Lewis’s food memoir includes happy memory of a Revival Sunday Dinner, aka “Second Sunday,” in her hometown of Freetown, Virginia, in the 1930s. Cooking was done by women, while the men attended church but returned home to pack the family and the food so that it would arrive at the church “piping hot.” After grace, the eating began, and the children were the last to be served.
Lewis was in her teens, and she remembers well enough that “the long tables were laden with the baked ham, the half-dozen or more chickens she had fried, a large baking pan of her light, delicate corn pudding, a casserole of sweet potatoes, fresh green beans flavored with crisp bits of pork, and biscuits that had been baked at the last minute and were still warm. The main dishes were surrounded by smaller dishes of pickled watermelon rind, beets and cucumbers, and spiced peaches. The dozen or so apple and sweet potato pies she had made were stacked in tiers of three, and the caramel and jelly layer cakes placed next to them. Plates, forks, and white damask napkins and gallon jars of lemonade and iced tea were the last things to be unpacked.
All along the sixty-foot length of tables, neighbors were busy in the same way. There were roasts and casseroles, coleslaw and potato salads, lemon meringue, custard, and Tyler pies, chocolate and coconut layer, lemon cream, and pound cakes.”
It was, in retrospect, a gourmand feast.
Featured Image: Alta Ann Parkins. Revival Sunday Dinner (1984) from Claudia Roden’s Everything Tastes Better Outdoors (New York, 1984).
See Edna Lewis’ A Taste of Country Cooking (New York: Random House, 1976)