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The Southern Barbarians' Cookbook is a culinary text that speaks to important changes in Japan's foodways in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Written in the seventeenth century, if not earlier, the book is a collection of Portuguese and Spanish recipes, making it unique among premodern culinary writings in Japan. Accordingly, it offers insight into historical developments outside of cooking and is the missing link in the transition from culinary texts to culinary books. The Barbarians' Cookbook also reveals broader developments in foodways in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. It describes the introduction of new food ingredients, cooking techniques, and dishes that would reshape the Japanese cuisine. The book may not have been widely circulated until modern times, but it offers a chance to examine the links and the gaps between the elite medieval culinary world and the developing popular trends in the Edo period in terms of ingredients (food) and thinking about food (fantasy).

Sashimi, tempura, and sushi are foods associated with Japanese cuisine found in restaurants worldwide today, and this book has touched on their history. However, there is more to the history of Japanese cuisine than the stories of just a few representative dishes or even a few esoteric ones such as crane soup. The Southern Barbarians' Cookbook, which probably dates to the early 1600s, and which contains mostly Iberian recipes, lacks a recipe for tempura but includes one for tenpurari, a type of fried chicken. Simmering and grilling were methods of cooking familiar to medieval chefs called hōchōnin, who worked for the military and imperial elite, and these methods remain central to preparing Japanese food. Cookbooks, like plays and novels, present ideals, not direct reflections of reality. What defines cuisine is not necessarily a particular dish or style of cooking, although these are important; rather, a cuisine, according to the approach used in this book, is a way to conceptualize food. Cuisine is an association of food with the imaginary, or a fantasy with food.

The rhetoric of commercial cookbooks mirrors the “death of home cooking narrative” by promising to provide the fulfilment that Americans are seeking. Creating an idealized picture of cooking at home, commercial cookbooks sell “comfort cooking” in which the kitchen becomes an oasis that allows the reader to shut out all of the stress of modern life and reconnect with family, community, and food. The first step in creating a healthy meal, comfortable home, and happy family is, of course, buy the cookbook.

Critically acclaimed author Susan Rebecca White fondly recalls the comforts of cooking from The Edna Lewis Cookbook during a difficult period in her life. Lewis’s prose smoothed White’s path, leading her away from her southern roots and eventually back home to Georgia.

Caroline Randall Williams—culinary author, young adult novelist, and poet—writes of the profound influence that Lewis has had on her life. She recalls listening to her mother’s stories of Lewis in childhood, cooking from The Edna Lewis Cookbook as an undergrad, and being inspired by Lewis’s works to write her very own cookbook.