The Taste of Country Cooking

Nourishing

EVERYONE THINKS our friend Marco Pasanella and his wife, Becky, and their son, Luca, are Italian, and everyone is both wrong and right. Marco was born in New York and grew up in New York; but his grandparents were Italian, and he spent a good part of his childhood there, mostly summers, especially after his father moved back to Italy when Marco was in college. So he’s half-Italian, with dual citizenship. Becky is from rural Pennsylvania, but her sense of style and hospitality are pure Italy, a country she first visited and fell in love with as an adult, on trips to see her in-laws. And Luca, age ten, likes nothing more than to eat and hang out with friends. So, as far as I’m concerned, that makes them all Italian.

For years, the Italian government thought Marco was wholly Italian—and tried to conscript him for mandatory military service every time he came to visit. Eventually his age did what his father’s attempts to fix the paperwork could not. When Marco turned forty, the Italian government ceased its efforts to enlist or imprison him, and finally ended all conscription two years later. But these bureaucratic troubles didn’t lessen Marco’s love for Italy, nor his father’s. Marco’s father loved Italy with all his heart: the art; the landscapes, which he painted every day right up to the day he died, age seventy-nine; and the food.

In his eulogy for his father, Marco mentioned that his father’s last supper was a Christmas Day feast with friends in Torre del Lago, a lake town. Marco’s father ate:

Antipasto di pesce

Risotto ai frutti di mare

Branzino al forno

Dolce

Vino bianco

“I know this,” Marco said, “because, for thirty-five years, my father kept a diary that listed everything he ate and drank and with whom. Twenty-five thousand two hundred fifty times, according to my calculations, he listed the dishes and the beverages along with a seating chart. Overlaid onto the meals are a series of color-coded lines and shapes, which I have yet to decipher. Other than the date, the menu, and the dining companions, there are no other words in his diary.”

For Marco’s father, I suspect the food diary did more than simply help him remember what he ate and with whom; I would guess it helped him remember everything else he did that day, his whole life.

A company in Silicon Valley is now manufacturing shakes called Soylent (an odd nod to a film called Soylent Green about—spoiler alert!—cannibalism). The idea is that you don’t ever have to stop working—you can just suck down one of these shakes a few times a day and get all the nutrition you need.

Lin Yutang believed that nothing was more important than having meals with friends. In The Importance of Living, he writes, “It’s a pretty crazy life when one eats in order to work and does not work in order to eat.” Lin Yutang’s wife and daughter believed the same; they devoted years of their lives to creating a book called Chinese Gastronomy, which helped introduce the world to real Chinese food.

I live to eat. I think about food all day long. By the time I finish dinner each evening, I’m already excitedly pondering what I’ll eat the next morning, noon, and night.

Often, a novel I’m reading will make me ravenous. Babette’s Feast by Isak Dinesen, Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel, Sticks and Scones by Diane Mott Davidson, The Debt to Pleasure by John Lanchester, and The Book of Salt by Monique Truong—I had to put each of these books down after a few chapters and run to the grocery store or a nearby restaurant. And it’s not only from tales that feature food. Any story set in Japan, for example, will make me desperate for Japanese food. And any book set on the high seas will make me crave seafood, even In the Heart of the Sea, a work of nonfiction by Nathaniel Philbrick about the search for the real Moby-Dick, a book where the main source of sustenance for the sailors is, by necessity, other sailors. It didn’t make me into a cannibal, but it did leave me with a fierce hunger for shrimp scampi.

And anyone who is in a book club, as I am, knows that when it’s your turn to host, you find yourself scouring the pages of whatever you are reading to come up with an appropriate meal to make (or order) and beverage to serve. As far as I’m concerned, any book set anywhere near the Caribbean gives license to eat jerk chicken and drink rum.

Oddly, reading cookbooks often satisfies my hunger. If I look at one great recipe, my mouth starts watering. But by the time I’ve looked at a few dozen dishes, my confused mind is happy to settle for a cup of tea.

Also, like most cookbook fans, I tend to read them in bed after I’ve brushed my teeth and before I sleep. The great baking books inspire sweet dreams; the best international books transport me around the world; and the books of healthy cooking send me to sleep feeling virtuous just for having read them. But some cookbooks take my dreams much further: they inspire me not just to want to bake, travel, or eat more healthful food—but to live a better life. Some of the cookbooks I own and read are among the wisest books I’ve ever owned or read.

There’s Home Cooking: A Writer in the Kitchen, by Laurie Colwin. This is a book from 1988 that people who love food and who love good writing tend to love. Colwin celebrates what she calls home food: meals like “a savory beef stew with olives and buttered noodles, a plain green salad with a wonderful dressing, and some runny cheese and chocolate mousse for dessert. Heaven!”

She writes, “We live in an age of convenience foods and household appliances. We do not have to slaughter pigs, pluck chickens, or make soap and candles. We do not hand-wash clothes. Machines often wash our dishes for us—and still everyone complains that they hardly have any time. The American family, we are told, is falling apart. It does not dine: it grazes from snack to snack.”

Colwin admits that she has “no idea whether or not the American family is falling apart.” But she does “know that many people still like to cook for their family, but that when they rush home after a day at the office they may not have a lot of time and energy to spend on cooking.” What she provides is a book of essays about cooking and food and life. And she includes an important caveat up front: “These essays were written at a time when it was becoming increasingly clear that many of our fellow citizens are going hungry in the streets of our richest cities. It is impossible to write about food and not think about that.”

These are elegant essays about topics from all the equipment you might ever need in the kitchen to how to disguise vegetables (from adults as well as from children) to feeding a crowd to easy cooking for exhausted people. And at the end of almost every essay is a simple and satisfying recipe: potato pancakes, shepherd’s pie, old-fashioned steamed chocolate pudding, salt-free baked chicken with garlic and apples, and a black cake from the West Indies that is “to fruitcake what the Brahms piano quartets are to Muzak.”

In one chapter, on what she calls nursery food, a specific category of home cooking that evokes the wonderful, mushy, fork-only meals of childhood, she writes of the comfort that old favorites can bring, and how she was filled with gratitude after a friend made her a shepherd’s pie after the death of her father. It was just what she didn’t know she wanted.

“Parts of a nursery dinner,” she writes, “should be eaten without any utensils at all: corn sticks, cookies, steamed carrots and baby lamb chops.” The ideal is “something comforting and savory, easy on the digestion—something that makes one feel, if even for only a minute, that one is safe. A four-star meal is the right thing when the human animal is well rested and feeling rich, but it is not much help to the sore in spirit who would be much better off with a big bowl of homemade soup.”

Colwin was a novelist, short-story writer, and essayist; she died suddenly, of a heart attack, at age forty-eight in 1992. She left a husband, a daughter, eight works of fiction, and two beloved books about food and life, the second one a sequel to Home Cooking called More Home Cooking.

Nigella Lawson is another cookbook author who, in writing about the role that food plays in our lives, writes about life. And about death.

Nigella’s sister, mother, and first husband all died of cancer. In her book Feast: Food to Celebrate Life, she ends with a chapter about food at funerals and what you can bring to those who are grieving.

“It may seem odd to talk about what you eat at a funeral as a way of celebrating life,” she writes, “but at every level, that is exactly what it is. Nor do I mean a celebration in that cheery, if faintly maudlin sense of giving someone a good send-off, though that is a part of it. Any food is a vital reminder that life goes on, that living is important. That isn’t brutal: it’s the greatest respect you can pay to the dead.”

Nigella describes how for some the act of eating “can seem like the cruelest demonstration of the dreadful disparity that now exists” between the living and the dead. But she reminds readers that you cannot bridge this gap “by acting as if you, too, have died.”

She also wisely points out that no one is given a choice as to how they will react: “some eat out of grief, some lose their appetite.” And she explains how food “marks a connection between the living. There is nothing you can say to someone who is bereaved that can make anything better and even the notion that you could make it better can feel offensive, even if the wish is declared out of kindness. But you can help, you can make food. And if you can’t cook, or haven’t got time, you can shop.” The one thing she implores you not to do if you are shopping for someone who is grieving is to ask questions, like “what they’d like you to get or what they might want to eat. Decisions are impossible: you have to do it, and do it without drawing attention to the act.”

As an example, Nigella describes how a friend left some bags of groceries for her on her doorstep when she was grieving. “She hadn’t told me she was going, she hadn’t asked what I needed: she just left the bags outside the side door with a short note.” Nigella comments that it was “one of the kindest things anyone could have done.”

The Taste of Country Cooking by Edna Lewis is a book filled with stories of generosity and kindness. It is as much a poetic memoir as it is a cookbook, and reading it brings me from my city apartment to a place I’ve never been: Freetown, Virginia, where Edna Lewis was born in 1916.

Lewis begins her book by telling the reader that Freetown was “a community of farming people. It wasn’t really a town. The name was adopted because the first residents had all been freed from chattel slavery and they wanted to be known as a town of Free People.” Her grandfather, she writes, was one of the founders.

The restaurateur and activist Alice Waters, in her foreword to the thirtieth-anniversary edition of The Taste of Country Cooking, writes this about Lewis and her classic book: “She enjoyed a childhood that could only be described as idyllic, in which the never-ending hard work of farming and cooking both sustained and entertained an entire community. In 1976, with the publication of this lovely, indispensable classic of a cookbook, she brought her lost paradise of Freetown back to life. Thanks to this book, a new generation was introduced to the glories of an American tradition worthy of comparison to the most evolved cuisines on earth, a tradition of simplicity and purity and sheer deliciousness that is only possible when food tastes like what it is, from a particular place, at a particular point in time.”

Waters compares Lewis to “another notable advocate of simplicity, Mahatma Gandhi,” who “famously remarked that we must become the change we want to make in the world. Like Gandhi, Miss Lewis was as radical as she was traditional. To become the change she wanted to make, she left the racially divided South and plunged into the maelstrom of New York City, working variously as a typesetter for the Daily Worker and as a dressmaker for Marilyn Monroe, among other jobs, before she became the chef of an East Side restaurant in Manhattan called Café Nicholson and, later, of Gage & Tollner in Brooklyn.”

Edna Lewis would go on to found the Society for the Revival and Preservation of Southern Food. She would be named Grande Dame des Dames d’Escoffier International. And she would write three other books, two alone, and one with her friend Scott Peacock. She died in Decatur, Georgia, in 2006, at the age of eighty-nine.

The Taste of Country Cooking is organized by season. Lewis walks the reader through all of the harvests and traditions and holidays, meal by meal. There’s an Early Spring Dinner after Sheep-Shearing, and a Midsummer Sunday Breakfast, and a Morning-After-Hog-Butchering Breakfast, and a Dinner Celebrating the Last of the Barnyard Fowl. There are feasts: Emancipation Day and Christmas Dinners.

Just as each season has its meals, each meal has its recipes. My favorites are Lewis’s citron preserves, new cabbage with scallions, hot buttered beets, braised leg of mutton, caramel layer cake, oyster stew, hickory nut cookies, beef kidney pie in puff pastry, smothered rabbit, dandelion wine, and her shad with roe. And the best recipe ever for eggs sunny-side up.

It’s a book that ends with four of the sweetest words in the English language: “Serve with warm gingerbread.”

So that’s the food. But Lewis presents the ethos behind the food. She writes, “Whenever there were major tasks on the farm, work that had to be accomplished quickly (and timing is important to farming), then everyone pitched in, not just family but neighbors as well. And afterward we would all take part in the celebrations, sharing the rewards that follow hard labor. The year seemed to be broken up by great events such as hog butchering, Christmas, the cutting of ice in winter, springtime with its gathering of the first green vegetables and the stock going away to summer pasture, the dramatic moment of wheat threshing, the excitement of Revival Week, Race Day, and the observance of Emancipation Day. All of these events were shared by the whole community, young and old alike. I guess that is why I have always felt that the people of Freetown were very special. They showed such love and affection for us as children, at the same time asking something of us, and they knew how to help each other so that the land would thrive for all. Each family had its own different talents, its special humor, but they were bound together in an important way.”

This is a book about looking after one another, and looking after the future: “If you have a spot of land, do plant a few apple trees, particularly if there are children around to enjoy them. We are still enjoying the apples from trees our parents planted 45 years ago.”

Lewis describes her childhood with joy. She writes lovingly of her parents; and the excitement of having cousins come to visit; and the joy of going shoeless from March until the end of summer; and of making ice cream; and being too excited Christmas Eve to eat more than the oyster stew that began the feast.

Near the end of The Taste of Country Cooking, in the section on late-winter feasts, comes a passage that reminds the reader how precious and hard-won was this idyllic childhood:

It was in between these daily chores that the people of Freetown found more time for visiting each other. There were visitors from nearby communities, especially to visit with Grandpa. A person of his age group (80 years and older) would arrive on horseback or in a buggy, unbridle his horse, and put it in the barn with ours. Then he would visit us for a week or two or three. We liked having visitors. It gave the house a festive air and neighbors would drop by to greet the guest. We children were able to be alone in the next room and relax our behavior without being noticed. A great fire would be going in the fireplace, and we would serve homemade cake and homemade wines that seemed to have been made for just such occasions. There would be lively conversations, with the aged men doing most of the talking and the young adults of my father’s age group listening. I would be listening, too, hanging between my father’s knees and watching the logs burning in the fireplace and bugs desperately trying to escape from the burning logs with only me being aware of their desperate plight. I was too young then to understand why so much time was spent in discussion. It was only afterward that I realized they were still awed by the experience of chattel slavery fifty years ago, and of having become freedmen. It was something that they never tired of talking about. It gave birth to a song I often heard them sing, “My Soul Look Back and Wonder How I Got Over.”

This world that Edna Lewis describes to us so lovingly, that inspires readers to want to celebrate the seasons and do more for our communities and plant trees that will bear fruit long after we are gone—this world, as she tells us at the beginning and end of her book, was created by people who grew up enslaved.

In a New York Times Magazine article about this book, food writer and cookbook editor Francis Lam writes about the foundational role that Edna Lewis and black southern cooking played in the creation of today’s American cuisine. Lam also writes about the world in which Lewis grew up and lived: “She wrote The Taste of Country Cooking, in her 50s, in the 1970s, after years as a political radical, after the civil rights movement, after marching for the Scottsboro Boys.” He quotes Lewis’s friend Peacock saying, “She could see the ugly in the world.” But, Lam adds, Lewis “refused to let the past, her past, be defined by anyone else but her.”

A cookbook can do far more than give recipes for tasty dishes: it can introduce us to new places, help us celebrate life, comfort us in loss, and show us how to live. A cookbook can even remind us of America’s original sin, which is manifest in the countless inequities that exist to this day, and inspire us to listen more carefully to one another and do more to fix our world. And it can help us remember to be grateful for the labor of those who farm and bring us the food we eat, and for the extraordinary gift of having meals every day and people we love to share them with.