Devilled eggs, peach cobbler and family pride
Traditional dishes and history are on the menu at Edna Lewis family reunion in Illinois
GALESBURG, ILL.— It was a mild July afternoon, and Ruth Lewis Smith was stuffing devilled eggs at the kitchen counter. She wore a red and white polka-dot apron, and her hair set in curlers under a scarf fashioned from pantyhose. A trio of women stood around her, assisting. “Tomorrow we’ll be dressed!” she remarked by way of greeting, giving me a once-over in my cut-off jean shorts.
At 94, Lewis Smith is the last living sibling of culinary icon Edna Lewis, arguably the most important figure in American regional cooking. In 1976, after nearly three decades of work as a chef and caterer in New York City, Lewis brought the traditions of refined, farmto-table Southern cooking, and the black foundation of American food, to national attention with her second, best-known cookbook, The Taste of Country Cooking.
After editing a book examining Lewis’ life, work and legacy this year, I was invited by Lewis Smith to attend the family’s reunion in Galesburg, where she now lives with her daughter and son-in-law, Mattie and Jerry Scott.
When I arrived, the household was already in high gear.
As she bustled in from the garden, Mattie Scott brushed the dirt from her hands, tasking my travel companion, Mashama Bailey — chef/partner of the Grey in Savannah, Ga., and the chairwoman of the Edna Lewis Foundation — and me with preparing the cobbler for the next day. Scott pulled a yellowed first edition of Taste from a shelf beside the stove, thumbing to Lewis’ cobbler recipe and beckoning me to the basement. Row upon row of home-canned bounty awaited: Strawberry and pear preserves, cucumber pickles and peaches. Galesburg, with its Midwestern flatness, feels worlds away from the rural Virginia of the 1920s depicted in Lewis’ writing, but in that cellar was a scene straight out of her book.
In The Taste of Country Cooking, Lewis wrote of her childhood in Freetown, a rural settlement in Orange County, Va., founded by formerly enslaved people, Lewis’ grandparents Chester and Lucinda among them. The residents worked for self-sufficiency, growing or gathering most everything they ate. Taste stands out among the cookbooks of its time: It’s seasonal in its organization, lyrical in its prose, precise in its instructions and subversive in its politics. Lewis offers menus for Emancipation Day, Juneteenth and Revival, but not for Independence Day or Thanksgiving.
Lewis died in 2006, at 89, but in recent years, there’s been a marked uptick in interest in her work and legacy: She was one of five honoured by the U.S. Postal Service on a celebrity chef stamp series in 2014, and she graced the cover of the New York Times Magazine in 2015. Although she is often compared to Julia Child in her importance, in 2017, a Top
Chef episode revealed that many young chefs have no idea who she is — and sent
Taste zooming up the Amazon charts. Back in the kitchen, Lewis Smith moved from devilled eggs to chicken salad, which she mixed and tasted for what seemed like an hour.
Scott’s sister, Amelia Smith, who lives with her wife in Arizona, sat at the kitchen table, waxing nostalgic about her Aunt Jenn’s beans. “You know, Aunt Edna may have gotten famous, but Aunt Jenn was the real cook of the family.” Several seconded the claim, including Nina Williams-Mbengue, who had typed the manuscript of Taste. Bailey scooped lard from a tub to mix into flour for cobbler dough, while I drained peaches in colanders set over soup pots.
The afternoon wore on. Scott defrosted a sink full of fish her husband had caught. The cobbler still wasn’t done. “You know, when Aunt Edna cooked, she moved so slow I thought we’d never eat!” Scott said. “But all of a sudden, it’d all come together.” Out in the barn-size shed, Jerry Scott, who goes by “Scotty,” fired up two deep fryers for the fish, and prepared a cornmeal and flour breading mix whose secrets he refused to share. Fishing in the lakes of the Midwest is a particular pleasure of Scotty’s, one he took to after he and Mattie moved to the region, lured by work.
That evening, those in attendance made quick work of the freshly fried walleye, hot johnnycakes, and a bowl of coleslaw we’d pulled together from preshredded cabbage and raisins. Other than the bottle of brandy awaiting its addition to the cobbler’s nutmeg sauce, there was no booze in the house; the Scotts don’t drink.
The next day dawned cloudy and cool; perfect reunion weather, Mattie Scott called it. She was moving fast: dumping green beans from a sack into one crock pot, a freezer bag full of her own braised greens into another. She pulled the devilled eggs and huge trays of potato salad from the fridge, laid out snack-size bags of chips, sliced onions. Jerry Scott and Bailey worked the grill, cooking herbed chicken breasts, hamburgers and hot dogs, while a cousin mixed powdered lemonade and iced tea. Someone arrived with boxes of fried chicken from a local restaurant downtown.
“At Revival in Virginia, they would have done their own chicken, but we just have to bring it in,” Mattie Scott said.
When we’d finished arranging the food in the garage, Scott led Bailey and me into a small dining that doubled as a sort of shrine to Edna Lewis, with all her books on display and portraits of her covering the walls. On a sideboard was a row of cakes and pies Scott had been baking, single-handedly, for weeks: sweet potato pies made from Lewis’ recipe, coconut layer cake, chocolate cake with white icing, bread pudding studded with raisins, and pound cakes. Our two cobblers rounded out the spread.
Car after car pulled onto the lawn, and relatives made their way to the long tables Scott had laid with albums of family history, photographs and every article ever published about Lewis. Family members pored over photos, some reminiscing intimately, while others paused to make introductions. A number of attendees had never met one another, and others had connected only briefly at one of the previous reunions that Lewis Smith has been convening since 1989. Few seemed to have a deep knowledge of Edna, other than that she was one among the family’s celebrities. She was a well-known chef, sure, but they also counted among their people a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer, Matt Lewis, and the coach of the Cincinnati Ben- gals, Marvin Lewis.
In early afternoon, the attention turned to the meal. As everyone ate, Lewis Smith stood and called us all to order; it was time to get down to the real business of the gathering. She introduced herself and named her grandparents, parents and siblings.
“Now we need to go around. Everyone should introduce themselves, the people they brought here today, and their connection to the Lewis-Turner family,” Lewis Smith instructed. Everyone abided, slowly sketching a verbal family tree that spanned generations.
As the last of the speakers took their seats, the Rev. Willie Aubrey Lewis, who had blessed the meal, rose and asked for our attention. “I’m humbled to be a part of this family,” he said. “What our forefa- thers did was impossible. But nothing is impossible in the eyes of God.”
Ronald Taylor stood. “I just want to say,” he said over the chatter, “that I now raise cattle on land that includes what used to be Freetown. And I just want to say that if you ever want to gather there, I’d be glad to welcome you.”
Like the last words of the Passover Seder — “Next year in Jerusalem” — his words ushered the hope, if not the promise, of a return to this family’s sacred ground. It wouldn’t be the same as Lewis had remembered in her cooking and writing, but these people’s presence would be a testament to the family’s persistence, not only in history, but the here and now.