THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, May 26, 1996 TAG: 9605230056
SECTION: FLAVOR PAGE: F1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY BILL RUEHLMANN, SPECIAL TO FLAVOR
LENGTH: 197 lines
OCTOGENARIAN Edna Lewis, granddaughter of a Virginia slave, has been a New York chef, a cookbook author, a museum lecturer on African-American folkways and a World War II air raid warden.
Now she is a Ph.D.
Today, at its 14th commencement ceremony in the Harrison Opera House, the Norfolk campus of Johnson & Wales University confers upon Lewis the honorary degree of doctor of culinary arts.
The citation reads in part: ``Edna Lewis, you are a national treasure. Revered as the mother of American regional cuisine, your culinary genius transcends all boundaries. You have turned every day into a joyful celebration of life, bringing out the best from our soil and, more importantly, our soul.''
The doctor is surprised.
``I don't believe it,'' says Lewis.
She chuckles with pleasure, adding: ``You know, B.B. King got one from Yale.''
Albert Schnarwyler, executive chef at the Homestead in Hot Springs since 1962, will also receive an honorary doctorate at the commencement exercise this afternoon.
``So often in the culinary world, the word is that the great chefs are men,'' says Johnson & Wales communications officer Marisa Marsey. ``That's being dispelled. Edna Lewis has had a major influence for over 50 years on how we eat today, and she is a black woman.''
Lewis has never been a self-promoter, not during any of the years she ran kitchens at Cafe Nicholson in New York; Fearrington House in Chapel Hill, N.C.; Middleton Place in Charleston, S.C.; U.S. Steakhouse in Manhattan; and the Olympianly upscale Gage & Tollner's in Brooklyn.
This last establishment, gas-lit and trimmed in dark mahogany and old brass, goes all the way back to 1879. When Gourmet magazine paid a ritual visit there before Lewis retired in 1992, its restaurant writer came away impressed. He pronounced her ``distinguished author, teacher and dean of Southern cooks.''
Nothing new.
Former New York City mayor David N. Dinkins once called Lewis ``an exemplary role model for our youth.''
She is listed in the Who's Who of American Cooking compiled by Cook's magazine. Chicago Roundtable honored her as an Outstanding Woman Chef. The New York Cooking Teachers' Association named her Cook of the Year.
She received an Award for Culinary Excellence from the International Association of Culinary Professionals.
But Lewis leaves the airs to others.
``It's because of my background,'' she explains matter-of-factly. ``We had to raise ourselves and take care of each other. And then we had to move on.''
Lewis turned 80 April 13, which is also the birthday, she is quick to note, of Thomas Jefferson.
Lewis grew up in Freetown, Va., a community of farmers. The name was adopted because the residents, freed from chattel slavery, wanted to be known as a town of free people. Her grandfather was one of the founders.
Her father died when Lewis was 9. Her mother died when she was 15. The family and the community closed ranks.
She and her brothers and sisters attended the first accredited school in the area, built with funds raised by an Oberlin-educated teacher who began classes in her grandfather's living room.
Everyone worked the farm. The agrarian year had a ceremonial rhythm to it, marked by hog butchering, Christmas, greens gathering, wheat threshing, Revival Week, Race Day. And, preeminently, Emancipation Day.
Twenty years ago, Lewis wrote in her introduction to ``The Taste of Country Cooking'':
``Over the years since I left home and lived in different cities, I have kept thinking about the people I grew up with and about our way of life.
``Whenever I go back to visit my sisters and brothers, we relive old times, remembering the past.
``And when we share again in gathering wild strawberries, canning, rendering lard, finding walnuts, picking persimmons, making fruitcake, I realize how much the bond that held us had to do with food.''
Sharing Southern Style
Her grandmother had been a bricklayer as a slave, purchased for $950 by a landowner who wanted big houses. She helped provide them. The real ordeal was not the manual labor, but having to leave her babies in cribs each morning, only to return late in the evening to care for them.
``Years later,'' Edna Lewis remembered, ``after her children had grown up and were living in Freetown, she would still take her kerosene lamp and go upstairs to make sure they were there and all right.''
Her grandmother's industrious and giving spirit is an example that Lewis is driven to share, along with the good cooking of a bygone era that expressed love in adversity.
``I learned about cooking and fla vor as a child,'' Lewis reported, ``watching my mother prepare food in our kitchen in Virginia. She took great care with the food she fed her large family and our assorted guests, and, I suppose, I just naturally followed her examples.''
She feels Southern cuisine has received a bad rap because poor practitioners corrupted it.
``Southern cooking was never a fatty cooking,'' Lewis said.
It was, from the outset, about freshness. Southern food is tasty. It's not sweet, and it's not greasy.
``Because of the changing seasons, and the absence of refrigeration, we never bought anything from stores except sugar and kerosene,'' Lewis said. ``We gathered from the wild and what grew in the garden. In those days, nothing was hybridized or sprayed.''
The Civil War changed a lot of things.
``Southern whites had never really done their own cooking until after that,'' the chef said. ``Before, blacks had been the cooks. Food started deteriorating as people moved around.''
Lewis witnessed women, white and black, go to work in the war plants during World War II; in her view, they never really returned to the kitchen, even after the conflict was over.
``Fast food came out,'' she said, ``and Kentucky Fried Chicken came in.''
She still recalls an interview of KFC founder Col. Harlan Sanders conducted by Clementine Paddleford for the New York Herald Tribune. Sanders said his mother's cook had taught him how to fry chicken. She had been a black woman.
``He went into business and everybody locked into it,'' Lewis said. ``But others my age didn't have all this going out to eat. I stayed with cooking the way my mother did it.''
She didn't deep-fry - she pan-fried.
There is a difference.
``Nowadays, everything in the supermarket is ready to take home and heat up,'' said Lewis. ``The world has changed. A lot of women are working; they come home and try to make it quick and easy.
``We don't know about great cooking anymore - we don't take the time.''
But growing organically has experienced a revival, and so has Southern taste. Three best selling volumes by Lewis testify to that: ``The Edna Lewis Cookbook'' (Ecco Press, 1972); ``The Taste of Country Cooking'' (Knopf, 1976); and ``In Pursuit of Flavor'' (Knopf, 1988). Celebrated therein are buttermilk biscuits with Virginia ham, corn pone, turnip and mustard greens cooked with cured pork shoulder and lima beans in cream.
How about this for breakfast: sourdough griddle cakes with warm blueberry sauce and maple syrup, sausage patties, biscuits, pear preserves and coffee (``or java, as we called it,'' she added).
Maybe add a little Damson plum jam, while you're at it.
Friends and neighbors, you eat that for breakfast and you can wrestle a bear all day and have him for dinner that night.
Beautiful Ingredients
Edna Lewis reminds us that certain cuts of pork are even lower in calories than beef, and pork is an excellent source of protein (``the slaves couldn't have survived without it,'' she points out).
Lard, she notes, is more nutritious than margarine.
She has eaten ham all her life and embodies the best evidence for the success of a Southern diet. Lewis is active at 80, imperially slim in long batik dresses, with snow-white hair crisply bound in back. Her regal appearance seems appropriate to one called the Queen of Regional Cuisine.
And her middle name is Regina.
Jimmy Sneed, acclaimed owner-chef of The Frog and the Redneck in Richmond, says of Lewis:
``I can't believe this woman. Alert, lucid, interesting, interested. Fascinating.
``High-energy! She has a lovely handshake. She looks you in the eye.
``She is the true representative of authentic Southern cuisine. It's the real thing. It's what she knows.''
Lewis is supremely equipped to head up, with Atlanta chef Scott Peacock and others, the Society for the Revival and Preservation of Southern Food.
Understand that this is a woman who can determine when pound cake is done by the sound of it.
None of this poking holes in the gold with testers. She listens for a bubbling at the bottom of the pan. When the cake is quiet, it's cooked.
This succeeds.
Her husband, a ``worker,'' passed on many years ago. Lewis has helped Masai and Ethiopian immigrant youths establish and educate themselves in America. Her advice is typically direct and upbeat:
``When life is giving you a hard time, you must keep going. There are ups and downs, but you have to surmount those. You never stop learning.''
When she cooked at and ran august kitchens in New York, Lewis enjoyed a clientele of considerable celebrity. Tennessee Williams and Marlon Brando, for example, used to show up at the Cafe Nicholson routinely during the Broadway run of ``A Streetcar Named Desire.'' Rita Hayworth was another regular.
They came for the corn bread, the corn pudding and the catfish stew.
But, characteristically, Lewis never went uptown, either in her cooking or her convictions.
Her memories tend to hinge more on humility than awe.
Like the day Greta Garbo came to the Cafe Nicholson.
The legendarily reclusive film star, showed up one day in the company of celebrity photographer George Hoyningen-Huene. She had arranged in advance to come at a time when the place was closed to avert onlookers, but a crowd formed outside anyway during the course of her lunch.
Lewis remembers Garbo had a cheese souffle and beer.
``Just myself and a few workers were there,'' Lewis said. ``She was very pleasant, very friendly. But I can't forget the dishwasher who kept staring at her through the latticework.
``He shook his head and said, `My wife is better looking than that!'''
Garbo Schmarbo.
The real goddess was the one who fixed the souffle. ILLUSTRATION: FILE COLOR PHOTO
Edna Lewis doesn't take credit for her award-winning cooking skills:
``I learned about cooking and flavor as a child, watching my mother
prepare food...She took great care with the food she fed her large
family.''
Color photo
JIM WALKER/The Virginian-Pilot
Food styling by Art Elvins of Johnson & Wales University
Edna Lewis doesn't deep-fry her fried chicken - she pan-fries it
just the way her mother did.
KEYWORDS: PROFILE BIOGRAPHY COOKING by CNB