Edna Lewis passed

In the mid-90s she retired from the restaurant and with some friends, she founded the Society for the Revival and Preservation of Southern Food, dedicated in part to seeing that people did not forget how to cook with lard.

Mythologies do arise periodically in the culinary world. Take the idyllic representations of Italy and their nonnas or the mythology now surging around Julia Child and La Pitchoune, her French pied–à–terre, now a cooking school.

A theory, floating around in today’s food world, suggests that slave cooks wielded an enormous influence – verging on the mythical – in the kitchens of antebellum America, essentially creating Southern cuisine and, by extension, much of what could be called traditional American cooking. That could very well be true.

However, proponents of this theory seem not to have examined in detail important aspects that could discredit the accepted wisdom: Did slave and black cooks have as much influence as popular theory has it?
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I Was Searching for a Cook Who Looked Like Me—Then I Found Edna Lewis