This Lemon Pie Captures the Feeling of Home

For years, Yewande Komolafe didn’t feel a connection to the food she was cooking professionally — until she started making Edna Lewis’s recipes.

In the decade I spent working in restaurant kitchens, I rarely felt an emotional connection with the food I was cooking.

This feeling of distance from the food I encountered here in the United States began almost as soon as I arrived from Nigeria as a young college student. Very few dishes I ate growing up were reflected in the dining hall food served in my university, nor was there evidence of them in the recipes I fastidiously honed in culinary school after college, and in my first restaurant jobs in Baltimore. When I moved to Atlanta in 2006, Edna Lewis, the great American chef and cookbook author, had just passed. At the two restaurants where I worked, I started making Ms. Lewis’s recipes, and began seeing in my own two hands the food that transported me home.

Those of us who work in restaurant kitchens know the physical and emotional demands of the job. We also know the intense connections we make with certain dishes on the menu. Beyond making ends meet — beyond just surviving — what I most remember chasing were the moments when a dish would resonate with me. Most menu items needed to be executed as planned: precisely, and to the chef’s instruction. But Ms. Lewis’s recipes demanded working from feeling, faith and sensory cues, the way my mother and grandmother always had.