The Farm Table

The farm table of American writing owes much of its standing to Edna Lewis, who set down in The Taste of Country Cooking the life of Freetown, a community in Orange County, Virginia, founded by freed people after emancipation, among them her own grandfather. Her book is organised by the seasons and by occasions of the farm year, and it remembers a table fed almost wholly from what the community raised, gathered, preserved and killed for itself. It is a memory of a particular place and a particular people, and it should be read as such rather than as a general picture of rural cooking.

Lewis arranges the book by the turning year, with a menu for each season and for the occasions that marked it: the hog killing, the spring planting, the church revival and the Sunday breakfast. The structure itself is the argument, for in Freetown the table followed the land, and a dish belonged to its week of the year as surely as to its recipe. Strawberries, shad, young greens, field peas, tomatoes, apples and hickory nuts each arrive when they ripen and are not looked for at other times. What could not be eaten fresh was put up in jars, dried, salted or rendered, so that the winter table was the summer garden kept in another form. The cooking she records is plain in method and exacting in judgement. Chicken is fried or roasted in the way of a household that kept its own birds, pork is cured and used to the last of the animal, and breads and cakes are made from a few ingredients handled with care. Lard, butter and cream came from the farm, and she insists on freshness above all: vegetables cooked soon after picking, eggs from the yard, fruit eaten at the height of its ripeness. Seasoning is restrained, and the flavour of the main ingredient is meant to be the point of the dish. Her recipes ask the cook to attend to the heat of the stove, the colour of the crust and the feel of the dough rather than to a printed clock. The table also had its order of service. Breakfast on a farm was a full meal, since the work of the day began early, and Sunday dinners and revival-time spreads were laid out for relatives and visitors with a generosity that the community took as a point of pride. Children had their tasks in the garden, the kitchen and the orchard, and the knowledge of how to cook passed to them by being present at the work. Lewis writes of this with affection and without sentimentality, and her authority rests on the exactness of what she remembers. The importance of the book to the wider American table is twofold. It put the cooking of Black Virginia farm families into print as a cuisine with its own rules of seasonality and craft, at a time when Southern food was too often described through other eyes. It also gave later cooks and writers a measure for the farm-to-table idea, which in Freetown was no movement but simply the way a household fed itself. Those who borrow the phrase today are, knowingly or not, describing a way of eating that Lewis recorded as lived.

The flavour of the farm table, as Lewis describes it, is the taste of ingredients at their peak: sweet young vegetables, rich farm butter and cream, cured pork and the clean crust of a well-made biscuit or cake. Seasoning stays light so that freshness is evident, and the contrast of a salted ham against a ripe tomato or a sharp preserve is the kind of balance the table relies on.