Transition

Edna Lewis, 89 "Breakfast was about the best part of the day," Edna Lewis wrote in "The Taste of Country Cooking," the 1976 memoir that rescued a missing part of our heritage and made her a superstar of Southern home cooking. "There were crisp fried white potatoes, fried onions, batter bread, any food left over from supper, blackberry jelly..." Lewis, the granddaughter of a freed Virginia slave, loved both the sweet smell of a summer evening and the heady vapors of New York night life. Lewis's editor, Knopf's legendary Judith Jones, promises "the secret of making 'flannel soft' biscuits" in the 30th edition of "Taste" due in August. Dorothy Kalins