Mom’s Sunday cooking—now that was food to me. Living up north, soul food and southern food were commonly considered to be one and the same. People think of soul food as BBQ ribs, macaroni and cheese, buttermilk biscuits, and sweet tea. Our Sunday dinners taught me about my family and what we ate, and helped me distinguish real southern from soul food. But I had no idea that there was so much more.
In 2000, I decided to change my career path from social work to becoming a chef. My decision was prompted by a few work dinners where coworkers complimented me on my sweet potatoes and roasted chicken. With a half-cocked aspiration, I left my job in Brooklyn and decided to attend culinary school.
The school I attended was French based, like all culinary schools at the time and the majority, still, today. I had chosen it because it was geared toward career changers and had an excellent work-study program. I also liked that the school took the view that French food was the mother of all professional cuisines, so my education’s foundation of principles, I thought, would be priceless.
During the first phase of classes our chef instructor asked us to write an essay about someone who inspired us to cook. My mother, of course; so easy, I thought. I would interview her when I got home that evening. But our teacher insisted that it be someone professional, like Escoffier or James Beard. My dilemma was that the only chefs I’d heard of were the ones on TV: Julia Child, the Frugal Gourmet, and the Cajun chef Justin Wilson.
I wanted to write about someone who looked like me, and like my mother and grandmothers. I began my search for a chef that I could admire. I started trolling around on the Internet without finding much on the subject of notable black women cooks. I searched at the public library, and after some digging, I found an article about a woman called Edna Lewis.
Edna Lewis’s search for taste, as well as her story, stuck with me. A black woman from the South, Miss Lewis moved to New York to start a whole new life, first as a laundress, later as a seamstress and restaurant chef. She was never formally trained, but she had grown up cooking in rural Virginia, was hardworking, and loved wholesome food made with fresh ingredients. This sounded like many of the women in my family before me. As the opening chef at Café Nicholson in New York in the 1950s, she showcased simple food and was heaped with praise for it. Through Miss Lewis I realized that there was a history of black women, like me, in professional kitchens, and that I wasn’t alone.
My cooking school was diverse. We had students from all types of backgrounds, but in class, African Americans were poorly represented. So I decided to tell my classmates about my discovery of Miss Lewis. Many of them hadn’t heard of her. My culinary instructor had, though, and told me about her cookbooks. In Pursuit of Flavor was the first cookbook of Miss Lewis’s that I read. I prepared her boiled Virginia ham recipe with mustard and rosemary for our final exam. I got an A−.