The Taste of Country Cooking

I like to check out cookbooks to get a feel for whether I'd like to own the book and use it regularly. With this book, I'm not likely to make many of the recipes, but I ended up reading it like I would a narrative. Edna Lewis grew up in a community in Virginia that had been established by formerly enslaved people. Their meals were delightfully seasonal, connected to the food being produced on the farms. The structure of the book includes sections for each season, then a menu for a different type of meal, such as “an early spring dinner after sheep-shearing” or “fall breakfast before a day of hunting.” Lewis introduces each section with a couple of pages about that season, then each meal includes a brief description, and finally almost every recipe includes charming headnotes. The food all sounds delicious, and the community connections are also wonderful.

It is easy to say that this is my favorite cookery book about Southern food. The stories of life in the rural South captures much of my own experience growing up on a farm in Tennessee. While I don't cook this way much anymore, reading these stories and recipes brings back all of the sights, smells and tastes of country cooking.