The Queen's Revival

Edna Lewis and revival cooking

Photo credit: John T. Hill

I first met Edna Lewis in a cooking class she gave at Macy’s Department Store. The store had recently inaugurated its De Gustibus Cooking School, which presented a series of demonstrations from many of the city’s renowned restaurant chefs. Conveniently situated near the kitchenware section, the school back then was intimate and informal, no more than 50 people and often there were empty seats. As they worked, the teachers told stories about their childhood influences—a grandmother still whipping egg whites with nothing more than an old whisk and a dented copper bowl well into her 80s or the way you steal a strudel technique with your eyes when the best baker didn’t like anyone around him. They revealed love affairs, kitchen firings, international gossip, everything—and they welcomed their pupils to do the same as if we were all sitting around a home kitchen. This is how I learned to bone an entire turkey and gut a fish, chop meat for pate de champagne, fold and roll puff pastry, and bake a decent sacher-torte.

Miss Edna in Gage & Tollner’s dining room

Then Miss Edna appeared. She fell comfortably within the renowned chef category but with two rare-for-the-time differences: she was Black and a woman. Miss Edna had recently taken over the kitchen of a historic Brooklyn restaurant, Gage & Tollner, and her unique menu reflected the opening proclamation in the forward of her first cookbook published in 1972, The Edna Lewis Cook Book:

“Our aim has been to present a cookbook with recipes for the kind of food that we feel people really eat and that are not too complicated to prepare.”

There were other restaurants in the city that were Black owned—most prominently Sylvia’s in Harlem—but their menus leaned solely toward soul food. Miss Edna cooked the food she grew up with in a small farming community, Freetown, Virginia, that was originally settled by freed slaves after the Civil War. She melted her hometown’s flavors into recipes she learned while operating a series of small restaurants in New York City and, when they failed, as a successful caterer. Her typical Gage & Tollner menu injected Freetown ingredients with a touch of European influence such as roasted pheasant stuffed with wild rice and white grapes.

While many people seem to think of pheasant, quail, and partridge as sophisticated fare, it has been my experience that people living in the country are far more familiar with the special and delicious taste of game birds than are most city dwellers.—The Edna Lewis Cook Book

Four years later she published her most personal book, The Taste of Country Cooking, a memoir of growing up in a family of fine cooks whose table reflected the seasons: spring’s first wild mushrooms and greens, and the early garden’s young crops; summer’s ripening fruit and grain harvest, early pickles, and young chicken; autumn’s hunted game and hog butchering, and the orchards’ ripe bounty; winter’s stews and soups, baked bread, and Christmas’s special offerings.

For her class at Macy’s she introduced a category of cooking that I—and I would venture the rest of the audience—had never heard of: revival cooking, consisting of the best of a household’s cooking at the moment when the fields and gardens had arrived at their peak.

Late summer was the time when the faithful gathered in the rich blessings of the year’s harvest. If not around the church then in a field, sometimes to hear a visiting preacher but more often with their own minister. Out of town relatives and towns people not among the congregation were welcome to join the tables, plates heaped high with food prepared with special attention not only to honor the occasion but, it needs to be admitted, bragging rights. By their nature, revivals were country, small towns and village affairs. You didn’t have to believe but you felt the need to give thanks for the generosity’s bounty.

All-day meeting of ministers and deacons, Yanceyville, N.C., October 1941. (Marion Post Wolcott, Library of Congress Farm Security Administration collection)

I have learned since then that religious revivals were and continue to be a central part of many American towns’ social life. Like Miss Edna’s home, people gathered together in summer during the sliver of time when farm work eased a bit while waiting for the harvest to commence in earnest. The revivals lasted for days, if not a week or two. Big tents were erected in fields or the churchyards, benches and chairs set out and boards laid across sawhorses to hold all the dishes families brought. I’ve gone to a couple of small ones around the country and as a nonbeliever awkwardly stood or sat in the back. Eventually I wandered over to the kitchen or the rows of groaning tables to ask if there was room for me to help out. The ladies (they were always ladies, or if there were men, they manned the barbeque fires and enormous boiling stew pots) welcomed this stranger’s extra hands. What they served represented the best of our regional recipes, passed down through families instead of through modern cooking shows and web searches. And this is where I began to truly understand the importance of Miss Edna’s revival cooking: Daylong preaching inspires hunger, hunger encourages socializing, socializing stimulates community engagement, community engagement imparts a healing sense that none of us are alone.

Miss Edna listed a typical Freetown revival dinner. Any of its dishes would be a fine honor to the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. as we approach his birthday.

Return on Saturday to find a few of her recipes and a special bonus to go with them— more than an hour long playlist to listen to as you cook. It stretches from J.B. Lenoir and Lead Belly to Joey Bada$$, on through Sweet Honey and the Rock and The Staple Singers, and pierced by unforgettable women—Marian, Nina, Billie, Mahalia, and Beyoncé among them. This is just a small sample of songs you need to dial up the volume for. So get your apron out and begin to praise Reverend King!

Full Revival Dinner

From The Taste of Country Cooking

Baked Virginia Ham

Southern Fried Chicken

Braised Leg of Mutton

Sweet Potato Casserole

Corn Pudding

Green Beans with Pork

Platter of Sliced Tomatoes with Special Dressing

Spiced Seckel Pears

Cucumber Pickles

Yeast Rolls

Biscuits

Sweet Potato Pie

Summer Apple Pie

Tyler Pie

Caramel Layer Cake

Lemonade

Iced Tea