At 87, the doyenne of Southern cooking just produced her fourth book. Gully Wells pays a visit and finds that all's well in the kitchen and the heart

Edna Lewis was born and raised in Freetown, Virginia, and it was there that she took the first steps in a lifelong culinary journey. As she recalls, Freetown wasn't really a town at all - more a settlement of houses and farm buildings - but it was free. And that was the point. Founded by three freed slaves (her grandfather among them), it was a farming community that shared not only the hard work but also the celebrations and feasts which punctuated the year.

Nearly a century later, Lewis's memories of family, farming, food, and friends are still inextricably wound around one another like the tendrils of a vine. "Over the years since I left home and lived in different cities, I have kept thinking about the people I grew up with and about our way of life," she wrote in The Taste of Country Cooking (1978). "And I realize how much the bond that held us had to do with food."

Long before the mantra of fresh and seasonal captured us all with its born-again, near-evangelical fervor, Lewis's mother, her aunt Jenny Hailstalk, and all the other women of Freetown knew instinctively that in the spring you made skinny wild asparagus and shad; summer brought corn, tomatoes, and every imaginable berry; fall meant game and apples; and winter was the time to bake and cook like crazy in preparation for the biggest feast of all, Christmas. Although Lewis left Freetown at 16 and moved to New York, she never forgot where she came from.

Steadily, over the years, her cooking made her something of a legend, first among her friends and then in the food world. In 1948 she went public, teaming with John Nicholson, an antiques dealer, to open Café Nicholson on East 57th Street in Manhattan. She did all the cooking, and while the food was as delicious and uncomplicated as ever (her roast chicken with watercress, fresh fruit cobblers, and Sunday-night cake were the favorites), her customers were a much more worldly crowd, with people like Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, Richard Avedon, and Diana Vreeland dropping by for regular doses of genuine Southern comfort.

Word spread that here was a person who really knew Southern food, and when, in the late sixties, Lewis broke her leg and was forced to stop cooking professionally for a while, she decided to write down some of her thoughts—and her recipes. The result was The Edna Lewis Cookbook, which she quickly followed with two more. M.F.K. Fisher was a fan, as was James Beard, and anyone who hadn't yet taken the cuisine of the South seriously was gently but firmly put on the right track by Lewis's easy mix of erudition and deep love for her culinary roots. Now, at the age of 87, she has written her fourth book, The Gift of Southern Cooking, with Scott Peacock, her protege and companion.

The photograph on the jacket gives a clue about their relationship: An elegant, elderly black lady with beautiful hands, dressed in a floor-length batik-print dress and dangly earrings, and a younger, dark-haired man in jeans and a red shirt sit across from each other at a simple but beautifully set table on a porch. They are about to have lunch—possibly fried chicken and black-eyed peas, followed by a pie with a slightly crooked crust that rests on a cut-glass cake stand. But even more interesting than the food is their obvious delight in each other's company. Inside the book are more photographs: baskets of okra and eggplants, home-bottled pickles, rosy-pink Smithfield hams. Interspersed with these is a portrait of a very young Edna Lewis in a fitted black linen jacket and white ruffled jabot, one of Scott Peacock in a long apron and a bandanna, cooking in the open hearth of an eighteenth-century kitchen on the occasion of Lewis's eightieth birthday, and another of the two of them, arms around each other, simply smiling into the camera.