From Freetown, Virginia, to New York City, Edna Lewis carved a remarkable path. She introduced many Americans to seasonal cooking, Southern cooking — the cooking of the Black community in rural Virginia that raised her. Yet despite a life that included fame and acclaim, she is not a household name. In FINDING EDNA LEWIS, Deb Freeman travels to the places where Miss Lewis made her mark.
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About The Show
From Freetown, Virginia, to New York City, Edna Lewis carved a remarkable path. She introduced many Americans to seasonal cooking, Southern cooking—the cooking of the Black community in rural Virginia that raised her. Yet even though her life included fame and acclaim, she is not a household name.
In FINDING EDNA LEWIS, Deb Freeman travels to the places where Miss Lewis made her mark, and where her legacy endures. Deb interviews—and cooks!—with chefs, farmers, cookbook writers, and family members whose approach to food was profoundly shaped by Miss Lewis.
Decades before culture celebrated chefs as celebrities, and often behind-the-scenes as a Black woman working in food, Miss Lewis appears in little archival footage. But Deb discovers Miss Lewis again and again, cooking dishes from her repertoire and talking to those who knew her and her food best. She finds not only an enigmatic chef, but also an essential American personality—a champion of seasonal, local, farm-to-table cooking whose life reveals deep truths about the tables we set.
Chef Adrienne Cheatham, cookbook author and "Top Chef" alum, shop for produce at the Union Square Greenmarket in Manhattan, just as Edna Lewis often did over decades of cooking in New York City.
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Deb Freeman and Amethyst Ganaway eat a Lowcountry meal in Charleston, where Edna Lewis infused her Virginia cooking with food and techniques of Gullah Geechee communities in South Carolina and Georgia
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Nina Williams-Mbengue, niece of Edna Lewis, helps Deb with the batter for Busy Day Cake, a recipe from the 1976 classic cookbook by Lewis, "The Taste of Country Cooking."
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Chef Leah Branch at The Roosevelt in Richmond, Virginia, reveals how Edna Lewis shapes her acclaimed cooking.
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