Educational Media Reviews Online

Edna Lewis in a noted cook and writer specializing in southern cookery and an interest in making it exciting to the masses. Lewis has influenced many chefs and touched restaurant patrons with her traditional cooking and her gentle personality. Fried Chicken and Sweet Potato Pie starts out looking at Lewis's life and how her love of cooking parallels the importance of cooking in African American Society. The mix of historical images, interviews with scholars in food and African American history, and images of Lewis cooking while an actress reads her words is quite wonderful.

The next part of the film focuses on Lewis's life in New York. She joined and worked for the Communist Party as a typist. While there she met a number of people including two men who started the noted restaurant Cafe Nicholson. Lewis had charmed many with her cooking and the owners of the Cafe asked her to serve as the restaurant's chef. She received rave reviews and the restaurant became the place to see people such as Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams and other notables wanting Lewis's simple southern cooking. After leaving the restaurant, Lewis continued cooking and eventually started writing cook books - books that brought southern cooking from down home to formal dinners.

Through her writing, Lewis meets Scott Peacock, an up and coming chef. They collaborate on the book The Gift of Southern Cooking and become friends. In fact as Lewis continues to age she moves in with Peacock and he becomes her caregiver. In the final section of the film, Peacock deals with watching Lewis deteriorate and come to terms with losing someone that he truly cares about.

This DVD appears to be a preview for a much longer work. It is quite disjointed hopping around Lewis's career, the importance of southern cooking or the relationship between Lewis and Peacock, without truly linking any of them or showing how one is important to another. The film appears to start off as an oral history but Lewis is never interviewed in person. The film would have been much more interesting if we could have heard from Lewis herself and not just from her writings. More biographical information about Lewis between the time that she left Cafe Nicholson and she met Scott Peacock would also be welcome. All the viewer knows is that she wrote books and catered. It would have been nice to hear about her other work to preserve the history of southern cooking, her experiences in other restaurants, about her awards and how she touched others with her cooking. In addition the film would have been much more effective if it had focused on one area, for example, the relationship between Peacock and Lewis - how they worked together, how they cooked together and how they lived together. It is interesting to hear Peacock talk about his relationship with Lewis but one is not sure why they moved in together and what they gain from the experience. The images used throughout are lovely but it is frustrating to watch a pretty film that meanders with no focal point or conclusion. Sections of the film could be used to start discussions on southern cookery or learning how to care with an aging friend or relative. One hopes that if this is a preview, the full length film is more organized and focused.

Awards:

• Best Documentary at the Decatur Film Festival