Reading:The Incomparable Edna Lewis
Edna Lewis, God rest her soul, was one of the great talents of the American kitchen—and one of the great voices in American food writing. This morning I happened across her essay "What Is Southern?," which ran posthumously in Gourmet and was honored with a 2009 James Beard Award for magazine writing.
In answering the titular question, Miss Lewis, who was from Freetown, Virginia, wrote about a South I also know, although my family is from the culturally somewhat different area of Blount County, Tennessee. It's the South of the farmer, the grandmother, the storyteller, the hunter, the barefoot kid and the cook. It's a South that sadly coexists with a meaner place—the South of the slaveholder, the segregationist and the contemporary bigot—but for me those latter voices do not drown out the former. The Southerners who still speak to me most loudly are my West grandparents, Gran and Pappaw, God rest their souls. They would have have understood exactly what Miss Lewis was writing about.
Her subject in "What Is Southern?" is food, and she lays a beautiful table with her writing, as well as a fine cupboard of seasonal preserves:
"Southern is weeks of canning, pickling, and preserving—cucumber pickle, artichoke pickle, pear pickle, tomato pickle, watermelon rind pickle, citron preserves, green tomato preserves, fig preserves, cherry preserves, grape conserve, crab apple jelly, wild blackberry jelly, fox grape jelly, quince jelly, guava jelly, wild plum jelly, wild strawberry preserves (the best).
okraBut here's the secret knowledge I want to share with you: when Southerners talk about food, what they're talking about is more than just food. They're talking about a specific way of living: in a specific place, with a specific understanding of the land and its inhabitants, and with a specfic ethical commitment to sustaining those relationships across the generations. Miss Lewis just barely nods towards all this in her last paragraph, but she gets the point across:
"So many great souls have passed off the scene. The world has changed. We are now faced with picking up the pieces and trying to put them into shape, document them so the present-day young generation can see what southern food was like. The foundation on which it rested was pure ingredients, open-pollinated seed—planted and replanted for generations—natural fertilizers. We grew the seeds of what we ate, we worked with love and care."
That's the real thing, folks—heartfelt, long-sighted—and the passage hints at a deeper meaning hidden behind the title of this blog, Saving the Season. It's something that has been tugging at me for a while, and I'm going to bend your ear about now.
Autumn from Nicholas Poussin's Four Seasons
With our cannning work, we save more than just a seasonal bounty of produce. We are also saving old and in some cases ancient food-preserving techniques. Equally we are saving, even in our urban kitchens, a sense of the agricultural cycle. Canning connects us with the past and with nature. That is tantamount to saying that canning is a culture—a specific food culture—that is sustained, that is perpetuated by every jar you put up. We ought to be mindful of that, even impassioned by it.
But let me suggest here an even broader view: if we begin to think about a long history that stretches all the way back to the origins of organized agriculture, then we begin to understand that the culture of food—how we get it and how we eat it—is a crucial building block in the architecture of civilization. And to my way of thinking, it lies very close indeed to the foundation, nearer to the cornerstone achievement of democracy than some might credit, although it also shares some the ornamental qualities of the arts.
Marie AntoinettePerhaps because food is so commonplace it can seem beneath serious scrutiny. When it does appear in basic history textbooks, its role is often caricatured. Food might be introduced to the grand historical narrative either as a bare political issue—starving masses revolt over the price of bread—or as a la-di-da indulgence for jaded economic overlords. Sometimes the clash between starvation and saiety erupts noisily—"Let them eat cake!"—but more often food is counted a trifling matter compared to feats of the Great Men. (This clumsy characterization of food's place is society continues in our national discourse today, expressed both in politically-tinged reports about the nutritional woes of the junk-food poor and in the smugly self-satisfied gastro-porn of rich Foodists, as yesterday's Foodies would now prefer to be known. Understandably, perhaps, the mere word "Arugula!" has become a sort of political attack slogan hurled from some quarters against a pampered liberal elite.)
I'll admit that the history of food is usually dull stuff to the non-Foodist, since cooking is a field of knowledge that has been assembled slowly over time through countless anonymous contributions. The collective experience of everyday cooks and a few professional chefs has arranged itself over the centuries into a mosaic of distinctive food cultures. In in the longest view, however, these specific traditions merge into the singular achievement of a general food culture in the West, one which can be traced backward from McDonalds all the way to its pre-Biblical origins. (Someday we'll talk about ketchup—the ubiquitous relic of an ancient Persian proto-cuisine that favored complex spice mixtures and sweet-sour flavor combinations.) Cuisine as a body of knowledge is no frivolity, and during the Enlightenment, influential thinkers understood as much as they studied the proximity of politics and national ambition to science, natural history, agriculture, and domestic economy. That is to say—to food.
Jefferson's crop-rotation plan for MonticelloA political thinker as great as Thomas Jefferson bothered to form opinions about farming and eating, basing his conclusions on what he read and observed in his travels and through his own empirical research at Monticello. Some of his ideas sound astoundingly prescient today, such as rotating crops to increase yield and suppress pests. (My favorite phrase from the Jeffersonian kitchen is that meat should be served "as a condiment for the vegetables," which would no doubt please the USDA, the AMA, Michael Pollan and proponents of Alice Waters's Edible Schoolyard program.) Jefferson believed that a vigorous democracy required sustainable farming communities and self-reliant citizens who possessed the means to feed themselves and the nation at large. He understood that food is a matter of national interest.
Food culture, then, needs to be safeguarded just as scrupulously as other achievements in learning and the arts. If we discard it—or even carelessly allow it to lapse from one generation and the next—then we loose something much more profound than a sheaf of recipes. A bit of civilization is lost, rendering us that much more vulnerable to the tyrannical potential of governments and corporations, transforming us from muscular, self-reliant citizens into feeble consumers. Growing food and processessing it at home today is a radical act. Eating home-canned goods is a way to stick a finger in the eye of agribusiness and flip the bird at the corporate food industry.
When I started this blog, I didn't see so many big ideas—I won't flinch if you call them grandiose—at the bottom of my preserving pan. I just wanted to make strawberry jam as well as Gran did. But while stirring dozens of batches of jam and filling hundreds of jars, I've had the time to lament that Gran "went to a better place," as they say down South, before I could learn to do things her way. Apart from the personal sorrow her absence causes me, I'm also left angry that so much food culture can be lost so quickly. One generation is what it takes.
Of course I know that America's canning traditions are not yet entirely lost and that part of what this blog and its readers are doing is reviving canning practices that had only recently started to fade and are now being revived. Still, I worry about canning traditions the way that a linguist must worry about indigenous languages among the Amazon tribes. The old people are going and taking with them what they knew. That kind of extinction has a cumulative effect: at first you may not notice, but then it's too late.
Miss Lewis left a short shelf of classic cookbooks. I look at them all the time, and it's thanks to women like her and Gran that I have come to believe that Saving the Season has significance beyond its celebration of a currently trendy kitchen hobby. Jam is more than just sweet nothings in a jar. Jam is one tiny aspect of a civilization—and an American democracy—that I cherish.
Miss Lewis understood it all along.
Reader Comments (6)
Colleagues look at my lunch and remark that it seems extravangant, over the top, laborious to prepare and crazy that I know how to make such things in the first place (roast chicken, kale and two varieties of squash, leftover from dinner and packed in a container for the next day; gnocchi from scratch with sage and black pepper).
They ask me how I learned to cook, and I tell them I taught myself and still have a lot to learn. In turn, they exclaim that they couldn't be bothered spending "a whole hour" in the evening, cooking some "big crazy dinner like that!" Or, they tell me how much they have to do after work--laundry, errands, housekeeping, TV-watching--and that there's no time left fo cooking once all that is taken care of first.
I know we all have our lines and limits, but to me, this one seems nuts--the idea that vacuuming your carpet and buying more boxed cereal from the shop all the way across town, then settling in to watch three hours of crime-thriller TV is more important than spending 60 minutes preparing the food that, in essence, keeps you alive long enough to run all those errands and watch all that television in the first place.
Sure, some nights I want take-out and trackpants, but this treatment of food and eating as an irritation or inconvenience is dismaying. Amidst my cooking and recipe successes there surely are a lot of failures and questionable dishes that need a tweak before they're truly palatable. But, I can't imagine my pantry without jars of my own jam, peaches, pickled beans and dried herbs, or my freezer without scones, biscuits, bread and cookies waiting to be thawed and baked later on!
My experince with canning started in 1976 and through the years as I inherited my grandmother's canning equipment and then went to grow veggies in a 900 square foot garden, I have learned that in today's society of instant gratification so many people have no idea where milk or an apple come from. Their first concrete experience is school, where glop is placed on a tray that has been washed and dried so someone else can eat.
I no longer have that 900 square foot garden; now I have 4 acres I share with the deer, rabbits and javalina. My food is now fruit, mostly apples. I have two 22/23 quart pressure cooker-canners, two water bath canners and two 50 quart crocks, along with various and sundry pieces of other equipment poised and ready for something to ripen before the hungry herbivores get it.
I am working on getting my 12x24 green/shade house up so I can start my own plants again this year. My grandmother and father got me started in gardening; my mother canning and baking. Soon, when I get this place fenced, I will be able to start in one corner and nibble on the feast from July to October and maybe leave enogh for me to can.
A few days ago I was lamenting to my brother that we have lost our way. Our pace of life is getting faster and faster and the people that will save it are the ones that still have a connection with the land. Go back before it is too late.
Hello -
I am a filmmaker in Atlanta. I just wanted to let you know I produced a 21 minute documentary about Miss Edna Lewis. The film is called "Fried Chicken and Sweet Potato Pie".
It is viewable in its entirety on Internet at a Gourmet Magazine website:
http://www.gourmet.com/magazine/video/2008/01/Edna
and at this Library of Virginia website:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cl6JVMoMN44&feature=channel_page
My website, http://bbarash.com/bb_friedchicken.htm
has more information about the film and the story of Miss Lewis.
Sincerely,
Bailey Barash
Well stated! I heartily agree, and I know my passion for this very subject often seems a bit weird to others - but then it's all a matter of patience and no acting superior. Bring a tasty bit of home-made goodness to the office to share, and suddenly there is conversation, room for learning, room to grow. I am so thankful that my mother, aunts and one grandmother are still alive and very much kicking and available for that mid-boiling phone call when something begins to go amiss! What you've written about is part of who I am, too, and I am thankful to you for expressing it so beautifully.
Thanks for such a thoughtful piece. As a sort of misplaced Southerner, I am scrambling to reassemble the threads of my grandmothers' cooking and of the heritage I simply took for granted. But I think we are in the midst of a food renaissance. More and more young people are finding their way back to food and to the creativity inherent in the old foodways. I can't tell you how many people that I thought would never care about baking or canning light up when the making of food from scratch is mentioned.
A special thanks to Edna Lewis for passing along her food wisdom, and reminding us of the great culinary tradition in our own backyards.
I would also like to thank one of my personal favorites, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (Cross Creek Cookery), for focusing on the food native to my neck of the woods.
This is one of the best "blog" entries I have read in a very long time. Thank you for your hard work...
I too love my books by Edna Lewis, and they are among my most-used cookbooks.
I first read her "What Is Southern" essay in one of the volumes of Cornbread Nation put out by the Southern Foodways Alliance and laid in bed with tears streaming down my face as I read it. My partner asked me why I was crying and I read it to him. So there we were: two grown men laying in bed with tears streaming down our cheeks comparing our own memories of growing up in Southern households. Thank you, Edna Lewis.
Just wanted to share...