A New Film Celebrates Edna Lewis, the ‘Mother of Soul Food’ Who Shaped How America Eats

When Deb Freeman started researching Virginia foodways about 10 years ago, Edna Lewis’ Taste of Country Cooking was the first thing that came up in her Google search. Freeman was just starting out as a food writer at the time, and when she read the book, she marveled at Lewis’ stories about life in an all-Black farming community in Freetown, Virginia in the early 20th century, and at the elegant beauty of her prose. “It was almost like the recipes were secondary,” Freeman recalls.

Freeman soon learned that The Taste of Country Cooking might be the most influential American cookbook of the past hundred years. And so she couldn’t stop thinking: Why hadn’t anybody told her about Edna Lewis before?

Freeman is the host and executive producer of Finding Edna Lewis, a new documentary about the chef’s life that premiered on PBS this week. The film is her attempt to address that oversight, bringing Lewis’ story to a larger mainstream audience — including food lovers here in the Bay Area. Toward that end, Freeman will host a screening and celebration of Lewis’ life — complete with snacks inspired by her recipes — at San Francisco’s Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) on March 2.

Lewis, of course, did become a tremendously famous chef by the time she died in 2006. She has been hailed as the “mother of soul food” and the “first lady of Southern cooking.” For many home cooks, her recipes for biscuits, dinner rolls and pan-fried chicken are canon. She even has her own postage stamp.

But in Freeman’s view, Miss Lewis — as everyone called her — is still strangely under-recognized. Many food enthusiasts only have a broad notion of her as a famous Southern chef, if they’ve even heard of her at all. “When I think about the culinary pantheon, unfortunately to most of America, Edna Lewis is not on that monument,” Freeman says.

And so, during a podcast interview two years ago, Freeman wondered aloud, “Where is the documentary on Edna Lewis’ life? Where is the sort of HBO prestige series that Julia Child has?” As it turns out, documentary filmmakers Hannah Ayers and Lance Warren heard the interview and reached out to Freeman to collaborate on exactly that — what eventually became Finding Edna Lewis, which aired last year as a six-part web series through Virginia Public Media. Now, Freeman and her team have turned the series into a more polished hour-long documentary that includes breathtaking, newly digitized recordings of Lewis’ voice.

In the documentary, Freeman retraces the steps of Lewis’ journey, first traveling to Freetown to explore her upbringing in this tiny rural community that was established by freed enslaved people. “It was like one big family,” we hear Lewis say. “I always felt loved and unafraid because everybody was your parent. Everybody loved you. I’ve never lived in a community like that since.”

From there, Freeman heads to New York, where a 16-year-old Lewis moved during the Great Migration and made a name for herself, first as a seamstress and then as the chef at Café Nicholson, on the East Side of Manhattan, which became a gathering place for literary figures like Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal and Truman Capote (who’d duck his head in the kitchen and ask Lewis to make him some fried chicken). She travels to South Carolina, where Lewis spent three years working as the chef-in-residence at a former plantation, and then back up to Brooklyn, where she became the executive chef at a grand old chop house called Gage & Tollner.

In retracing each stage of the chef’s life, Freeman interviews chefs, writers and food historians who’ve drawn inspiration from Lewis’ life and her approach to cooking. According to Freeman, one of the biggest points she wanted to highlight was how Lewis brought Black Southern foodways — and Virginia’s foodways, in particular — to national prominence, and how that really shaped the way the whole country eats.

“When you think of Southern food, you think of the greatest hits. You think of fried chicken and mac and cheese — these really heavy, decadent staples,” Freeman says. “But I think that [Lewis’] cookbook highlighted that seasonality is really what drives Southern cooking, and a lot of it is vegetable-based.”

Here in the Bay Area, especially, it’s practically seen as gospel truth that Alice Waters and Chez Panisse were the ones who first popularized what we now know as farm-to-table dining in the 1970s. But Finding Edna Lewis convincingly argues that Lewis was preaching this simple, seasonal approach to cooking up and down the East Coast several decades earlier.

“I’ve seen an interview where Alice Waters gives Edna Lewis credit, but you don’t hear about that,” Freeman says. “Farm-to-table is a huge part of our vernacular at this point, and so I do think you’ve got to give credit where credit is due.”

Beyond the recipes themselves, Freeman also believes there’s power in examining — and celebrating — Lewis’ remarkable life, which also included stints as a typist for the Communist Party and as a pheasant farmer. And even though she endured plenty of hardship living through Jim Crow, Lewis also “lived a beautiful, idyllic life,” Virginia chef Leah Branch says in the documentary. “For Black people, it doesn’t have to be all rising up from the ashes.”

Or, as culinary historian Leni Sorensen says toward the end of the film, about Lewis’ career in food, “It didn’t save the planet. It didn’t stop segregation. It didn’t stop lynching. [Lewis isn’t] saying any of that. She’s saying, ‘In this little place, for this little time, we had this. And it was beautiful.’”

For those in the Bay Area who want to learn more about Lewis’ beautiful, history-making life, Freeman will join MoAD chef-in-residence Jocelyn Jackson and the author and food activist Bryant Terry for an afternoon screening and discussion of Finding Edna Lewis on March 2. Of course, no Edna Lewis event would be complete without a spread of delicious food — in this case supplied by Fernay McPherson of Minnie Bell’s.

MoAD’s (685 Mission St., San Francisco) Finding Edna Lewis event is on Sunday, March 2, from 1–4 p.m. — tickets are $5 plus museum admission. The full documentary is available to stream now on PBS.