George Tillman Jr.'s Celebration of the Sunday Supper
By Carol SugarmanWashington Post Staff Writer
September 24, 1997;
Remember Sunday dinners? You know, those extended family feasts where everyone ate together, laughed together and fought like mad? You know, those afternoon suppers in the days before "family meal" meant sharing a bucket of chicken in the car?
George Tillman Jr. doesn't want anybody to forget them. He wants to resurrect them. Celebrate them. Maybe even require them.
The writer and director of the new movie "Soul Food," Tillman vividly remembers the weekly gatherings at his grandmother's home in Milwaukee. Fried chicken. Potato salad. Candied yams. Macaroni and cheese. Egg pie. As a young boy, the food and the communion apparently made a big impression.
So it's no wonder that the film, which opens Friday in area theaters, treats Sunday dinner as "the net which helps keep everyone together," as the 28-year-old Tillman puts it. "Food for me in the film is a symbol of love."
And group meals are symbolic for all African Americans, adds Tillman, since "several hundred years ago, the only thing that slave families had was cooking and their family meals. There they were able to talk about their souls . . . "
In the movie, Mother Joe, the matriarchal grandma patterned after Tillman's own, presides over the Sunday cooking with the help of her three grown and married daughters. Any woman who has ever cooked with a female family member will relate to these kitchen klatches, which are as much about bonding as they are about baking corn bread.
The camera pans in on the preparations -- ham being studded with cloves, pie crust being pinched, peaches being set in a cobbler pan, fried fish sizzling in hot oil. This is comfort food at its most sensual. You can practically taste it, just as you feel the warmth between Mother Joe and her grandson Ahmad.
Not surprisingly, the Joseph family falls apart like salmon croquettes without binder when Mother Joe is hospitalized and the 40-year dinner tradition is abandoned. The bulk of the movie, set in downtown Chicago, details those tribulations.
But it is the dinner-table scenes that are the most convincing, as much for the sibling bickering as the food. And therein lies a charming take.
The food for the movie was prepared by Freddie Petross, who is described in the publicity materials as a "food stylist."
But reached at her home in northwest Chicago, the 62-year-old Petross seems more like a great church cook than some high-falutin' specialist. Which is perfect -- and the reason she aced out a couple of experts that had been considered for the job.
"I didn't want a professional food stylist to make something I didn't remember as a kid," says Tillman.
In fact, the way Petross was hired is homey in itself. Her 39-year-old son is an old friend of the movie's on-set dresser, and she "auditioned" by cooking a couple of dinners for Tillman and the film crew..
Then Tillman ate dinner at Petross's home, which she describes as "the only house left on the block" after drugs and crime turned it into an "area in a lot of transition." She says Tillman asked her to prepare things "the old way," including chopping everything by hand, and he watched her do it.
There were two reasons for his request. As a boy, Tillman says he wasn't allowed in the kitchen while his grandmother, aunts and mother were cooking Sunday dinner. So he never learned how to cook. But when it came to filming the kitchen scenes in the movie, he had to know the cooking steps in order to "break down the shots."
The other reason is that even though Tillman's grandmother cooked in the age of modern conveniences, she didn't use any. It was crucial to him that the food in the film have that homemade look.
After a two-hour feast at Petross's house that included potato salad, sweet potato pie and egg pie, Tillman was convinced. "I ate among her family," he says. "It was great. She reminded me of my grandmother so much."
And that's how cooking fried chicken, fried fish and pies, over and over and over again, became Petross's life for about two months.
"I made dumplings all day one day," she says. Some of the food, like the macaroni and cheese, she would prepare at home then reheat in a kitchen adjacent to the set. In more perishable cases, such as fried fish, she would prepare it on the stove right next to the set. In all cases, Petross always had to cook much more food than a meal required since scenes were frequently reshot and the food had to be constantly replenished to keep it looking freshly prepared.
At the beginning of each scene, Polaroid pictures would be taken of each place setting to keep track of the position of the food on the plate, Petross recalls. "Then anytime they started the scene over, the food had to be exactly what it was like the first time on that plate."
Of course, that meant the cast had to eat a lot. "They said they were gaining weight," says Petross. And no wonder. In some cases, "we had the problem of them eating up the food so we didn't have enough to last for the scene," she adds with a laugh.
It's not clear whether Tillman was one of those hungry fans, but he says that after filming a scene, "it was great to grab a couple pieces of chicken or something like that."
In the case of one scene, much of the food went to waste. That was the food in the opening scene of the movie, the wedding reception of youngest sister, Bird, played by Nia Long. Shooting for the scene began at 6 a.m., and the food sat out under hot lights "all day long and into the night," Petross recalls. "A lot of that food had to be thrown away."
Not accustomed to kitchen calamities, Petross had to prepare burnt fried chicken for a scene in which Bird, the clumsy cook, unsuccessfully tries to resurrect Sunday dinner. She couldn't do it.
"I found it hard to actually burn it while cooking it," she remembers, figuring that there had to "be a better way to do this." As she thought about it, it hit her: "Go ahead and cook the chicken, then put it under the broiler and burn it. It was a real simple process."
Cooking large family suppers has been Petross's life just as it was Mother Joe's. A mother of five grown children, including a set of twins, Petross also worked as a church clerk for 26 years. "And a lot of times, it caused me to be at the church office in the evening," she says.
But even if the children had to start preparing the food themselves, everyone ate together, to catch up on the day's events. "It was important," says Petross, "that we sat down as a family."
As for Tillman's Sunday dinners, his grandmother passed away, and he no longer lives in Milwaukee.
The family still gets together for holidays, and periodically for Sunday dinner, but not as often as Tillman would like.
"Hopefully," he says, "this movie will change that."
