by Beth Goulart

I like to read cookbooks before bed. These days, The Taste of Country Cooking by the late guru of southern cooking, Edna Lewis, graces my bedside table – and I’m loving every sentence.

Lewis came of age during the Great Depression, growing up in a small agrarian community founded by freed slaves in Virginia. Her childhood, as she recalls it, was simple but joy-filled. Joy fills the pages of her book in even the most unexpected places, like this one, in the introduction to her chapter called "Spring":

Another pleasure was following the plough. I loved walking barefoot behind my father in the newly ploughed furrow, carefully putting one foot down before the other and pressing it into the warm, ploughed earth, so comforting to the soles of my feet.

It's the kind of simple joy that's taking on even more romantic hues as our own economic fortunes darken. So I decided to add a little Miz Lewis to my days. I made salad dressing according to her instruction at lunchtime today, and I can't wait to make her Special Butter Cookies, which she deems "the most delicious type of sugar cookie."

But my favorite visual reminder of Lewis is the collection of eggshells I've filled with soil and lined up on the windowsill above my kitchen sink. (Conveniently, a tea-candle holder is just the right size to stabilize them.) In each one, I have planted a single dill seed. It's what Lewis's mother did each spring - in her case, with mint - to start the seeds on a windowsill so that small plants would be ready as soon as the soil warmed enough to accept them. I chose dill because it's a favorite of the black swallowtail butterflies that frequent our neighborhood. It's a simple joy I feel very fortunate to embrace.
 

Image from the author's collection.

Beth Goulart is an Austin-based freelance journalist.