Love in the Kitchen - American Story with Bob Dotson

6/26/2003, Atlanta, GA - A caring heart is as good a measure as any, when you try to evaluate success. World-class Chef Scott Peacock once told me, "It's always the most important ingredient.”

He was lifting a cake out of the oven. Turned and dropped it on the kitchen table next to an elderly woman.

"Tell me if it's ready?"

Edna Lewis didn’t poke it or taste it. She cocked her head and lowered her ear to the dish.

“It’s fading away,” it’s fading away

There was a reason she was in the cookbook hall of fame. She cooked
by ear.

"Does that mean it's done?" asked Scott.

"I think so."

Miss Lewis learned about food and flavor in her childhood garden at the end of a small Virginia crossroads settled by slaves, one of them, her grandfather. She married briefly, no children, traveled extensively and settled in New York City to open a restaurant. Before she retired in 1992, Edna Lewis had worked in some of New York's finest restaurants and received cooking's highest honors. Not bad for a chef who started in 1949 with no formal training.

The summer she opened her first restaurant, Tennessee Williams wrote a little play called "A Streetcar Named Desire." Marlon Brando wanted a part. They met to discuss it over their favorite dessert, a dish Edna called, "Just pie." That pie helped to form the most important friendship of Lewis' life. She was seventy-four when Scott Peacock, a chef at the Georgia's governor's mansion, was asked to assist her at a fund-raiser. He was just twenty-seven when she came to Atlanta that day, dragging a huge cardboard box by a rope. It was filled with one hundred pounds of frozen pie dough, hand carried all the way from New York City. Edna was very particular about her pie. Friends, too. She and Scott Peacock, although separated in age by half a century and living a thousand miles apart, fell for each other.

"I didn't see it happening myself," Scott said. "I'm sure neither of us did. We're both very shy, very reserved and private people, loners, really."

Peacock grew up in Alabama, learning by heart what food is like when it's home grown and prepared simply. That helped him become a celebrated Atlanta chef. It also attracted Edna Lewis, the queen of Southern cooking.

"No one has ever understood me the way she does," Scott insisted. So what followed seemed quite natural. Lewis lost her home in New York City when her apartment was converted to a condominium. Peacock proposed she move in with him.

"Without realizing it, really, or thinking about it, we became a family," Scott said, "and I formed a life with her and I love her."

But that love posed a big challenge. Lewis became increasingly forgetful, and in her eighties needed constant attention. Scott Peacock became her caregiver because, "It would be impossible for me to say you're an inconvenience now."

You won't find that recipe for friendship in their cookbooks. This is how Scott explained it.
"You don't count the grains of salt that you pick up to put on something. Something just tells you, it feels right. This is what you do."

Not just in the kitchen, but also in life. Scott Peacock looked after Edna Lewis until the day she died at eighty-nine. That was his recipe for love.

Bob Dotson is the author of four books, including the New York Times best-selling “American Story: A Lifetime Search for Ordinary People Doing Extraordinary Things.” (Penguin/Random House)

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/bo...

The latest edition of his classic, “Make It Memorable: Writing and Packaging Visual News with Style” became Amazon’s best-selling journalism book. It is being studied on 26 campuses and in newsrooms around the world. (Roman & Littlefield.)

https://www.amazon.com/Make-Memorable...