We're delighted to share this previously unpublished essay by the late Edna Lewis—one of America's most resonant and evocative food writers.

"Never throw away your old tapes," said Davia Nelson, who with Nikki Silva comprises NPR's Kitchen Sisters.

"Green peas were considered a great delicacy," says Edna Lewis in The Taste of Country Cooking.

The late chef and cookbook author Edna Lewis changed the face of Southern cuisine.

Edna Lewis trained Peacock’s palate to detect the metallic undertones that commercial baking powders can impart, and he's never looked back.

"There is a dish that originated in Charleston called Hoppin’ John," Edna Lewis writes in In Pursuit of Flavor, "which we had never heard of in Virginia."

This "assembly of greens," as Miss Lewis would say, has a supple texture that works nicely with cornmeal dumplings.

Potatoes aren’t a backbone starch in the South, but they’re one vegetable, notes Miss Lewis, that is good in all seasons.

Surrounded by mementos of a richly lived life, unassuming culinary powerhouse Edna Lewis talks to Chang-Rae Lee about political activism, running a restaurant, and strawberry shortcake....

They were a startling couple. But even today, nearly two years after Edna Lewis's death, Scott Peacock says that she still makes him the man—and the chef—that he is....