Although the founders of Freetown have passed away, I am convinced that their ideas do live on for us to learn from, to enlarge upon, and pass on to the following generations. “Since we are the last of the original families, with no children to remember and carry on, I decided that I wanted to write down just exactly how we did things when I was growing up in Freetown that seemed to make life so rewarding. The book progresses with the seasons – Spring, Summer, Fall, and Winter – and particular events during those seasons, such as: “A Late Spring Lunch After Wild Mushroom Picking” “Emancipation Day Dinner” and “Morning-After-Hog-Butchering Breakfast”. She wrote this cookbook, her second, in 1972. In 1948, she became a chef at a restaurant in New York and she grew to became a foundational figure in American cuisine even after she retired from professional cooking in 1992. She was born there in 1916 and lived there till her teens, when she made her way northward in the Great Migration. Formerly enslaved people, among them her grandparents, founded and named the village. Lewis documents her childhood in Freetown, a community of Black farmers in the middle of Virginia.

The Taste of Country Cooking weaves the biography of a community into a cookbook.

I realize how much the bond that held us had to do with food.” Edna Lewis, in The Taste of Country Cooking “Over the years since I left home, I have kept thinking about the people I grew up with and about our way of life.

The taste of country cooking recipes