The Cooks : Real Food in Brooklyn : Cuisine: Landmark restaurant has a landmark chef who believes in real food with real taste.

There’s nothing like “real” American food--the satisfying, down-home stuff that people used to eat before radicchio replaced lettuce and Cheddar gave way to chevre. But the new incarnations of luncheonettes, diners and backwoods food stands seem to satisfy every sense except taste. The visual ironies are on target, the oldies soundtracks playing in the background feel right, yet you usually leave such a place wondering if it’s just false nostalgia, a cover-up for what is, in the end, bad cooking.

But at Gage & Tollner, a refurbished landmark restaurant in Brooklyn that features working gas lamps and waiters so attentive they seem transported from another century, the food is the real thing: Charleston she-crab soup, crab cakes “Freetown,” Smithfield ham with corn pudding and long-cooked beans, pan-fried quail with julienne ham and spoon bread, and barbecued spareribs with red rice.

The soup boasts a velvety essence of crab. The ribs have not only a Sunday-dinner elegance but a spicy and succulent taste as well. It is a challenge to select one dessert from a sumptuous list that includes bitter-chocolate souffle, double chocolate cake, lemon meringue tart and pies galore: Tyler, sweet potato, pecan and apple.

The woman behind the food at Gage & Tollner is a national treasure named Edna Lewis, a 74-year-old chef who is also the author of three cookbooks. As any reader of the cookbooks or visitor to Gage & Tollner will discover, Lewis’ work is about fullness and directness of flavor. This isn’t chic “retro” cooking. “I never tire of finding new ways to do things,” she said about the cuisine she has spent a lifetime exploring.

Peter Aschkenasy, one of the new owners of Gage & Tollner, thought he’d just renovate the spacious interior of the 110-year-old restaurant when he took over last year. But he soon realized that the Southern-style food that had been served for years also needed some updating. He sought out Lewis after having admired her work at Middleton Place in Charleston, S.C., and Fearrington House in Pittsboro, N.C.

Lewis is the quintessential “natural” in the kitchen, primarily because she was raised eating and cooking this food. Unlike most of today’s celebrity chefs, who learned their techniques at culinary schools, Lewis was taught her trade by relatives who’d been improving on the recipes for generations.

In an autobiographical passage from her first book, “The Taste of Country Cooking,” she shares a slice of American history.

“I grew up in Freetown, Va., a community of farming people. It wasn’t really a town. The name was adopted because the first residents had all been freed from chattel slavery and they wanted to be known as a town of Free People.” Lewis’ grandparents were some of the first settlers, and before she was freed, Lewis’ grandmother had been the slave of a landowner who put her to work laying bricks.

Lewis’ descriptions of the aromas of her childhood--of cakes and coffee and spices--are homey without being folksy: “Rich milk was used in the making of gravies, blanc mange, custards, creamed minced ham, buttermilk biscuits and batter breads as well as sour-milk pancakes. And we would gather wild honey from the hollow of oak trees to go with the hot biscuits, and pick wild strawberries to go with the heavy cream.”

Lewis, a slender and strikingly lovely woman, expresses herself best through her work. Ambition doesn’t seem to be what motivates her--she’s simply devoted to the food. “Once when I was cooking a dinner party for a client, she said she didn’t want to pay for butter,” she said, laughing. “So I bought my own.”

Her commitment to cooking and preparing aesthetically pleasing dishes is impressive. She works six days a week and on an average night serves 150 dinners. Her involvement in all phases of the food’s preparation is, Aschkenasy said, “complete.”

Lewis’ day begins at 7:30 a.m., shopping for ingredients at a farmers’ market on Union Square in Manhattan, a short drive from the restaurant. One rainy morning as she picked through green beans, tasted strawberries and ordered apples, her gentle, unhurried air made her seem as though she were shopping for a dinner with friends.

“How many would you like?” one seller of tomatoes asked. “A bushel,” she replied matter-of-factly. Stopping to buy fresh currant rolls from one of her favorite bread stalls, she pointed to a line of herbs in pots. “Look at them,” she said. “They’re so pretty you almost hate to buy them and disturb the arrangement.”

Lewis knows most of the farmers and makes a point of keeping track of whose produce most suits her needs. While the outdoor markets are open only from spring until late fall, she prefers to buy produce from these local organic growers. Even so, she bemoans the chemical damage that has threatened the fruits and vegetables she has cooked with since she was a child.

This is also a recurrent theme in her books. “The fur has been bred out of peaches today, as well as most of their flavor,” she writes in one typical passage.

Upstairs in the narrow baking kitchen at Gage & Tollner, Lewis turned to rolling out the pastry dough for other desserts. Whether shaping a mound of meringue topping, slicing apples or fitting pastry dough into fluted pans, Lewis seems to be learning something new from each task.

She makes it clear she’ll do whatever’s necessary to make a dish special, like searching from market to market for the best citron to put in her fruitcakes or devising innovative ways to prepare an age-old dish. Many lemon meringue pies, for instance, are cloyingly sweet, but Lewis’ are near-perfect, the result of her discovery that condensed milk, when used as a thickener, interferes with the lemon flavor. Without a thickener, however, the filling runs when a pie is sliced.

Lewis’ clever solution: She prepares individual tarts without condensed milk.

Lewis can also be a woman of strong opinions. She dislikes microwave ovens and refuses to use them at Gage & Tollner, so dishes are always made to order and dinner is a long, luxurious experience.

People who can’t make it to Brooklyn can still experience Lewis’ cuisine. Many of the recipes for the dishes she serves at the restaurant are in her cookbooks: “The Taste of Country Cooking,” “In Pursuit of Flavor” and “The Edna Lewis Cookbook.” The books offer pleasure even for those who don’t cook; they’re so evocative they reawaken your senses. “The Taste of Country Cooking” is remarkably personal, as much a set of autobiographical short stories as a collection of recipes.

The personal touch--as well as the sense of connection with history--that Lewis brings to her cooking results in food that makes you feel rooted. Lewis makes it clear that she doesn’t cook for show or to impress or to appeal to false nostalgia. “You can study at many places,” she explains, “but real cooking has to come from within.”

SHE-CRAB SOUP, CHARLESTON STYLE

1/2 cup butter

3 cups milk

1 quart whipping cream

1 pound crab meat, cleaned

2 tablespoons Sherry

2 teaspoons salt

Cayenne pepper

2 cups crab roe, optional

Finely chopped parsley

Melt butter in heavy saucepan over low heat. Slowly stir in milk, mixing well. Cook over low heat 15 minutes, stirring occasionally to keep milk from burning on bottom (do not allow milk to boil).

Pour cream into wide skillet. Cook briskly about 10 minutes, until cream is thick. Pour cream into butter and milk mixture, stirring well. Add crab meat, then pour soup into top of double boiler set over simmering water. Cook about 30 minutes for flavor to develop.

Season soup with Sherry, salt and generous dash cayenne. Add crab roe and check seasonings. Garnish with parsley. Makes 8 servings.

Note: If crab roe is unavailable, hard-cook 4 eggs and crumble 1/2 egg yolk in each bowl before ladling in soup.

PAN-FRIED QUAIL WITH COUNTRY HAM

1 cup green grapes

2 teaspoons salt

1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

1 teaspoon dried thyme leaves

8 quail, split and flattened

1/2 cup unsalted butter

1/2 cup Virginia ham, cut into 2x1/4-inch match sticks

Prepare 1/4 to 1/3 cup fresh green grape juice by crushing grapes with pestle, then pressing through sieve, vegetable mill or potato ricer to extract juice.

Combine salt, pepper and thyme, crushing thyme with fingertips. Sprinkle both sides of quail with seasonings.

Melt butter in large skillet over medium heat. When butter foams and just begins to brown, add quail, skin-side down. Sprinkle with ham, cover and cook 3 to 4 minutes, until skin is golden brown.

Turn birds and continue cooking, covered, until juices run clear, about 4 minutes longer. Remove pan from heat and let quail stand, covered, about 10 minutes. Arrange quail on platter and sprinkle ham from pan over top.

Pour fat from pan. Add grape juice and bring to boil. Cook 1 minute, scraping browned bits from bottom to deglaze pan. Pour over quail. Makes 4 servings.

Note: Water may be substituted for grape juice, if desired.

DAMSON PLUM PIE

3 eggs

3/4 cup light brown sugar, packed

1 teaspoon flour

1/8 teaspoon salt

3 tablespoons melted unsalted butter

1 teaspoon vanilla

2 3/4 cup Damson plum preserves

Crust

Whipped cream

Beat eggs in mixing bowl until light. Mix in sugar, flour and salt. Add butter and vanilla, mixing well. Stir in preserves.

Pour filling into Crust, making sure pieces of plum are well distributed. Bake at 350 degrees 45 minutes or until set. Serve at room temperature, garnished with ribbon of whipped cream. Makes 8 servings.

Crust

1 cup unbleached all-purpose flour

1/4 teaspoon salt

5 tablespoons chilled lard

1 1/2 to 2 tablespoons ice water

Mix flour, salt and lard in large mixing bowl, using pastry blender or fingertips. Blend until mixture resembles fine crumbs.

Add 1/2 ice water, then mix dough by hand. Pull moist dough together gently and add small amounts of water until dough holds together. Shape dough into ball and refrigerate 20 minutes.

Roll out dough on lightly floured surface. Press dough into 9-inch pie or tart pan, fluting edges. Cover and refrigerate or freeze until ready to use, at least 30 minutes.