Which cookbook by Edna Lewis, published in 1976, is celebrated for documenting rural Virginia cooking traditions?

Edna Lewis’s 1976 cookbook is The Taste of Country Cooking.

Lewis based the book on the foodways of Freetown, Virginia, the African American farming community where she grew up. Rather than presenting only restaurant-style recipes, she organized the book around seasons, describing what families traditionally harvested, preserved, and cooked throughout the year.

The book is important to soul-food history because it records African American Southern cooking as a sophisticated regional cuisine rooted in agriculture, memory, and seasonality. Lewis emphasized fresh vegetables, grains, fruit, poultry, and game instead of reducing Southern food to a short list of fried dishes.

A common mix-up is confusing this title with Lewis’s earlier cookbook, The Edna Lewis Cookbook, published in 1972. The 1976 work is the more influential seasonal portrait of rural Southern cooking and remains one of the best-known books about African American food traditions.