Edna Lewis, My Grandmother, and the Continuities of a Southern Preserving Tradition
On June 8, 1861, the citizens of Blount County in east Tennessee—567 square miles of fertile valleys and wooded foothills that climb toward the Smoky Mountain crest—paused from their work in fields and towns to cast ballots in a referendum on the state’s Ordinance of Secession, which had been shepherded through the General Assembly by Governor Isham Harris. Blount County voted against, by a count of 1,766 to 414. Strong secessionist majorities in middle Tennessee swung the other way, and Tennessee became the last state to join the Confederacy.
None of my living family members knows with certainty how our Anglo–Scotch-Irish ancestors voted, but the Wests have lived in Blount County long enough that our family lore stretches back almost to that day. My father heard his great-grandfather tell that, as a young boy, he saw Union soldiers pass his window at the end of the cataclysm. That ancestor was Payton West, born on my birthday, May 22, in 1860, so his memory of boyhood must have been either unusually acute or, more likely, informed by stories he later heard and adopted as his own. Payton went on to study law and to keep a farm, although without much success on the latter count. He had a bookish and moody nature—I suspect today he’d be diagnosed as depressive—and his land produced poorly. The family lacked. Payton’s son, Burgess, had a clearer mind and a stronger back. With poverty as his goad, Burgess acquired land at a steady clip and died with 500 acres. One of his ten children was my grandfather, John Riley West, born in 1912. Pappaw married my grandmother, Mary Eloise McGill, in 1930, and five years later they settled on 126 acres near the town of Greenback. Gran had been born in Blount County in 1916, and she died there in 1981, when I was eleven, an age at which I was old enough to feel the pain of loss but too young to have a sane measure of its proportion, and so her death became the traumatic center of my childhood.
Many years later, in April 2008, I was at a farmers’ market in Santa Monica, California, at the peak of strawberry season. It’s a story I’ve told often, because often people want to know how a person’s life changes course. The sight of so many strawberries made me impulsive, and I bought a whole flat, then realized I couldn’t eat them all before they went bad. I thought of Gran’s strawberry jam and decided to make some. With no one to explain preserving to me, my first attempts were a bust. The formula to describe what happened next would look something like this: desire + frustration = obsession.
Five years later I emerged from my rabbit hole of research, cooking, and writing with Saving the Season: A Cook’s Guide to Home Canning, Pickling, and Preserving. It’s a collection of 220 recipes inspired by my family, southern ingredients, southern traditions, and historic English and American cookbooks. I explored or adapted preserving recipes from, among others, Edna Lewis, Rufus Estes, and Abigail Fisher, not because I went looking for African American contributions to southern preserving, but because their recipes connected me vividly to childhood memories of Blount County in the 1970s, on the eve of land-use changes that saw farming replaced by tract housing.
A little more about Gran’s death, and a ghost story: that summer I turned eleven, Gran went into the hospital for her heart and didn’t come back. I last saw her in a little sitting room off the kitchen, where she kept a covered crock of fourteen-day sweet pickles. Miss Lewis gives a similar recipe in In Pursuit of Flavor, although she mentions in the headnote that “changing times have produced hybrid cucumber varieties, which have affected the way we make pickles.” Still, the general outline holds. You ferment the cucumbers (fewer than fourteen days are needed for “improved” hybrid varieties), stabilize them with vinegar and sugar, and season the pickle with the traditional blend of mustard, allspice, pepper, cloves, ginger, and such. Gran made them every summer. When Pappaw died in 1999, the year I turned twenty-nine, the farm on Maple Lane sold to a developer. The last time I went to see the place, bulldozers had already scraped away the farmhouse. I sat stupefied and red-eyed on the red clay ground and looked in vain for shards of Gran’s pickling crocks. Some years later, after I moved to Los Angeles, I booked a session with a psychic energy healer as research for a magazine piece on alternative medicine. She laid me on a table and performed her hocus-pocus. My mind drifted back to Gran and Pappaw’s farm. “This is strange,” said the healer as she kneaded the air around my body. “I’m getting a smell of pickles.”
I was mired in a depressive and alienated phase then, wounded by my buried grief about Gran’s early death and homesick for Blount County. I went to a therapist, sometimes twice a week, in hopes of a talking cure. Then, for whatever reason offered by a mind in psychic turmoil, in the spring of 2008 I seized on strawberry jam as synecdoche for Gran and Pappaw’s farm, for the childhood idyll, for the lost locus amoenus. After my first failed attempt to conjure Gran’s jam, I riffled cookbooks for knowledge that could help me, and among the books I found were Miss Lewis’s.
Like my grandmother, Edna Lewis was born in 1916 in the upland South. This is most of what the two women shared, other than that they both grew up in communities of farming people in former Confederate states and they both made strawberry preserves.
In The Taste of Country Cooking, published by Knopf in the bicentennial year, Miss Lewis proposes a menu for a late spring lunch that includes a ring mold of chicken sauced with wild mushrooms in cream, a salad of loose-leaf lettuce and scallions, and biscuits with strawberry preserves. Note that adverb, late spring. Someone who has lived close to a garden or cooked from one knows that the seasons have their seasons. Early spring brings cress, polk, and asparagus—the first shoots and leaves. Crops of mushrooms and strawberries—two types of fruiting bodies—need longer to mature. In her next book, 1988’s In Pursuit of Flavor, Miss Lewis wrote that she always tried to get home to Virginia in late April or early May for wild strawberry picking. Strawberries were a cause for celebration in Freetown, as they were in Blount County when I was young, because they came in once a year, a seasonal occurrence that marked both natural cycles—orbs spinning in the solar system and all that—and cultural traditions. Strawberries were an event. Miss Lewis made strawberry preserves for the same reason one made the effort to preserve any food: to extend the shelf life of a desirable and fleetingly abundant crop. At its most basic, preserving is the way to storehouse seasonal calories, nutrition, and flavor for later use. “Having preserves on the pantry shelf,” wrote Miss Lewis, “is like having a little taste of summer in the middle of winter.” Preserving is how abundance prepares for want. It’s saving the season.
Miss Lewis’s recipe for strawberry preserves in The Taste of Country Cooking is standard: three cups of crushed fruit cooked down with 2 1/2 cups of sugar. (Her use of crushed fruit suggests to me that the final product will be more of a “jam” than “preserves,” but the distinction between the two categories always blurs.)
Miss Lewis’s experience, the source of her authority, shows in her written instructions. For example, she’ll have you crush the berries with “a clean, odorless, wooden pestle”—not, in other words, the same one used for spices or garlic—”or a strong coffee mug.” When the fruit and sugar meet in the preserving pan, “it is much better to skim while it’s rapidly boiling, because that seems to cause the scum to remain in a mass, and it’s easy to dip it out without getting too much of the syrup.” Her prose shows an intimate knowledge of what actually happens in a kitchen—sometimes you don’t have a clean, odorless, wooden pestle handy—and sings with the folksy tune of oral tradition. That is, the instructions have been honed by repetition over time. An older relative might have told the young Edna Lewis that bit about skimming, and in turn Miss Lewis instructs us.
I don’t rightly remember how my grandmother made her preserves, but I do know that Gran made biscuits nearly every day of her married life, and they usually went on the table with small jars of strawberry or wild blackberry sweetness. She used jelly jars that looked like juice glasses and sealed them with paraffin; sometimes they would come up from the earthen cellar with a spot of mold where the wax cap met the glass rim. Life on a farm had turned Gran into an able and efficient cook, and her kitchen afforded her no luxuries, certainly not the luxury of being squeamish. She could wring a pullet’s neck or ax its head on a stump, and she didn’t hesitate to spoon out the clean strawberry preserves beneath the mold. Preserving food was part of her year’s work, and she reflexively used traditional techniques that reliably safeguarded against spoilage. The underlying science—not that Gran ever paused to consider it—was sound, and it confirms the speck of mold as a localized blemish, not pervasive decay. In brief: strawberries’ natural acidity suppresses pathogenic bacteria, including those that cause botulism, while the addition of granulated sugar and the extraction of moisture through boiling lowers the “water activity,” meaning that the finished strawberry preserves lack sufficient “free” water for dangerous microbial proliferation. (Pappaw applied the same principle in curing his country hams: a fresh pork leg will rot on the counter; salted and hung to dry, it cures.)
Edna Lewis, while not a household name, was certainly admired by the professional chefs who influenced me. I remember reading that Alice Waters called her a major voice in American food writing or something along those lines. Then in the wary and militant semidecade between the 9/11 attacks and the Great Recession, home canning underwent a revival, one of various niche specialty skills practiced within a broader food movement—let’s call it conscientious eating—that also embraces local agriculture, organic and sustainable farming, farmers’ markets, seasonal ingredients, traditional foodways, and home-based food production. A dozen or more substantive contemporary cookbooks on preserving, including my own, have been published since 2008’s financial crisis, most of them marketed to affluent urban and suburban kitchen enthusiasts. One explanation is that the new jam movement grew out of the farmers’ market movement. A focus on cooking seasonal ingredients led to the wish to preserve them.
During the time I spent on Gran and Pappaw’s farm in the 1970s, preserving was not yet in need of revival in the rural South. People just did it. Gran and many other women in rural communities, including my maternal grandmother, put up homegrown summer produce out of necessity. Others did so from habit or custom or to meet a family member’s special request or to satisfy their own personal taste. My late Tennessee friend Ada Mae Houston grew up in a remote hollow that didn’t get electricity until November 5, 1948, when she was thirteen. Before then, her family ate what they raised, and they made it through winter with supplies of canned, fermented, cured, and root-cellared food. Ada Mae never characterized this reality as a hardship but rather considered it a mode of self-sufficiency, something many rural southerners used to call “living at home,” as in providing for their needs at home rather than going out to buy necessities. Pappaw had a slightly different phrase for the same idea. He called it “good living,” which I like better inasmuch as it conveys a belief that healthy food, family coherence, neighborliness, and individual self-determination cannot be purchased at large. “Good living” suggests an ideal of country life that is as old as the Georgics, as deeply American as Thomas Jefferson’s yeoman farmer, as radical as Wendell Berry’s critique of industrial agriculture, and as current as Berry’s ideological heir Michael Pollan. It hews to the Aristotelian logic that eudaimonia, the good life, requires the exercise of virtue, arete.
By the time I knew Ada Mae, she could have eaten from the grocery store, but into her seventies she still put up hundreds of quarts of green beans and tomatoes every year. Why? Ada had no children but liked to serve her grand-nieces and grand-nephews the food she grew up on, and she admitted that she always craved home-canned tomatoes “when the snow flies.” Preserved food, it seems to me, is particularly adhesive to such nostalgia, placing it among other occasional foods such as Sunday desserts, holiday pies, and Christmas cookies that merit heirloom status as family recipes. The preserving recipes get passed down, preserving ancestral variations on regionally iconic dishes such as chow-chow, fourteen-day sweet crunch pickles, pickled peaches, and strawberry jam.
None of us Wests are sure what happened to Gran’s recipes—or, more accurately, the skimpy chicken scratches she relied on to jog her memory from one year to the next. Pappaw remarried after Gran passed, and Gran’s kitchen became someone else’s. Without Gran’s gravitational pull, the West clan spun apart. Things scattered.
In the introduction to The Taste of Country Cooking, Miss Lewis announces that her purpose is to safeguard against such scattering. It’s an important paragraph, one that reveals the scope and consequence of her writing:
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. Since we are the last of the original families, with no children to remember and carry on, I decided that I wanted to write down just exactly how we did things when I was growing up in Freetown that seemed to make life so rewarding.
Miss Lewis doesn’t claim the recipes that follow as her inventions, although most of her readers would surely grant her that privilege. Instead, she places her cooking within a larger historical context. “Although the founders of Freetown have long since passed away, I am convinced that their ideas do live on for us to learn from, to enlarge upon, and pass on to the following generations.” Implicit in this paragraph, which in effect spans the generations from slavery to the 1970s, is something my West kin might well recognize. When the Wests talk about food, we’re talking about more than just food. We’re talking about a specific way of life—in a specific place, with a specific understanding of the land and its inhabitants, and a specific commitment to sustaining those relationships across the generations. We’re talking about “good living.”
Miss Lewis also lets us in on her secondary purpose. To preserve recipes means to preserve culture, or how a body of knowledge exists within a set of social practices. If a single recipe is akin to a story—or, perhaps better said, if a single recipe is a vehicle for a story—then collectively Miss Lewis’s recipes align to form a grander narrative. This narrative chronicles one farming community’s signal achievements, which included political liberty and economic self-reliance, as well as the exercise of such virtues as personal dignity, cordiality, cooperation, reverence for family, joy in companionship, neighborliness, skill at farming, stewardship for the land, and intimacy with nature and its cycles. It’s a narrative about good living.
Admittedly, the story is idealized. It elides negative counterforces such as racist neighbors or abusive family members. But as an agrarian model, Freetown nonetheless prefigured more recent experiments in social reorganization, including back-to-the-land communes of the 1960s, as well as written explorations of traditional craft skills, such as the Foxfire books and post-9/11 neo-homesteading blogs.
Wendell Berry implores us to see eating as an agricultural act. Miss Lewis’s books speak to that in readily apparent ways. She also reminds us of another set of connections inherent in the act of eating. A recipe documents what happens when a shared or communal form (an iconic regional dish, for instance) is shaped by local use and played on by individual ingenuity. In other words, home cooking is a folk performance, and a jar of strawberry preserves is like a twelve-bar blues or a mountain reel, two folk musical forms in which a soloist will improvise on a commonplace riff snatched from a community memory bank.
Miss Lewis was a particularly fine soloist in the kitchen; her lasting achievement was that she wrote it all down, both her own experience—her improvs—and the commonplace riffs she borrowed from Freetown’s collective memory bank. Miss Lewis’s recipes turn the autobiography of her kitchen life into what you might call an autoethnography of her community. Her writing is telescopic in both senses; it unfolds pleasingly, unexpectedly, and it sees far.
If you take a very long view, food preservation is as old as human culture. Drying is a primordial technique that has hardly required further refinement—fish, grapes, stone fruit, and tomatoes are still dehydrated under open skies—and dried foods have long provided staple nourishment around the world. The first Europeans who came to North America stocked their ships with dried cod, and once here they met Native peoples sustained by pemmican, a mixture of dried meat and dried berries bound with fat. Techniques for preserving vegetables are only relatively more recent. On the Korean peninsula, kimchi has been a staple side dish since the beginning of agriculture. I suspect that sauerkraut has similarly ancient roots in Europe, and at the very least, Cato’s De agri cultura describes cabbages and turnips preserved by salting. Our word pickle plausibly derives from an obscure Teutonic root word meaning “to prick”—a reference to the pickle’s piquant taste—and modern usage was established by the fifteenth century. (The OED cites Le Morte d’Arthur, published in 1485: “with pekille and powdyre of precious spycez,” an antecedent of the spice blend Gran and Miss Lewis used for their pickles.)
As for the sweet preserves, they were scarcer in antiquity because sweetness was hard to come by in the wild, and refining sugar from sugarcane required skills and technologies that restricted production until the modern era. One early written recipe comes from Rome, where epicures knew the quince as a peculiar type of apple, astringent when raw, that became succulent when cooked in honey and kept for months. They called it melimelum, honey apple, and Roman legions carried honey-cooked quince on their long march to the Iberian Peninsula. The travel-battered word emerged in Spanish as membrillo, used today for both the fruit and a dense fruit paste made from it. In Portuguese, a marmelo cooked with honey—or, after the fourteenth century, sugar—was marmelado, “quinced.” Tudor England imported quince sweetmeats from Portugal, and the Anglicized word proved flexible enough to describe both quince paste and a “dry marmelet of peaches,” in Thomas Dawson’s Good Housewife’s Jewel of 1596/7. It also eventually applied to an eighteenth-century citrus preserve eaten with breakfast toast, orange marmalade. Incidentally, Dawson gave a recipe, “To Preserve Quinces All Year through Whole and Soft,” that would have looked quite familiar in ancient Rome, apart from his use of sugar in the Portuguese manner.
Always desirable, sugar and sugary foods remained precious until after the Columbian voyages. Then New World sugarcane plantations established with enslaved African labor created vast exports from the Caribbean “sugar islands,” and at the time of the American Revolution, sugar, once a rarity, had become a mere luxury. (Homegrown sorghum and maple syrup provided the Republic with cheaper everyday sweetness.) By abolition, inexpensive sugar had reached most pantries, and Freetown’s founding coincided with the golden age of sweet preserves, thanks to the convergence of a ready sugar supply with another historical anomaly, the nineteenth-century South’s immense horticultural diversity, which represented gatherings from Europe, North America, Africa, and South America, as well as extensive tinkering on American soil.
A principal author of that nineteenth-century garden, and by extension the farmer whose experiments would define a distinctly American cuisine, was none other than Thomas Jefferson. His garden at Monticello—the “rich spot of earth” he conjures in his famous letter of 1811 to the painter Charles Willson Peale, in which he also says of himself “but tho’ an old man, I am but a young gardener”—is described by Monticello’s longtime director of garden and grounds Peter Hatch as a “revolutionary American garden” for the 330 varieties of 99 species of plants and herbs that Jefferson grew. As Hatch wrote in “A Rich Spot of Earth”: Thomas Jefferson’s Revolutionary Garden at Monticello (2012), the array represented a “world of edible immigrants,” including such novel crops as asparagus, tomatoes, okra, Brussels sprouts, cayenne pepper, rhubarb, and peanuts. Hatch muses that the Jeffersonian recipe for okra soup, attributed to the president’s daughter, Martha Jefferson Randolph, was an apt metaphor for the entire Monticello garden.
The Jefferson family gumbo is a rich blend of “native” vegetables like lima beans and Cymlings, or Pattypan squash, that were grown by American Indians on the arrival of the first Europeans. It also included new vegetables found by Spanish explorers like potatoes, an Andean discovery adopted by northern Europeans, as well as tomatoes, collected in Central America and embraced by Mediterranean cultures as early as the seventeenth century. Binding the soup was an African plant, okra, grown and “creolized” by both the French and enslaved blacks in the West Indies. The dish was ultimately prepared by African American chefs trained in the fine arts of French cuisine in the kitchen at Monticello.
Jefferson’s enthusiasm for horticultural experiment extended equally to his Fruitery, which encompassed 400 trees and multiple berry patches that supplied his favorite fruits in season: Albemarle Pippin and Esopus Spitzenburg apples, Green Gage plums, Moor Park apricots, Seckel pears, peaches, and cherries. The Old Man/Young Gardener also loved strawberries. Wild strawberries had been harvested in the New World since before colonization; the first Europeans delighted in their abundance. The surprise is that in Jefferson’s day, garden strawberries—including new strains hybridized in France by crossing New World and Old World stock—were only infrequently cultivated. A letter from Jefferson to his granddaughter Anne Cary Randolph in 1808 demonstrates the attention he paid his strawberry patch, advising that the soil be dressed with sand and manure so that “the waterings would carry both down into the clay and loosen and enrich it.”
Strawberry preserves almost certainly found a place in Monticello’s larder. Jefferson’s kinswoman Mary Randolph, reckoned to be the best in cook in Virginia, included two recipes for preserved strawberries in her 1824 cookbook The Virginia Housewife; or, Methodical Cook, which culinary historian Karen Hess called the most influential cookbook of the nineteenth century. Both recipes are brief, but they neatly demonstrate the difference as it is usually drawn between strawberry “jam” and strawberry “preserves.” For the former, Randolph has you cook down one pound of ripe strawberries with one pound of loaf sugar, stirring frequently to break down the fruit, until the mixture reduces to a thick spread, or “jelly” in Randolph’s terminology. (This recipe parallels The Taste of Country Cooking’s Strawberry Preserves made with crushed fruit.) Randolph’s “preserves” recipe, on the other hand, refines the normal sugar + fruit + heat technique, applying more skill to keep premium berries whole. You stew the “largest strawberries, before they are too ripe,” with an equal weight of sugar, “taking them out to cool frequently, that they may not be mashed,” until the fruit is translucent with absorbed sugar. The candied fruit suspended in clear syrup is then transferred into “small glasses or pots,” covered with brandy paper seals, and tied under additional layers of paper.
Miss Lewis’s recipe for wild strawberry preserves in In Pursuit of Flavor differs from Mary Randolph’s only in small particulars. Lewis has you boil the precious wild berries—”I have always treasured them”—for a spell, rest them in their syrup overnight to plump with sugar, and carefully boil them a second time before canning. She gets away with less sugar (that is, less preservative) as a consequence of storing her preserves in sterilized Mason jars that are double-sealed with paraffin and fitted lids. Otherwise, Miss Lewis and Mary Randolph might be swapping recipes between neighbors, albeit neighbors separated by 152 years.
This retrospection from Freetown kitchens to Mary Randolph’s (which also spans a chasm of race and class) calls for a further look back, because there was nothing new about Mary Randolph’s preserves, either. They hardly differed from contemporaneous English preserves, including the definitive recipes given in Eliza Acton’s Modern Cookery for Private Families, published in 1845 but fragrant of earlier Regency cooking. From there, it is only a short culinary step from The Virginia Housewife of 1824 to The Good Housewife’s Jewel of 1596/7. Randolph and Dawson agree on how to preserve quince, oranges, cherries, lemons, pears, plums, and pumpkins. Their recipes for preserved gooseberries might as well be interchangeable. (He has strawberries, too, but puts them in a pie.) If we can draw a direct line from Edna Lewis to Mary Randolph, we can also confidently extend that line back another 228 years to Tudor England. And why stop there? The line fades across the next thousand years, but Dawson’s quinces preserved “whole and soft” point back toward honey apples stored in covered clay pots, so we can at least infer a very distant Roman lineage for Miss Lewis’s strawberry preserves.
The point is that a curious exchange occurred in the kitchen at Monticello and in other kitchens staffed by enslaved African women. The exchange was unequal and transacted under the abhorrent circumstances of slavery, but it mirrored the so-called Columbian Exchange in which, for example, apples and sugarcane came to the New World and tomatoes and potatoes went back to the Old. Multiple ecologies and multiple cuisines converged in the early American kitchen, and the influences ricocheted in unpredictable directions. Black cooks preparing food for white owners left their “thumb print,” as Karen Hess says, on every recipe they touched; their forced service also required them to learn cooking techniques to satisfy white tastes, and some of those techniques outlasted slavery to inform subsequent African American cooking.
As for our strawberry preserves, English preserving techniques based on sugar—a double legacy of slavery—passed through the hands of Miss Lewis’s Freetown ancestors until their thumbprints had marked the recipes as Freetown heirlooms. Miss Lewis wrote them down to memorialize her African American cultural inheritance, “how we did things when I was growing up in Freetown that seemed to make life so rewarding.” What we as readers take away, in turn, is not just a sense of one kitchen, Miss Lewis’s, but a glimpse into the domestic economy of a whole community of independent, land-owning yeoman farmers. In this light, Freetown comes across as a vigorous proof of the Jeffersonian concept, even as it also sharply rebuked Jefferson’s failure to imagine his yeomen citizenry as anything but white. Freetown’s gardens, lush and sweet, bloomed in the rubble of American history, always close to the surface in the rural South. Miss Lewis quietly acknowledged as much with The Taste of Country Cooking’s Emancipation Day menu.
I eventually learned from reading her obituaries that Miss Lewis had been a political activist, a registered Communist, and a volunteer for FDR’s second presidential campaign in 1936. But from my first brush with her story, as told in The Gift of Southern Cooking with coauthor Scott Peacock, I had intuited political shadings to her culinary pride. Her African-influenced dress and self-possessed, statuesque personal bearing reminded me of Nina Simone (whose song “To Be Young, Gifted, and Black” featured on the 1970 album Black Gold) and of Aretha Franklin at her 1972 performance at the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Los Angeles, which was recorded live and released as the best-selling double album Amazing Grace. Just as Aretha was known as a queen, Miss Lewis’s dignity and talent—she was “gifted”—inevitably called down the honorific Miss Lewis for those who knew about her.
During research for my book, I read Miss Lewis’s essay “What Is Southern?” published posthumously in 2008, and my understanding of the particular gift of her southern cooking finally came into sharp focus. What Miss Lewis left behind—apart from a guide to good eating—was a manifesto about good living, a coherent set of ideas that protested against the diminished farming and cooking practices of today in contrast to the richer agrarian model of Freetown. It bears remembering that Freetown as she knew it had passed by the time of her writing; it existed only in her pages, among the phantoms of memory, a verdant but ghostly place.
Wendell Berry’s Unsettling of America, a milestone in American agrarianism since Jefferson, came out the year after The Taste of Country Cooking. Different in all obvious ways, Berry and Miss Lewis nonetheless inked their pens from a common well. Both trusted their experience of rural life and doubted professional agricultural expertise. They shared a belief that the health of the individual, the community, and the earth were indivisible, and they understood that traditional rural life possessed but fragile defenses against the mighty force of industrial agriculture. Their prescience has earned them iconic stature among conscientious eaters today, when we have all the more reason to distrust agribusiness.
Miss Lewis and Wendell Berry both laid bare for me the urgent need for a cook’s aesthetic considerations—how food tastes—to fit honorably within larger ethical and political realities—how food is grown, by whom, and under what social and economic conditions. Miss Lewis’s cookbooks are not overtly political, I know, but still I’d categorize them, if such a category existed, as radical pastorals.
There is another overlooked commonality between Miss Lewis and Berry, and it is something I share with them in a modest way. Both left the rural South for the metropolis, where they moved in privileged literary and artistic circles before they began to espouse in print their rural visions. Perhaps I connected so strongly with Miss Lewis because she remembered Freetown from the perspective of her life in New York and I was a southerner living in Los Angeles. We were both exiles. Memory served as the necessary bridge to our subject, which was located in the past—which was the past. Miss Lewis’s cookbooks had a different tone and shape than the other cookbooks I studied, how-to books like The Virginia Housewife, Mrs. S. R. Dull’s Southern Cooking, Charleston Receipts, Rufus Estes’s Good Things to Eat, and What Mrs. Fisher Knows about Southern Cooking. It’s not just because she was the more gifted writer. The Taste of Southern Cooking was also a why-to book, and it was frankly nostalgic.
I don’t mean to say that Miss Lewis was merely wistful. Historian Eric Foner argues that “as a wholesale rejection of the present, nostalgia can serve as a powerful mode of protest.” Miss Lewis’s nostalgia was of this potent kind. Her essay “What Is Southern?” focused my work in Saving the Season because it allowed me to realize that in preserving food I was also preserving my family past and my southern heritage—to say nothing of my sanity. I seized on the additional idea that preserving could be a protest against the greed of the contemporary food system and the banality of contemporary consumer culture. Putting up strawberry jam was a finger in the eye of agribusiness. Preserving my memory of Gran’s strawberry jam was, to use Miss Lewis’s words, my way “to learn from, to enlarge upon, and pass on to the following generations” the joy I’d felt on Gran and Pappaw’s farm. I realized that I could preserve in my jars an inherited belief in good living, which included notions of self-reliance, reverence for family and friends, awareness of agriculture’s impact on health and the environment, cordiality, generosity, and other such virtues that would have been equally familiar to Miss Lewis.
The exile, by definition, is writing from the perspective of distance, of separation, of loss. The exile’s impulse to write is complex. It takes in a wish to re-create, if in imagination only, the lost homeland, and it encompasses the wish to protect its memory. Miss Lewis’s cookbooks issued from this displaced perspective and they took the form, to borrow Eric Hobsbawm’s phrase, of “a protest against forgetting.” Her books remembered something fine and laid up a store of past knowledge, the necessary seeds for revival on the far side of some future lapse.
Toward the end of my work on Saving the Season, I experienced an intense dream. I was riding a train through springtime woods abloom with serviceberry and wild apples. The train delivered me to Gran and Pappaw’s farmhouse, and they ran out to the porch to greet me. “Get in here, you old rascal,” said Pappaw. My shrink declared it a termination dream, meaning that we could safely end my therapy. I had returned from exile.
My book’s publication date the following summer, chosen by my publisher with no input from me, fell on June 25, Gran’s birthday. Aware that she would hover over the publication party in Los Angeles—another uncanny apparition—I decided to serve biscuits and preserves. What could be, to answer Miss Lewis’s titular question, more southern? At a subtler level, I also wanted to show how a southern-inflected preserving tradition could adapt to other ecologies and subsume other influences. (I sourced berries from a favorite grower in San Bernardino County and flavored them with splashes of Bandol, Alice Waters’s favorite wine.) More personal still, biscuits and jam would bring together, if only in my imagination, the two otherwise unlike women who shaped my southern cooking and helped me find my way back from the pain of exile. A friend put me in touch with Scott Peacock, and after I explained myself, he agreed to fly from Alabama to Los Angeles to make the biscuits, an extraordinary gift. We met in the kitchen on the day of the party, two gay men who cherished southern cooking and the women who had taught us most about it. We swapped stories, talked about food, and laid out trays of lard biscuits with jars of strawberry and blackberry sweetness. The moment was southern in spite of the obvious ways it was not. We remembered. It was good living.