and Emancipation Day with its rich and generous thanksgiving dinner. hog-butchering time and the making of sausages and liver pudding. the hunting season, with the deliciously different taste of game fattened on hickory nuts and persimmons. The harvest of fall: a fine dinner of baked country ham, roasted newly dug sweet potatoes, and warm apple pie after a day of corn-shucking.hot afternoons cooled with a bowl of crushed peaches or hand-cranked custard ice cream. Sunday Revival, the event of the year, when Edna's mother would pack up as many as fifteen dishes (what with her pickles and breads and pies) to be spread out on linen-covered picnic tables under the church's shady oaks. pan-fried chicken, sage-flavored pork tenderloin, spicy baked tomatoes, corn pudding, fresh blackberry cobbler, and more, for hungry neighbors on Wheat-Threshing Day. The feasts of summer: garden-ripe vegetables and fruits relished at the peak of flavor.the treat of braised mutton after sheepshearing. a ring mold of chicken with wild mushroom sauce. The fresh taste of spring: the first shad, wild mushrooms, garden strawberries, field greens and salads.With menus for the four seasons, she shares the ways her family prepared and enjoyed food, savoring the delights of each special time of year: In recipes and reminiscences equally delicious, Edna Lewis celebrates the uniquely American country cooking she grew up with some fifty years ago in a small Virginia Piedmont farming community that had been settled by freed slaves.

The taste of country cooking recipes