Edna Lewis

Miss Lewis taught America that Black Southern cooking was a cuisine in the full sense, seasonal, disciplined, articulated, written down. The Taste of Country Cooking, organized by the year in Freetown, Virginia, is one of the most important cookbooks ever published in this country.

She cooked at Café Nicholson in 1950s New York for Eleanor Roosevelt and Marlon Brando, and she did it without apology and without translation. She set the standard.