Free Best Food Writing 2014 by Holly Hughes Page B

Lewis’stenure at Café Nicholson. Reading contemporary reviews of the restaurant, I learned that Lewis rose to fame there while serving simple and elegant dishes like roast chicken, which Clementine Paddleford, the reigning national critic of the day, described as “brown as a chestnut, fresh from the burr.” She also favored Lewis’s chocolate soufflé, which was “light as a dandelion seed in a wind.” In the New York Times archives, I discovered that the 1948 partnership offer from Nicholson was timely for Lewis, who grew up on a farm near Freetown, Virginia, but had no other demonstrable experience in the industry. At the time they began working together, Nicholson told a reporter, “Edna was about to take a job as a domestic.”
    Café Nicholson employed a conceit that presaged the reigning white-tablecloth aesthetic of today. “We’ll serve only one thing a day,” Nicholson said to Lewis, as they schemed their first menus. “Buy the best quality and I don’t see how we can go wrong.” Long before farm-to-table was a marketing concept, Lewis was challenging chefs to learn “from those who worked hard, loved the land, and relished the fruits of their labors.” Her approach, like her cooking, was straightforward. In a 1989 interview, she told the New York Times, “As a child in Virginia, I thought all food tasted delicious. After growing up, I didn’t think food tasted the same, so it has been my lifelong effort to try and recapture those good flavors of the past.”
    The archives at NYU, where Nicholson deposited his papers, yielded a cache of Bissinger photographs that made clear the afternoon he captured in that iconic image was not singular. More important, I discovered that I was not the only one who saw metaphorical possibilities in that 1949 black and white. In October 2007, Smithsonian magazine published Gore Vidal’s gauzy recollection of that moment at table on Johnny Nicholson’s patio. “For me, Karl Bissinger’s picture is literally historic, so evocative of a golden moment,” he wrote, with the mixture of brio, ego, and privilege that was his signature. “I don’t know what effect the picture has on those who now look at it, but I think it perfectly evokes an optimistic time in our history that we are not apt to see again soon.”
    With that dispatch, Vidal, who wrote the introduction to The Luminous Years: Portraits at Mid-Century, a collection of Bissinger’s photographs, was finished. But Smithsonian wasn’t. Two months after Vidal’s recollection ran, the magazine published a letter to the editorby Edward Weintraut of Macon, Georgia. “I am troubled that his text does not make the slightest reference to the black waitress,” wrote Weintraut, a professor at Mercer University. “I found myself wondering whether she shared Vidal’s view about this time being so optimistic, whether she would welcome a revival of the society and culture in which this scene is embedded, whether she enjoyed a similar golden moment as the author and his friends did during lunches at Café Nicholson.”
    Over the years, I’ve taken a number of swipes at the “good food” movement. Because I think too many of its members are surfing trends and indulging passions that will prove dalliances, instead of forging a true path toward a better-fed future, I’ve referred to overzealous twenty-somethings trying to effect change in our broken food system as agriposeurs. After hearing Jayaraman speak, and after tracing the reception of the Bissinger photo, I recognize that my real complaint is that too much of the attention now focused on food skews toward natural resources instead of human resources—and that imbalance has proved more egregious when it comes to people of color.
    Recent victories, won by groups like the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, which fights for the rights of