In Pursuit of Flavor

It is safe to say that this cookbook is like no other you will find unless it is another by this giant of a chef/instructor. The book is filled with information: how to purchase fish and duck, how to freeze berries-- there are two pages of information on Virginia hams; and, yes, there are recipes too exotic for my simple tastes. For example, I doubt that I'll ever prepare rabbit pate or roast and stuff a suckling pig. Miss Lewis' whiskey cake recipe is from another world, however. The cake is made in a tube pan and has a cup of bourbon in it--and tastes as if it does. (Miss Lewis says that you should never cook with any alcohol you wouldn't drink.) The cake comes out of the oven a beautiful pale yellow color, almost like salt-fired pottery. Dense and moist, it slices like a thick piece of fine cheese. I didn't believe the author when she says that you can listen to the sounds of a cake to know when it's done. I can testify that she is quite right about that. This is a really fine cake. There are lots of other breads and desserts I want to try.

I had heard of Edna Lewis for many years, so was anxious to see what all the fuss was about. And I was only mildly disappointed. Like M.F.K. Fisher, she has an uncommon appreciation for food and a keen sensitivity to subtleties in flavor. Throughout her cookbook she speaks of preserving flavor, complementing it, & getting the best out of it; and stresses the importance of fresh, organic, high-quality food. In her introduction she says, "I feel fortunate to have been raised at a time when the vegetables from the garden, the fruit from the orchard, and the meat from the smokehouse were all good and pure, unadulterated by chemicals and long-life packaging. As a result, I believe I know how food should taste." And so naturally, by extension, she has alot of particularities and preferences for how she likes things: she prefers Madagascar vanilla to Tahitian, cinnamon from Ceylon, the fall crop of raspberries to the early summer crop, the basil plants with tiny leaves, home-made baking powder to store-bought (she includes the recipe), and she waxes rhapsodic on wild berries: "...but wild things never fail us. They always taste good, which is why if you see only a handful of wild nuts or a cupful of berries, you should pick them. They have a flavor nothing else has. If you transplant a wild plant to the garden it will never taste the same." Etc.,etc. Quite a few recipes are designed for specific, possibly obscure, types of fruits or vegetables-- green gage plums, explorer potatoes, cymling squash, lady apples, Keiffer pears, etc. In the case of the Damsom plum, wild persimmon, and wild strawberry recipes, she allows for substitution with the regular and cultivated versions, but warns that the results will taste different and not as good. She offers a diverse range of hints along the way-- from how to buy a good coconut, to how to learn to listen for the signs when a cake is done. Edna Lewis is an old Virginian, raised in Freetown, a small farm community founded by her grandfather shortly after his emancipation from slavery. The narratives introducing each food chapter, and the comments that accompany each recipe, are reminiscences from her childhood and insights into southern sensibility, and they are delightful: " Summertime is just nothing without boiled corn on the cob. When I was younger, for dinner, corn would be a separate course, which we would eat after the main part of the meal when the dishes were cleared away. After all, you really can't eat anything else if you are concentrating on corn", and "In the South there's a big stir about how chess pie got its name. Some say it's because when a guest would say 'My, this a good pie, what is it called?' the answer would be 'jes pie'." The disappointment for me, a near-vegetarian, was not only in the relative paucity of vegetable recipes, but in seeing how heavily she relies on meat in general-- not just as a course in itself, but as a means of