Julia Child needs no introduction to foodies and food historians. The co-author of Mastering the Art of French Cooking created an enduring mythology as the star of her own PBS show, The French Chef. She waved a magic whisk and warbled on camera as the American fairy godmother of elevated home cooking. Since Child’s death in 2004, her story has been told and retold with some minor variations in the movie Julie and Julia, with Meryl Streep; in the TV series Julia, with Sarah Lancashire; and in Julia, a 2021 documentary by Julie Cohen and Betsy West.
In the new PBS documentary, Finding Edna Lewis, food writer and podcaster Deb Freeman introduces Edna Lewis (1916–2006), a lesser known but beloved Black chef, to contemporary audiences. As the host and executive producer, Freeman doesn’t frame the doc as a comprehensive biography. She seeks out cookbook authors and chefs who pay homage to Lewis’ Southern recipes, her culinary influence on their lives and American cookery in general.
The food imagery is shot with the same level of cinematographic intensity as the Chef’s Table series. We are living through a golden age of food TV. Raw ingredients and their subsequent transformation into finished fine dining plates all receive tantalizing close-ups. As Freeman roams the country, traveling from Virginia to Georgia and on to South Carolina, the camera pauses and slows down to take in vivid red tomatoes, pan-roasted quail browning with grapes and ham, and yellow cake soaking up the dark juices of a blackberry compote. Every dish whets the appetite.
The details of Lewis’ personal life appear in outline form before receding into the background. Raised in Freetown, Virginia, she migrated to New York City where she opened Café Nicholson in 1949. Freeman’s narration breezes through her childhood years. We learn that Lewis was a Communist, but not why she became one. There’s no roundup of how many cookbooks she wrote, no mention of a spouse nor any specific information about her final years. Her niece only has kind things to say about her beloved aunt.
Freeman includes a couple of archival audio clips featuring a soft-spoken Lewis, and one on-camera interview with her. In those brief snippets, she registers as an introvert. Unlike Child’s onscreen mix of ebullience and daffiness, Lewis disguises her private self from the camera’s intrusive eye. When her personality does come alive, it’s through a series of portraits made by John T. Hill, who photographed her late in life as a regal queen in African garments and jewelry.
In the course of her decades-long career, Lewis succeeded in her chosen métier despite America’s history of institutional racism. But, as chef Leah Branch notes, “She was a person who had a beautiful, idyllic life and enjoyed it and shared it with other people. Black people can also have those stories, too. It doesn’t all have to be rising up from the ashes.” Finding Edna Lewis suggests that racism may not have hampered the chef’s career, but that it might have something to do with the decline of her posthumous reputation.
To counteract her subject’s slow fade, Freeman assembles a chorus to testify on Lewis’ behalf. Regionally diverse chefs including Branch, Mashama Bailey, Amethyst Ganaway and Adrienne Cheatham are aware of the path Lewis helped to pave for, in particular, women of color. When Branch makes Lewis’ “she crab stew,” or Bailey adapts the first recipe from Lewis’ The Taste of Country Cooking, the spirit of Edna Lewis emanates from their kitchens.
At the end of the doc, Freeman films a ceremony in Virginia commemorating Lewis’ legacy on what would have been her 108th birthday. There’s a close-up of a historic highway marker in her honor, but no mention of a Hollywood biopic in the wings. Finding Edna Lewis might be the catalyst to launch one, the first entry in a canon that could start to establish Lewis’ mythology in the public’s shared imagination.
‘Finding Edna Lewis’ airs on KQED Channel 9 Saturday, March 8, at 6pm and is available to stream online at: pbs.org/show/finding-edna-lewis.
