You Love Food
Jolene Handy of Time Travel Kitchen on legendary cookbook editor Judith Jones
Hi friends,
Hope you’re doing well. Before I introduce this week’s guest writer (I took a week off to go to Disney World!), I want to invite you all to join me and my friend Valorie Castellanos Clark for an online discussion about her new book, Unruly Figures: Twenty Tales of Rebels, Rulebreakers, and Revolutionaries You've (Probably) Never Heard of, based on her newsletter of the same name.
We’ll be chatting on Saturday, March 23 from 1-2 EST. You can register here and attendees will have the chance to win a signed copy of Val’s book.
This week’s post comes from my pal Jolene Handy of the fabulous Time Travel Kitchen newsletter. It’s about Judith Jones, a cookbook editor who worked with everyone from Julia Child to Marcella Hazan, and includes a number of delectable sounding cookbooks plus some great history.
— Elizabeth
Judith Jones loved food.
Her memoir, The Tenth Muse: My Life in Food, takes its title from the 18th century gourmand, Brillat-Savarin, who thought the mythological creature Gasterea was the tenth muse, presiding over the delights of food and eating.
Jones wrote several other cookbooks in collaboration with her beloved husband, Evan. After his death, she lost her joy for the table for a time, but came to the realization that a way to honor their years of enjoyment together was to continue to make wonderful meals and to set a pretty table, just for herself. The Pleasures of Cooking for One is a touching book with delicious recipes.
The Beginning
Judith Jones started her career in publishing by retrieving a French copy of The Diary of Anne Frank from a slush pile in her Paris office at Doubleday. It was the photo of the young girl on the cover that moved her.
She championed the Diary for U.S. publication in 1952 under the title Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl and this is what Jones is perhaps most remembered for.
It was the very beginning of a life in publishing that spanned genres and decades and shaped tastes over the second half of the 20th Century and into the 21st.
As the legendary editor at Knopf for over 50 years, Jones edited the works of Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Langston Hughes, Anne Tyler, John Updike and more.
But Jones, a lover of food and cooking, was also excited by the work of the unlikely trio of Julia Child, Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle who were looking for a publisher for their breakthrough French cookbook for American audiences, Mastering the Art of French Cooking.
Child and Jones became lifelong friends and the book changed the way Americans thought about food and cooking. It was 1961, Jackie Kennedy was First Lady, a French Chef headed The White House kitchen and all things French were en vogue.
After Mastering
With the success of Mastering, Judith Jones wanted to highlight other cuisines and traditions. She went on to seek out culinary talent and subsequently edited some of the most important, acclaimed and popular cookbooks ever published.
Madhur Jaffrey (An Invitation to Indian Cooking, 1973), Edna Lewis (The Taste of Country Cooking, 1976), Marcella Hazan (The Classic Italian Cookbook, 1976), Joan Nathan (Jewish Cooking in America, 1994), Claudia Roden (The New Book of Middle Eastern Food, 1985) Irene Kuo (The Key to Chinese Cooking, 1977) and Lidia Bastianich (Lidia’s Mastering the Art of Italian Cuisine, 2015) are some of those whose cookbooks were shepherded and edited by Jones.
A New Biography of Jones
Writer Sara B. Franklin, who knew Judith Jones, has written a new biography about her — The Editor, to be released in May, 2024.
I was lucky enough to read a galley and Ms. Franklin’s book is a comprehensive and terrific read. In February, I wrote about it for my newsletter, and you can read it here:
Thanks to Jolene for the fascinating post. I’ll be back next week with three new book picks.
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Thank you so much for inviting me, Elizabeth!
I will read anything and everything to do with Julia Child!