Lewis's cookbook was selected by the Book-of-the-Month Club, cementing its status as an influential text in American kitchens.
In October 1978, the Book-of-the-Month Club selected The Taste of Country Cooking for its subscribers, a significant mark of mainstream literary and cultural recognition for a cookbook rooted in Black rural Southern traditions. The Book-of-the-Month Club was, at the time, one of the most influential arbiters of American middlebrow literary taste, and its selections reached hundreds of thousands of households nationwide.
This distinction helped push Edna Lewis's work beyond the culinary world and into broader American literary culture, positioning her alongside celebrated authors of narrative nonfiction. It validated her approach of blending memoir, agricultural history, and recipe writing as a legitimate and important literary form.
The selection significantly expanded the book's readership and durability, helping ensure that Lewis's descriptions of seasonal Southern Black foodways would reach and influence readers, food writers, and future chefs for generations. It remains one of the clearest institutional markers of the book's crossover success and enduring literary value, reinforcing Lewis's legacy as both a culinary and literary pioneer.