Foods, Lewis argued, are always temporal, so all good tastes are special
November 12, 2015 10:00 AM   Subscribe

Edna Lewis and the Black Roots of American Cooking

An Interview with Chef Edna Lewis.

Edna Lewis: What Is Southern?
I grew up among people who worked together, traded seed, borrowed setting hens if their own were late setting. Early hatched chickens were like a prize. Neighbors would compete to see who would serve the first spring chickens pan-sautéed. The first spring greens, lettuce, scallions in a vinegar dressing with salt, pepper, and sugar—no oil. They shared favors of all kinds, joined in when it came to planting or harvesting a crop, wheat threshing, hog butchering, and cutting ice on the ponds to store for the summer in the community icehouse.

I grew up noticing the food feasts, picnics, church revival din­ners with long white tablecloths. Families put out warm fried chicken, braised leg of mutton, thin slices of boiled Virginia ham. Green beans cooked in pork stock, beets in a vinaigrette sauce. English peas in cream. Baked tomatoes with crusty squares of bread on top. Fragrant corn pudding. Potato salad with a boiled dressing. Watermelon and cantaloupe pickles and relishes, preserves and jellies, and iced tea.
The Best Biscuits
Hoppin' John
Simmered Greens and Cornmeal Dumplings
Southern Pan-Fried Chicken
She-Crab Soup with Benne Seed Biscuits

more,
posted by the man of twists and turns (26 comments total) 24 users marked this as a favorite
 
So. This is timely for me in that I have been thinking a lot about Southern food and what it is and how it obviously--as a Southerner a long long way from home--played a huge role in my life. I am going to Florida in late February next year to see my grandparents probably for the last time. Pa is nearing 94 now and years of smoking has given him the inevitable emphysema as well as pancreatic cancer. He was always a bone-thin man and now he's more like a ghost still breathing. My beloved grandmother, MeMe, the woman who taught me how to love books and libraries and kindly doted on me as I watched her cook throughout my childhood, now has dementia and can't remember when I called her. They still live in the house they built with their own hands but now one of my aunts and her husband have to live there too to make sure they will be okay. I mourn the dementia and the emphysema in that my grandmother no longer cooks, and cooking is the strongest and best memories of her I have. Homemade doughnuts, biscuits, crowder peas, coconut cake, lemon pie, jams, macaroni and cheese, etc. I regret that I never ever asked for those recipes. I mean, I will try, but I should have done it so long ago. I can remember how they tasted, how they looked, and goodness knows I watched her make those things all the time, but I never really thought to ask how they were made.

Anyway, I should probably make some of Edna Lewis' amazing recipes those might be closest.
posted by Kitteh at 10:23 AM on November 12, 2015 [4 favorites]


What a fascinating article and what wonderful recipes. I am definitely going to get a copy of "The Taste of Country Cooking", and I think I'll give those benne seed biscuits a try this weekend. (IME, you can substitute 1/2 coconut oil and 1/2 Earth Balance for lard - obviously it doesn't taste the same, but it gives a very flaky texture like lard does and carries some flavor.)
posted by Frowner at 11:10 AM on November 12, 2015 [1 favorite]


Wonderful article and very inspiring recipes.
Also now I finally understand that what Americans call biscuits are what other people call scones (somewhat).
posted by mumimor at 11:15 AM on November 12, 2015


Mumimor, you could start a fight by talking about what Americans mean by "biscuit".
I tried to figure out what it meant once and the closet I got was "small, bread-like product, usually made from wheat".
Sometimes they are scone-like. Sometimes they are like a yeast-roll. Sometimes they are rolled and cut to shape. Sometimes they are made by dropping dough from a spoon. Sometimes they are kneaded and sometimes they are a stirred quickbread. Sometimes they are layered and flaky and sometimes they have a delicate crumb.
It's like the whole "definition of sandwich" or "definition of soup" discussion.

(These are the things one thinks about when one marries a person with a staggeringly different family and regional cuisine.)
posted by Seamus at 11:48 AM on November 12, 2015 [2 favorites]


But I guess your "somewhat" cover that!
posted by Seamus at 11:48 AM on November 12, 2015 [1 favorite]


Lard biscuits. I'm drooling.

Given that recipe, if I didn't have buttermilk, I would use regular milk with a teaspoon of vinegar mixed in.
posted by Seamus at 11:53 AM on November 12, 2015


I didn't realize that fried chicken was a meal reserved for special occasions until I began to dig into my family's history and started peppering the oldest generation of my living relatives about their lives and the world they grew up in. I was raised in a world of KFC, Bojangles, and Popeye's, with the crispy golden brown skin of fried chicken paraded as an everyday meal. But my family history drew me in, and I needed only to go back to my grandparents' generation to lives that started on small farms in Southern Appalachia. Particularly, to the letters my grandfather wrote his future wife during the Second World War, of his acclaim for her mother's fried chicken, and demands to be invited to the house whenever that occasion arose that she might be cooking it. I spoke with my great-uncle, who's mother was rarefied by my grandfather and learned that most meals, if they had a meat product, were pork that had been salted and preserved from when the hogs were slaughtered. Fried chicken was special, indeed.

In Ms. Lewis' words, I saw reflections of my own Southern roots and can understand her fears of the region's rich culinary history in danger of disappearing. After all, before I learned for myself, I only had the Colonel's word for it.
posted by Atreides at 12:00 PM on November 12, 2015


Also now I finally understand that what Americans call biscuits are what other people call scones (somewhat).

They're really pretty similar in many respects, but very different in others. Apparently not all Americans really understand the distinction either. One of my favorite things is biscuits and gravy, which I only allow myself when I'm traveling because otherwise I would eat it every day. I recently had an order of biscuits and gravy that tasted really odd, and I finally realized that it was because the biscuits were waaaaay sweeter than they should have been. (And they were also crumbly where they should have been flaky.) In case anyone has designs on doing some sort of Southern/British fusion thing? Scones and gravy -- let me tell you, no, it doesn't work.

Biscuits, like pie dough, intimidate people into using inferior store-bought versions. I had another plate of biscuits and gravy recently that was very obviously made from what we always knew as whomp biscuits**. I mean, your gravy can be stellar, but biscuits and gravy has to be greater than the sum of its parts, and you just can't achieve that using those overcooked hockey pucks that taste like chemicals and disappointment.

Thing is, biscuits and pie dough are made from extremely similar recipes, and they're not difficult at all. You just have to get the ratio of dry to wet right (which isn't difficult) and you can't knead them like you would a loaf of bread. There's nothing scary about that!

I think everyone who loves biscuits should learn how to make biscuits. Knowing how to make your own biscuits makes you a better person. (Not better than others, just better than your previous self.)

** Because you whomp the tube on the edge of the counter and -- foof -- opened.
posted by mudpuppie at 12:47 PM on November 12, 2015 [4 favorites]


Only semi-related, but I learned the other day that Canadian KFCs do not have biscuits.
posted by Ham Snadwich at 12:50 PM on November 12, 2015


(And they were also crumbly where they should have been flaky.)

I've always found the idea of flakey biscuits perplexing, myself. However, the point that the ingredients for biscuits and gravy must be greater than the sum of their parts is dead on. A local cafeteria serves "biscuits and gravy" and I've heard coworkers tell me how delicious it is...and it makes me die a little inside. They're terrible, in part, because the biscuits are terrible.

Interestingly enough, I was having breakfast at the Many Glacier lodge in Glacier National Park several years ago. I was conducting my way along the breakfast buffet and was making myself a dish of biscuits and gravy, when a fellow behind me expressed astonishment at what I was doing (pouring the gravy over the biscuits). He had no accent that I picked up, so he might have been either American or Canadian, but he was definitely not familiar with the custom. I couldn't fathom anyone not being familiar with it. Egads!
posted by Atreides at 1:59 PM on November 12, 2015


I have an interest in 20th century food writing and I had never heard of Edna Lewis. It's not like I'm an expert or have studied it especially seriously, but I do have books by MFK Fisher, Adele Davis, Patience Gray, etc. This reminds me of the fact that whenever I am reading about an intellectual or political field and I don't know about any writers/artists/intellectuals of color in the field, that's because they are hidden or forgotten, not because they didn't exist.
posted by Frowner at 2:02 PM on November 12, 2015 [1 favorite]


Leni Sorensen is a Virginia historian of African-­American cooks. ‘‘Many black people have not heard of Edna Lewis because they’re urban and raised in schools to learn that farming is dirty and slavery was awful, so let’s not talk about it,’’ she told me. ‘‘There is a feeling: ‘Oh, hell no, we just got off the farm.’ And for many black people, to see any activities done under slavery now as professional is just too painful.’’ Joe Randall, a chef of five decades and a friend of Lewis’s, says: ‘‘Cooking was relegated to black folk, and when Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, a lot of civil rights leaders said, ‘We don’t have to work in your restaurants anymore.’ ’’ Randall taught hospitality management at universities and says, ‘‘A lot of my students’ grandparents said, ‘I didn’t send my baby to college to be no cook.’ ’’

Oh Lord, yes. I've run into that mindset before, and I surely understand it. But I sure feel like there's a connection between our past and present that's being lost.

When I was a child being taught to cook some of the "old" recipes, my relatives--especially my father, who seemed to really want me to know these things--would say of a dish, "Your great-great-grandparents ate this when they were slaves. We had to make do with the leavings, because Ole Massa would take the good food from the garden and from hog-killin' up to the big house and leave us the bad, the organs, the weeds, stuff no one wanted. We had to find a way to survive. This is how we survived. This is what we ate".

And so I learned to make chitlins and plucks & lites and wild greens (always drink the pot liquor, 'cause that's where the vitamins are). I learned that a serving of cornbread in buttermilk was sometimes the only thing my ancestors had to eat after going out to the fields before dark and returning after dark. I learned that the weed called dandelion had nutritional leaves and could make good wine. I learned to fry the squirrel and turtle and groundhog that my dad hunted, because long ago there were times that my ancestors had no other meat.

I learned to make fancier dishes, too, the things my grandmother cooked as a housekeeper for white people, rich down-home dishes like smothered pork chops and dinner rolls as light as a cloud and buttermilk pound cake--the sort of quality food that would get you hired as a cook in a big house when you needed work.

"This is the chocolate cake your grandmother made that got her the job that helped her and Granddaddy pay off the farm." "We make plucks every winter, stick-to -your-ribs food, to keep you warm when there's no heat." "As long as you have flour you can have biscuits and gravy." Every dish had a story, of ancestors fighting to survive, to live. "Your grandmother's grandmother would take her ration of flour, and make biscuits and gravy for the children, and then go sit on the porch so they wouldn't see her go without eating."

My mother used to say of white people, "They did it to us before, and if they ever get the chance, they'll sure 'nough do it to us again." My father never said such things, but I wonder if deep down he didn't have a fear that slavery, in one form or another, could come back to us, and so he wanted me to know what to do, how to find food, how to survive as our ancestors survived, in case it ever did return. He grew up knowing his great-grandparents, their light-skin inherited from the masters' rape of their mothers, and saw how they clung to food, to the old recipes that had sustained them. An old fear like that you never get over, and you share it with the ones that come after you.

Anyway. This book has been on my Amazon wish list for a while. This article is just the impetus I need to order it.
posted by magstheaxe at 2:08 PM on November 12, 2015 [26 favorites]


I've always found the idea of flakey biscuits perplexing, myself.

Really? What about it perplexes? (I'm honestly curious. Come on, let's talk biscuits!)

For me, I think it's something about butter (or jam or honey or gravy) being able to filter down through the layers without saturating them, like they would actually saturate them if we were talking about a crumb. I think it's something about that. (It's the best I can come up with off the top of my head, although I'm realizing that it might not be the physical possibility that I'm imagining it is.) That, and flakier also connotes lightness, I think? Like puff pastry and its many layers of lightness?
posted by mudpuppie at 2:46 PM on November 12, 2015


Oh no! It's started!
posted by Seamus at 4:12 PM on November 12, 2015 [1 favorite]


If you are starting biscuits for the first time then definitely cream biscuits and make sure that the heavy cream is ice cold.

If you are using butter or lard then freeze them and then shred them in a food processor before gently tossing/mixing with dry ingredients. By doing so, you reduce the handling and thus the gluten build up when you add the ice cold buttermilk or milk to the dry ingredients then roll out.
posted by jadepearl at 5:25 PM on November 12, 2015 [1 favorite]


Honestly, though, as long as you don't overmix, you can make good biscuits. Great biscuits take work, but good biscuits really aren't that hard.

You can even make - gasp! - pretty good vegan ones. What you do is you clabber your almond milk with 1 T vinegar per cup and let it set until you can see the protein separate. And use half warmish coconut oil (cold coconut oil is so solid that it won't cream into the flour) and half very cold Earth Balance. I myself feel that vegan biscuits are better with herbs, since you don't get the flavor boost from the dairy and/or lard. Herbs and black pepper, or maybe some sweet paprika.
posted by Frowner at 5:33 PM on November 12, 2015 [1 favorite]


I would never serve sawmill gravy with flaky biscuits. Gravy needs the crumbly kind for sopping. The flaky kind are not good for sopping.

Admittedly, my flaky biscuits are not as good as my crumbly ones. I would never in a million fucking years make vegan biscuits, but my vegetarian gravy is finally quite delicious.
posted by crush-onastick at 6:32 PM on November 12, 2015


I don't think I've actually ever heard it called 'sawmill gravy' before. Woo, regionalisms!
posted by mudpuppie at 8:51 PM on November 12, 2015


You folks might enjoy looking this menu over. The biscuits are cat's head style.
posted by Mr. Yuck at 2:02 AM on November 13, 2015


Re: vegan biscuits: I find the trick to tasty ones (courtesy the Veganomicon) is using apple cider vinegar. It imparts just the right amount of tang and depth of flavor.
posted by eviemath at 6:17 AM on November 13, 2015 [1 favorite]


would never in a million fucking years make vegan biscuits

Hi, can we please not do this?

There is an excellent Southern vegan blogger, Bianca Phillips, who wrote a whole book about veganizing Southern cuisine. I keep meaning to check it out as I would love to see new takes on old recipes. I don't cook a lot of Southern food myself--I was a very picky eater as a child--but I should at least make more biscuits! And coconut cake. And pie.
posted by Kitteh at 6:24 AM on November 13, 2015 [1 favorite]


Really? What about it perplexes? (I'm honestly curious. Come on, let's talk biscuits!)

Flaky biscuits are good, but it's the crumbly biscuits that my mind immediately zips to when I think, "These must be served in heaven!" They're my definition of what I expect from a biscuit, but obviously, not the controlling definition. The more biscuits we have, even if we disagree about them, the better the world is, period.

On my honeymoon, my wife and I ate at Poogan's Porch in Charleston, S.C. They had pretty decent biscuits, so after we got home, we tried looking to see if they had shared their recipe for them online. Surprisingly, they did! We went and bought the ingredients and were about halfway through when I examined the bag of one of the ingredients, which had a recipe for biscuits on it. It was the same recipe. Heh.
posted by Atreides at 6:47 AM on November 13, 2015 [1 favorite]


I might add, the definition arising from what my grandfather served me as a child.
posted by Atreides at 6:47 AM on November 13, 2015 [1 favorite]


Hey Mr. Yuck, that resto is in my sister's neighborhood in West Asheville.
I have wandered past it a few times and wondered if it is worth my time.
We are heading there in a few weeks. Should I hit the place?
posted by Seamus at 9:12 AM on November 13, 2015


Yes! The location on Biltmore has less of a wait. You probably wont need to eat again that day.
posted by Mr. Yuck at 1:03 PM on November 13, 2015 [1 favorite]


Biscuits, like pie dough, intimidate people into using inferior store-bought versions.

You know what I keep in just for making biscuits?

Pre-mixed cake flour. It's more or less what I'd end up making anyway, its finer and delicate enough for peak flakiness, and then you can focus on getting that ice cold cream and buttermilk right.

Oh god I want to make a tray RIGHT NOW
posted by The Whelk at 2:18 PM on November 14, 2015


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