Documenting, studying, and celebrating the diverse food cultures of the changing American South.
Oral History Project Index
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INTERVIEWS
Ann Abadie
Kaye Adams
Jim Auchmutey
Marilou Awiakta
Ben Barker
Karen Barker
Ella Brennan
Ann Brewer
Karen Cathey
Leah Chase
Al Clayton
Mary Ann Clayton
Shirley Corriher
Norma Jean Darden
Crescent Dragonwagon
Nathalie Dupree
John T. Edge
John Egerton
Lolis Eric Elie
Donna Florio
John Folse
Terry Ford
Psyche Williams-Forson
Damon Lee Fowler
Vertamae Grosvenor
Jessica B. Harris
Cynthia Hizer
Portia James
Martha Johnston
Sally Belk King
Sarah Labensky
Edna Lewis
Rudy Lombard
Ronni Lundy
Louis Osteen
Marlene Osteen
Timothy W. Patridge
Paul Prudhomme
Joe Randall
Marie Rudisill
Dori Sanders
Richard Schweid
Ned Shank
Kathy Starr
Frank Stitt
Pardis Stitt
Marion Sullivan
Van Sykes
John Martin Taylor
Toni Tipton-Martin
Jeanne Voltz
Charles Reagan Wilson
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Interviews by SFA Members and Friends.
Project sponsored by Jim 'N Nick's Bar-B-Q.
So many great souls have passed off the scene. The world has changed. We are now faced with picking up the pieces and trying to put them into shape, document them so the present-day young generation can see what southern food was like. The foundation on which it rested was pure ingredients, open-pollinated seed—planted and replanted for generations—natural fertilizers. We grew the seeds of what we ate, we worked with love and care.
~Edna Lewis, from her essay "What is Southern"
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.
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Sadly, we were not able to collect an oral history interview with Edna Lewis before she passed. Instead, we offer you Kim Severson's essay on Ms. Lewis, "Blood and Water", a chapter from Severson's memoir, Spoon Fed: How Eight Cooks Saved My Life. "Blood and Water" also appeared in the SFA's 2012 collection of food writing, Cornbread Nation 6.
*PDF: To download Kim Severson's "Blood and Water" in PDF form, please click here.
