Edna Lewis, who died yesterday at 89, was the doyenne of southern cooking and the author of four cookbooks that featured a halcyon vision of the cookery of her youth in rural Freetown,Va.

Her breakthrough book was “The Taste of Country Cooking” (1976), which presented stories and menus organized by season, from pan-fried shad and rhubarb pie in the spring and fried chicken, corn pudding, and persimmon beer in the summer, to cold roast pheasants in fall, and oyster stew and hickory nut cookies in winter. Emancipation Day in Freetown, which was founded by freed slaves, including her grandparents, was celebrated with guinea fowl, steamed wild rice, and plum tart.

The food writer M.F.K. Fisher greeted its publication thus: “It is in the best sense American with an innate dignity and freedom from prejudice and hatred. It is reassuring to be told again that although we may have lost some of all this simplicity, it exists here and may be attainable again.”

Yet the woman whose cookery seemed drenched in nostalgia had anything but a stereotypical southern existence. Lewis moved to New York City in the 1940s and joined the Communist Party, founded a storied restaurant, and worked for several years as a teaching assistant in the African Hall at the American Museum of Natural History. Lewis was only briefly married and was childless, and she spent her final years living in an Atlanta apartment with Scott Peacock, who was cook to two governors of Georgia; her coauthor on a cookbook; and a gay, white southerner half a century her junior.

Perhaps the most distinctive motif of Lewis’s cookbooks was her insistence on fresh ingredients; in this sense she echoed Alice Waters, but for southern cuisine. It was a concern that dated from her earliest years, growing up in a community so self-sufficient that the only things purchased were staples like kerosene, sugar, and salt. “My mother died when I was 18. Up until then, I never saw a tin can in my house,” she told the Washington Post in 1990.

The family raised hogs and chickens, and her father even reaped his own wheat. An itinerate hog butcher visited each summer. “Ham held the same rating as the basic black dress,” Lewis wrote. “If you had a ham in the meat house, any situation could be faced.” The books included intriguing folk practices, like planting root vegetables in the dark of night.

Despite the fond memories, Lewis left her home behind in the 1940s and found her way to New York City, where she participated in demonstrations and volunteered for the Daily Worker. She found work as a seamstress for Dorcas Avedon, wife of the famous photographer, sewing knockoffs of Dior designs, and as a window dresser at Bonwit Teller.

Lewis once told Craig Claiborne that in Freetown, “Women didn’t learn” how to cook – you were born knowing how.” She got her start as a restaurant cook starting in 1948 as a proprietor of Cafe Nicholson, a Midtown restaurant that served just one or two entrees each evening, depending on what was available in the market, and whose enthusiastic clientele included luminaries like Greta Garbo and Howard Hughes, but also southerners like Tennessee Williams and William Faulkner. Truman Capote, she told the Post, “was always badgering me about biscuits.”

Cafe Nicholson was upscale and quirky in the extreme in its decor, which its other founder, Johnny Nicholson, described as “fin de siecle Caribbean of Cuba style.” It was most famous for its chocolate souffle. (The recipe appears in her 1988 cookbook “In Pursuit of Flavor.”)

Lewis left Cafe Nicholson in the mid-1950s, and led an eventful and peripatetic existence, returning home to Virginia, then back to New York, working as a caterer and in other food industry jobs. At one point, she ran a pheasant farm in New Jersey.

In 1969, while bedridden after breaking a leg, Lewis began writing down the recipes of her youth. The result was “The Edna Lewis Cookbook” (1972), which the Los Angeles Times wrote was “a book for people who like to cook, filled with fundamental recipes using basic ingredients, but with flair.”

Lewis then took a series of executive chef positions at high-end regional restaurants, including the Fearrington House in North Carolina, and Middleton Place, in South Carolina. “The Taste of Country Cooking” made her a household name. Craig Claiborne called it, “the most entertaining regional cookbook in America.”

She became the last executive chef at Brooklyn’s Gage and Tollner before that storied institution shut its doors for good, in 1993.

Nicholson retired to Freetown then. “I relaxed and bought two cows that I milked and fed early every morning,” she told American Visions magazine in 1997. “I didn’t mind doing it – except when it snows.”

Ever restless, she later moved to Atlanta, where she consulted on menus at many restaurants, and also taught cooking classes. In 1999, she moved in with Mr. Peacock, who cared for her during several years of declining health. Her last years were marred by a dispute between her family, who wanted to care for her in Freetown, and Mr. Peacock, who had power of attorney and insisted she wanted to live with him.

Her final book was “The Gift of Southern Cooking: Recipes and Revelations From Two Great Southern Cooks” (2003) written with Mr. Peacock.

A revered figure in gastronomy, Lewis received numerous industry awards, including a cookbook hall of fame award from the James Beard foundation in 2003. In 1999, she was named Grande Dame of Les Dames d’Escoffier International.

In a time when many southerners had a chip on their shoulder about their culture in general and their cookery in specific, she bestowed “pride of place for them,” the director of the Southern Foodways Alliance at University of Mississippi, John Edge, said in an interview. “She reintroduced southerners to something they knew quite well – great food comes from locally available ingredients.”

Those ingredients inevitably included things most modern cooks look askance at – pig’s ears, large quantities of butter, and home-rendered lard.

“Some think the ingredients are too heavy or out of date,” she told American Visions. “But I don’t think we should throw away our culture because of some fad or new ideas.”

Edna Lewis

Born April 13, 1916, in Freetown, Va.; died February 13 at her home in Decatur, Ga.