Edna Lewis was a legendary American chef, a pioneer of Southern cooking and the author of four books, including The Taste of Country Cooking, her memoir cookbook about growing up in Freetown, Virginia, a small farming community of formerly enslaved people and their descendants established in 1866.

Before she began writing books, Edna had been a celebrated chef at Cafe Nicholson in New York City in the 1950s where Eleanor Roosevelt, Paul Robeson, Marlon Brando, Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote and Marlene Dietrich all came for her Southern food and legendary chocolate soufflé.

The Taste of Country Cooking chronicled the traditions and recipes of the community where she grew up — a rural settlement that celebrated the events and traditions of daily life across each year with special suppers and ritual meals — Emancipation Day Dinner, Early Spring Dinner after Sheep Shearing, Morning After Hog Butchering Breakfast, Christmas Eve Supper and Christmas Dinner to name but a few of the dishes and stories that fill this book.

In 1983 The Kitchen Sisters went to talk to Ms. Lewis about her life and the Christmas traditions in the tight-knit Virginia farming community where she came of age.

For Christmas, The Kitchen Sisters Present... Edna Lewis: Christmas in Freetown

On the occasion of her 80th birthday in 2000, The Kitchen Sisters, along with food writer Peggy Knickerbocker, visited the home of Cecilia Chiang, the legendary Chinese-American restaurateur, chef and founder of The Mandarin Restaurant in San Francisco for a bit of an oral history.

Cecilia Chiang introduced regional Chinese cooking to America in the 1960s, revolutionizing what most Americans thought Chinese cooking was. Elegant and savvy, her restaurant drew in celebrities and food enthusiasts, including Pavarotti, John Lennon, Jackie Onassis, Mae West, Henry Kissinger, and others. She inspired James Beard, Marion Cunningham, Alice Waters, Julia Child, and generations of chefs and restaurateurs, including her son Philip, founder of P. F. Chang's. Cecilia died in 2020 at the age of 100.

A pioneer in her field, Catherine Bauer Wurster was advisor to five presidents on urban planning and housing and was one of the primary authors of the Housing Act of 1937. During the 1930s she wrote the influential book Modern Housing and was one of the leaders of the "housers" movement, advocating for affordable housing for low-income families.

Catherine Bauer’s life divided into two names and two geographies: her urban east coast youth, and her later life in the Bay Area. She hobnobbed with the bohemian elite of the interwar years….brilliantly charming the big architect names of the Weimar Republic, Paris cafe society, and the International Style: Gropius, Mies, Corbusier, Oud, May, and her lover, Lewis Mumford.

Her glamour and charismatic presence endeared her to trade unionists, labor leaders, and politicians—who she tried to turn to her vision of housing as a worthy responsibility of the government—sexier and leftier during the Depression. Her arguments were a harder sell in the red scare fifties and ran into a dreary deadlock in the suburban sixties, as she later wrote from her west coast stronghold at the University of California, Berkeley. In the Bay Area she developed an academic career that also included her husband architect William Wurster, a daughter, and a house on the bay – all surrounded by the nature she quickly grew to love. Her legacy lives on to this day, as even the latest of housing legislation echoes the progressive ideals she was advocating for in her prime.

Produced by Brandi Howell for the New Angle Voice podcast from the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation. Editorial advising from Alexandra Lange. Thanks to host Cynthia Phifer Kracauer. Special thanks in this episode to Barbara Penner, Gwendolyn Wright, Sadie Super, Matthew Gordon Lasner, Katelin Penner, and Carol Galante. Archival recordings are from the UC Berkeley Bancroft Library. Funding from the New York State Council on the Arts.

The Kitchen Sisters Present is produced by The Kitchen Sisters (Nikki Silva & Davia Nelson) with Nathan Dalton and Brandi Howell. The Kitchen Sisters Present is part of Radiotopia from PRX.