....They had essentially finished writing a book, ­‘‘The Edna Lewis Cookbook,’’ that Jones thought was fashionable but characterless. But when Lewis started talking, recalling scenes of growing up in Freetown and the foods they had gathered, grown, harvested, shot, hooked and cooked, Jones lit up. ‘‘I knew this was a voice that could teach us,’’ she said. This was the story of American food that she had wanted to hear. Peterson graciously went home, Jones asked questions, Lewis wrote answers on yellow legal pads and the seeds of her classic, ‘‘The Taste of Country Cooking,’’ were sown. Lewis would go on to write more books and to hold chef posts at esteemed landmarks like Middleton Place in South Carolina and Gage & Tollner in New York. But she will be forever remembered for writing the book that started with that meeting.

‘‘The Taste of Country Cooking,’’ published in 1976, is revered for the way it shows the simple beauty of food honestly made in the rhythm of the seasons — the now common but at the time nearly forgotten ethos of eating farm-to-table — and for the way it gave a view of Southern food that was refined and nuanced, going beyond grease, greens and grits. ‘‘Until recently, we Southerners were very apologetic about our food,’’ Lewis’s friend, collaborator and eventual caretaker Scott Peacock told me. ‘‘But she wrote about it with such reverence.’’ She inspired generations of Southern cooks to honor their own roots. Alice Waters, who is usually credited for sparking the American organic-and-local movement at Chez Panisse in California, says: ‘‘It was certainly revolutionary at that point. I was such a Francophile, but when I discovered her cookbook, it felt like a terribly good friend. By then, we were already in a fast-food world, and she showed the deep roots of gastronomy in the United States and that they were really in the South, where we grew for flavor and cooked with sophistication. I had never really considered Southern food before, but I learned from her that it’s completely connected to nature, totally in time and place.’’

The book is, in one sense, a country manual, with instructions on picking wild mushrooms and the best way to turn dandelions into wine. (It tastes like Drambuie, Lewis offers helpfully.) It’s also a cookbook, because there are teaspoons and tablespoons and ‘‘cook uncovered for 10 minutes.’’ But perhaps the truest way to describe the book is as a memoir told in recipes, where every menu, dish and ingredient speaks to her childhood in rural Virginia and how her community made a life from the land, taking pleasure in the doing of many things.

It stands as an exemplar of American food writing, a complex, multilayered, artistic and even subtly subversive document. And it stands on the other side of a cruel tradition in cookbooks from the first half of the 20th century, one in which black domestic cooks often had their recipes recorded and written by their white employers, who tended not to flatter the help in the process. Toni Tipton-Martin’s 2015 book ‘‘The Jemima Code,’’ a bibliography of African-American cookbooks, collects some examples of this, including one from 1937 called ‘‘Emma Jane’s Souvenir Cookbook,’’ by Blanche Elbert Moncure. In the equivalent of blackface dialect, a servant cook, Emma Jane, ostensibly says, ‘‘I ain’t no fancy cake maker but here is a re-ceet dat ‘Ole Miss’ taught me,’’ then goes on to give the cake a name involving both a racial slur and an insult to her own intelligence.

Lewis is a sensitive, even-toned renderer of beauty. Her small stories in ‘‘The Taste of Country Cooking’’ gently urge the reader toward a life of mindfulness, a life of learning to see the details. Early in the book, she describes a spring morning: ‘‘A stream, filled from the melted snows of winter, would flow quietly by us, gurgling softly and gently pulling the leaf of a fern that hung lazily from the side of its bank. After moments of complete exhilaration we would return joyfully to the house for breakfast.’’ As Jones once said on a panel, ‘‘You felt all through her writing that she was giving thanks for something precious.’’.....If someone handed you a book about a settlement of freed slaves trying to live off the land, what would you expect? A story of struggle, at least. Privation and desperation, probably. But in Lewis’s telling, it is a story of peace and celebration, of receiving the gifts of the earth and hard work. The children sing at concerts in this story. The recipes are arranged by menus with formal titles as literally quotidian as ‘‘A Late Spring Dinner’’ or ‘‘A Cool-Evening Supper,’’ because the very acts of cooking and serving and eating food are worthy of occasion. It is a story of refinement, not in the fine-china sense but in the sense of being meticulous and careful about the way the people of Freetown raised and grew and trapped and foraged and prepared their food, because their lives were worth that. The pleasure of that was due them.......