Edna Lewis

A salad of brown lentils, dressed with sliced onions and a mustard vinaigrette, is perfect for picnicking.

These handheld, crescent-shaped, fruit-filled pastries, long popular in the mountain South, are found at church picnics, crossroads country stores, and, if you are incredibly blessed, in your favorite aunt's hot cast-iron skillet. The fat half-moons of crisp, chewy dough ooze with spiced stewed dried apples. The other traditional filling is dried peaches.

Sour-milk cornbread is one of those quintessential foods of the South for which there are hundreds of recipes (and infinite variations). Although we'd never claim to have the "definitive version," Miss Lewis and I worked together on this recipe until we got just what we wanted: an all-cornmeal bread that's light, moist, and rich, full of corn flavor, with the tanginess of sour milk or buttermilk. Like all Southern cornbreads, it has no sugar—that's a Yankee thing. Traditionally, milk that had started to culture was used in cornbread and other baked goods, both for its pleasant sharp taste and for a leavening boost (its acids react with baking soda to generate carbon dioxide). Since modern pasteurized milk doesn't sour nicely—it just goes bad—we use commercial buttermilk here instead. This is a genuine all-purpose cornbread, delicious as a savory bread or even as a dessert, slathered with butter and honey. My mother and grandmother only made this kind of leavened cornbread (which they called "egg bread") for cornbread stuffing, and it does make superb stuffing. It's also delicious in a time-honored Southern snack: cornbread crumbled into a bowl with cold milk or buttermilk poured over. Many Southerners—especially of an older generation—would call that a perfect light supper on a hot summer day, after a big midday meal.

Beans have sustained people—black, white, and Native American—in the South for centuries. Miss Lewis first developed this recipe as a way of jazzing up canned green beans, which she appreciated for their economy. These days, fresh green beans are available and affordable all year long, so we happily adapted the recipe. Don't rush the cooking time and the goodness of these beans will be a revelation: smoky, luxuriant, and vegetal.

Like many an accomplished hostess in the South, Miss Lewis was a dab hand at making yeast rolls and always generously anointed them with butter before putting them in the oven. Dinner rolls should be brought to the table hot, so if you make them early in the day, you will want to reheat them gently. (Leftovers are great for breakfast the next morning, split, buttered, and served with homemade strawberry or fig preserves.) Mashed potato is a traditional addition to a yeast dough like this one; it helps the rising and also contributes to its tenderness. These rolls have outstanding flavor and are so light and fluffy they almost levitate.

"Smothering" means braising a tough cut of meat to tenderize it. Slow simmering also concentrates the flavor of the gravy.

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

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

Residents of Brunswick, Georgia, and Brunswick County, Virginia, are both fiercely protective of the provenance of this dish, but let's face it—hunters have lived off this sort of thing forever. Like all stews, this tastes even better the next day.

Miss Lewis mentions buttermilk cookies, which she pairs with ice-cold lemonade, but as far as we know, she never committed a recipe to paper. When we developed one, the big debate was about texture: Soft or crisp? What you see here is the cookie of your dreams, with a tender interior and the slightest bit of crispness around the edge.

"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 (along with the fact that she found black-eyed peas a little dull) goes a long way toward explaining why she decided to gussy up its scrupulous simplicity—virtually unchanged through the centuries—with tomatoes. Well, nobody's perfect. Here you'll find the real thing, traditionally eaten on New Year's Day for good luck. Serve it with extra black-eyes and their pot liquor on the side to add more moisture, as well as a platter ofSimmered Greens.

This is a time-honored way to sweetenmint juleps, lemonade, and iced tea.

Moonlight-and-magnolia myths aside, this is one of the world's great libations.

The brown sugar in the ingredients list below is there to mellow the acidity of the tomatoes, not to make this a sweet dish. Use a sturdy bakery loaf of white sandwich bread, not the packaged sliced stuff, for the topping. You will get enormous pleasure from serving people this dish.

For most people, the word gumbo immediately conjures the Cajun and Creole cooking of Louisiana. But okra (ngombo in Bantu), for which the soup-stew is named, reached South Carolina with the slave trade some years before Europeans settled in Louisiana, and the Creole world, where African, European, and indigenous cultures meet, actually extends up the southern Atlantic coast. There are many different gumbo recipes, all taking advantage of local ingredients and served with rice. This one is a heady, fragrant slurry thick with seafood. If desired, add filé powder (ground dried sassafras leaves), a Choctaw thickening agent with an almost lemony flavor, just before eating.

This shrimp's gentle preparation yields an utterly soothing broth that tastes just right first thing in the morning. Grab somegritsor a warmbiscuitto help sop up the juices.

When a meat is "potted," it's usually preserved beneath a layer of fat or made into a paste such as shrimp paste or deviled ham. Miss Lewis, however, merely cooked the birds in an iron pot on the stove. She gives the option of roasting in the oven, and that's what we did because it plays up the contrast between the rich, tender, moist dark meat and the crisp skin. Miss Lewis would never waste any part of such a luxurious bird, so she chops up the livers and adds them to the bread stuffing, which may look unprepossessing but is actually delicious. This is a simple, elegant meal, so treat yourself to a wonderful Bordeaux.

"Green peas were considered a great delicacy," says Edna Lewis inThe Taste of Country Cooking."If our peas ripened first, they were shared with the neighbors and vice versa." Since garden-fresh peas have become practically impossible to find, we rely on frozen peas for this classic combination. Serve it, as Miss Lewis would, with skillet-cooked chicken and biscuits on an evening in late spring.

After this cobbler (it's actually more of a double-crust pie) has been in the oven for about 20 minutes, your kitchen will be filled with the winy fragrance of blackberries. Miss Lewis loved to serve it warm, with the syrupy juice spooned over the crisp yet yielding topping.

If you read Edna Lewis's cookbooks, you will come to understand that southerners do not boil their vegetables to death. They cook them until they are perfectly, magnificently tender—and there's a big difference. Try this versatile side and see: It's absurdly easy and full of deep, sweet flavor.