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 free slaves. 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.

The scores of recipes highlighting the fresh taste of spring, the feasts of summer, the harvest of fall, and the hearty fare of winter are all set down in loving detail. The reader comes to understand the values that formed this remarkable woman - her love of nature, the pleasure of living with the seasons, the sense of community, the satisfactory feeling that hard work was always rewarded by her mother's good food. Edna Lewis shows us precisely how to recover, in our own country or city or suburban kitchens, the taste of the fresh, good, natural country cooking that was so happy a part of her girlhood in Freetown, Virginia.

Written by Edna Lewis. Foreword by Alice Waters.