“Unlike other seasons of the year, the coming of fall was looked upon with mixed feelings. When the leaves began to fall, all the visitors were gone, and the whistle from the train passing through Orange gave a long, lonesome, shrill sound as it rolled through without stopping to let off any passengers. …
“A group of high-school students who loved my mother would come on the first moonlit night and help us with the corn shucking. They thought it great fun, boys and girls with their favorite friends. After the shucking they would return to the house and be given a festive meal that my mother had had in preparation all afternoon: one of fried chicken, baked ham, roasted, newly dug sweet potatoes, baked tomatoes, green beans, cake, and apple pie—the apple pie being the favorite. The young people ate heartily and left late, thanking my mother and promising to come back the next fall.”
—Edna Lewis in The Taste of Country Cooking. Published 50 years ago, Lewis’s cookbook-cum-memoir lovingly depicts her childhood in Freetown, a Virginia Piedmont hamlet established by freed slaves. Lewis, who died in 2006 at the age of 89, was a much-revered figure in the world of American food, and The Taste of Country Cooking continues to influence the way we eat with the seasons.
