsnips, our curry chicken and tomato soup.

- Okay!

Come on!

Good to see you.

[Dinner bell ringing] Dinner guests included Chef Leah Branch of The Roosevelt, along with neighbors, family and friends.

We served each other and we traded stories.

And Leni shared her deep knowledge of Virginia cooking.

An evening Edna Lewis would no doubt appreciate.

You know, we have gone through months and months of talking about Edna Lewis and I'm wondering what people think her legacy is and what she means today.

- I just think that her power is like, she has so many entry points for everybody.

I came from like a history background, but also farm-to-table cooking, Southern cooking, her name comes up prominently in all these different avenues and entry points that speaks to like how strong and powerful her influence is.

And that like is just gonna grow more and more.

- She's writing a book about the life that these people who were emancipated and became these marvelous people.

She, she knows where they came from and she's not gonna not tell you where they came from.

But that isn't the story that she wants to tell.

And she doesn't make more of it than what it was.

It, it didn't save the planet.

It didn't stop segregation.

It didn't stop lynching.

She's not saying any of that.

She's saying, in this little place, for this little time, we had this, and this is what it was, and it was beautiful.

- Leni's words rang true as we enjoyed the food and each other's company.

The cherry on top?

Edna Lewis's bread pudding, one of Leni's favorite recipes from her favorite cook.

Searching for Edna Lewis, I found that everyone who knows her, everyone who knows her work, has been on their own journey of discovery.

No matter who you are, to know Miss Lewis is to feel empowered, to grow your own produce, to cook for others, to celebrate the place where you grew up, to work hard and put your stamp on things.

One meal on one evening may feel fleeting, but there's so much of Edna Lewis that lingers.

- You spend just intensely, intensely working on something and then it is, it's eaten and gone.

But I think some foods linger, which although they're eaten and gone, if it's good, it'll be remembered.

So it, it is gone, but remembered.

[Music]