Edna Lewis - Later Career

Later Career

In a 1989 interview with The New York Times, Lewis said: "As a child in Virginia, I thought all food tasted delicious. After growing up, I didn't think food tasted the same, so it has been my lifelong effort to try and recapture those good flavors of the past."

After The Taste of Country Cooking was published, Lewis returned to restaurants, most notably to Gage and Tollner in Brooklyn. She worked there for five years before retiring in the mid-1990s. She co-founded the Society for the Revival and Preservation of Southern Food, a precursor to the Southern Foodways Alliance (SFA).

Lewis also lived and worked in Chapel Hill, North Carolina and Charleston, South Carolina. For example, from 1983 to 1984 she served as guest chef of The Fearrington House Restaurant located in Pittsboro, just outside Chapel Hill.

She introduced the chocolate soufflé dessert to the menu, and it has remained on the menu to this day. The dessert graced the cover of Gourmet magazine in 1983 and helped launch the Restaurant, then three years old.