"Fresh?" The word hangs there incredulously. "No, we don't have any. We have smoked pig's feet. No, no pork liver." The butcher's face closes down like a curtain.
Another vendor: "Hog jowl?" she repeats dubiously. "We don't carry it. Try that counter over there."
Edna Lewis is too polite to look appalled, but really. This is the Sweet Auburn Curb Market, staffed with Southern butchers in a great Southern city, and they act as if no one ever comes in search of ingredients for liver pudding and pig's ear salad.
What's the Yankee with her going to think? I'd probably be a little afraid to actually see the hog jowl, to tell you the truth; that tripe under the counter is already giving me the creeps. But the 78-year-old Lewis, a chef and cookbook author who has brought the glories of Southern country cooking to some of the biggest names in the food world, has agreed to spend a few days cluing me, new to the South, in to the essence of food life in this part of the world.
We're going to have to do it without the funny parts. So instead, we head home to make a poundcake. That's the simple kind of recipe she specializes in and her fans thrive on.
As the author of "The Taste of Country Cooking," (Knopf, 1976); "In Pursuit of Flavor" (Knopf, 1988); and "The Edna Lewis Cookbook," (Ecco Press, 1972); as chef at the Fearrington House in North Carolina or, more famously, at New York's Gage and Tollner restaurant, Lewis presented polished versions of the food she grew up with on the family farm in Freetown, Va., a community founded by former slaves.
"In those days, a lot of people were good cooks and didn't even know it," she says. "The food was raised by us and not fed with chemicals and additives, and it was eaten in its own time, not shipped someplace else." The farm was so self-sufficient, says Lewis, that trips to stores were only for staples such as sugar, salt and kerosene. The mill ground wheat they had grown into flour. "Everything fed each other," she says, "even the pigs got milk from the cows and chickens got the whey."
You have to lean in close to catch the pride in her voice, since every spoken word from her is so soothingly soft and measured and utterly ladylike. She has a drawling way of pausing between sentences, so you think she's finished, then has you hovering for the next one, and what she has to say is that she sees this region as a land of great bounty.
"The rivers and streams and branches were teeming with fish and fruit and wildlife; there was always something to bring home to cook," says Lewis. "People used to walk a mile for good greens, looking for wild watercress under the snow."
Lewis has lived in New York City on and off since 1938. Aside from a stint as an air raid warden in the city during World War II, and as a teaching assistant in the African Hall at the American Museum of Natural History, most of her working life has involved food. She has lectured to and taught cooking classes; been honored at the James Beard House, New York's most prestigious culinary center; been named one of the top black chefs in the country; cooked poached pears and cat's tongue cookies that were sold at the glamorous Dean & Deluca food store in New York; and ran the Cafe Nicholson in New York and the Middleton Place restaurant in Charleston, S.C.
Lewis moved to Atlanta a year ago to work as a consulting chef for Harry's Farmers Markets. She recently left Harry's to work on a new cookbook. Her other project is helping organize the newly founded Society for the Revival and Preservation of Southern Food, a group of Southern cooks and authors dedicated to their culinary heritage. Lewis is glad to be back in the South.
"I think it's the landscape," she explains. "There's something about the South no other part of the country could replace. When I was growing up, in the summer we used to see a half-moon rainbow on the side of the sun - they called it a sun dog. When I came to Charleston from New York and saw it again, I knew I was back home. Even though people were discriminated [against] to the point we could hardly stand it, it had nothing to do with our love of the land."
Lewis showed that to her closest friend in Atlanta, chef Scott Peacock of the Horseradish Grill. Although he, too, came from a small Southern town, this one in Alabama, Peacock says he never appreciated food from home - the kind of food he now makes a living cooking - until they met.
"We both love the Mediterranean and I was telling her I wanted to go to Italy," he remembers. "She said Italy is great, but you should really go home and learn about the food of the South. At the time, I felt a little scolded, a little called down, but I came to realize the diversity of the cuisine. I was brainwashed like everybody else. But she told me about the cooking in Virginia, where she is from, and then I saw the differences. It almost seemed exotic: the different greens, the cymling [pattypan] squash and black raspberries."
Said another admirer, "Southern Food" author John Egerton, "She taught me about culture as well as food. She is such a modest, unassuming person; she doesn't seek to take credit for anything, and although she is a woman of few words, they are words well-chosen."
So you can imagine how I am anticipating a visit to her kitchen, expecting a culinary temple that burns incense, or at least hickory smoke, as an offering to the food gods. She's certainly worked with a few.
What I find in the small Virginia-Highland apartment is a butcher- block table set with flour shaken out on a square of wax paper, eggs at room temperature, a sturdy wooden spoon and a heavy ceramic mixing bowl striped with white bands. There's no electric mixer in sight. No food processor to be found. And a wire mesh strainer instead of a sifter.
Something's wrong here. She expects me to cream the butter and sugar by hand? Yup.
So I get to it, churning the spoon through the butter, wondering if I'm doing it fast enough, or well enough, perspiring even, until it looks right.
Lewis peers at the bowl. Not a word. Then the dreaded news: "I see some lumps."
She takes the spoon from me and: WHACK! WHACK! WHACK! The lumps are gone.
I haven't disgraced myself too much to earn lunch, even if she insists it's dinner. Once the poundcake batter goes into the oven, the greens she just cooked, and the creamed corn and whipped sweet potatoes heated over a makeshift double boiler are served on flowered Italian plates. Slices of bread from a neighborhood bakery are piled on blue china, and a pot of tea steeps in a favorite teapot.
We eat off the butcher-block table set with linen napkins, the mirror in the buffet behind us sparkling, and framed by her collection of demitasse cups.
And I can tell how beloved dinner at home was for her. "We ate everything that grew in the garden," says Lewis. "A half-dozen vegetables - beans, beets, cabbage, white potatoes - whatever there was."
We wait for the cake. The oven is a little fussy - the numbers on the temperature dial have been worn almost smooth, and it's unclear if the oven is heating properly. So when the time is up and the cake has an acceptable golden color, no cake tester stuck in the middle will do.
"I just listen to it," says Lewis. "When the cake is done, it will be quiet." Taking a potholder, she holds the hot pan up to her ear, a dangling gold earring almost touching, then lying flat on the cake as she listens. It's not ready. She holds it out to me like it's a seashell and I listen too.
And no kidding, she's right: There is a faint but busy bubbling coming from the bottom of the pan. We put it back in and keep checking every 10 minutes - her ear, my ear - until the cake is quiet. It's done.
"Now that's really something," she says, "cooking with your ears."
In other words, don't use a food processor when a knife will do, don't use a knife when your hands will do. If she cuts lard into flour for a deep-dish pie crust or tender biscuits, she needs to feel the flour while she works. Expensive equipment is highly overrated; her aunt, "the best cook in the world," couldn't read or write, but measured out baking powder by sizing it against a dime and a nickel she kept on the table.
The tube pan that cooked the poundcake is an old metal deal from the Swans Down flour company. It's so old it's darkened; Lewis estimates it was made in 1925.
When the cake is finally cut, the pieces bear the imprint of letters from the Swans Down name raised in metal along the bottom of the pan.
It makes me laugh. It tastes great. If this is Southern style, I'm staying.
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