Behind every great cookbook
Editor Judith Jones has a knack for turning cooks into best-selling authors
STANNARD MOUNTAIN, Vt. - The old notion that luck is nothing without skill might have been conceived with Judith Jones in mind. She was 27 and working for a publisher in Paris when she discovered Anne Frank's diary in a rejection pile and insisted her editor say yes. Several years later, as an editor in New York, she took a chance on another manuscript that was starting to collect rejection letters. That one was from a group of unknown women who turned out to be Julia Child and two French colleagues.
Jones went on to give the nod to more writers no one knew, including Middle Eastern food expert Claudia Roden and Indian cuisine authority Madhur Jaffrey, all of whom Jones writes about in her carefully crafted memoir, "The Tenth Muse: My Life in Food." This is an editor who turns cooks into best-selling authors, but she doesn't dish, isn't snide, and isn't reporting any juicy tales. She spent five decades taking writers by the hand, packaging their expertise, and presenting it to home cooks in volumes that have become hallmarks. "Her track record, brilliance, ability to just pick them - and then to run with them, put an imprimatur behind them - that career is unequaled," says Laura Shapiro, author of "Julia Child," one of the Penguin Life series.
For about four months a year, Jones lives here at Bryn Teg ("beautiful hill" in Welsh), a simple house in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom. She has been coming to this region from New York since she was a girl. Her father was from Montpelier. "We had a little Dodge convertible and I got stuck in the rumble seat," she says. The drive took two days. About 25 years ago, she and her husband, Evan, a freelance food writer who died in 1996, bought this place. Today she comes by herself from her apartment on the Upper East Side in her Subaru with Madoc, her Corgi-Beagle mutt.
She is hearty, some say tough, small, lean, and fit from decades of yoga ("an assistant convinced me to try it"). Her manner is reserved, a little 19th century, one of those people who has to warm up to you. Dawn and dusk she swims in a pond nearby and doesn't mind the very cold water. "I'm a New Englander," says Jones, who is 83. Last spring she missed a step in Paris and broke her hip. But years of yoga and swimming healed her quickly. They also saved her life when a road she was driving on alone in a rainstorm late one night flooded and she had to abandon the car and swim to safety.
Today, she and her cousin John Reynolds, who owns the neighboring property, are raising Angus cattle, "the girls," on land near her pond. She calls this time of her life her "ripe old age," as opposed to her "old old age," when she hopes to spend more time here and less in New York.
It was no accident that the manuscript that became "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" found its way to Jones's office at Alfred A. Knopf. After France, Jones had become an accomplished cook and was working with French translations of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus (authors on her roster today include John Updike, Anne Tyler, and poet Sharon Olds). "Alfred was interested in food, but you didn't go into the kitchen. The servants do that," she says. "[Knopf was] interested in cookbooks - sort of."
Jones had been working on Elizabeth David's "Italian Food," which she took into her kitchen and began correcting, much to David's horror. When the young editor read "Mastering," she writes in "Tenth Muse," "I was bouleversee, as the French say - knocked out. This was the book I'd been searching for."
Shapiro, who has read the early correspondence between Jones and Child housed at Radcliffe Institute's Schlesinger Library, says, "[Julia] was a wonderful writer from the beginning, but an undisciplined one." It fell to Jones, says Shapiro, to "harness that charm and vigor."
Jones would go to Child's house in Cambridge and the two would cook, go over the manuscript, add and drop recipes. That established a pattern. Jones stood at the stove with other authors to encourage them and had opinions about every recipe. "She makes it possible for that cookbook writer's message to get through," says Shapiro. "She makes it usable, not by simplifying, not by dumbing down, but by thinking like a smart American home cook."
Jones became friendly with The
Talented cooks - pianist Michael Field, Chinese authority Irene Kuo, southerner Edna Lewis, Californian Marion Cunningham - just kept coming her way. Each volume became a success. Colleagues in the field say they don't know how she does it. "I've never been able to figure it out," says Houghton Mifflin's cookbook editor Rux Martin. "She obviously has a silver touch when it comes to assembling a team because the results are always seamless."
One of the only authors who doesn't get off the hook in "Tenth Muse" is Marcella Hazan. When Jones tried one of her recipes and found it "a bit unappetizing, with pools of fat circling the plate," as she writes, she mentioned it the next time she met Marcella with her husband, Victor. Marcella was insulted, and there was an unpleasant incident.
Jones never actually addresses the widely held belief that Victor was Marcella's writer. In the book, she words it like this: "He wrote eloquently, whereas Marcella was not at home in English - and didn't seem to want to be." The couple, she adds, "were singularly attuned, sharing the same rigidities and condescension toward the average American's knowledge of, and taste in, food."
Other authors who had trouble at the keyboard got a professional writer to help. Some were asked to rewrite. Salem resident Nina Simonds, a Chinese cookbook author, published "A Spoonful of Ginger" and "Spices of Life" with Jones; both won James Beard awards. " 'Spices,' " says Simonds, "was particularly brutal." She calls Jones, whom she admires, "a bit of a terror." They fight all the time, says Simonds, then admits that she does the fighting while Jones remains inscrutable. Once, after a particularly painful session, says Simonds, she decided not to call Jones for a while. Days later, when Simonds phoned her, it was as if the incident had never happened. "That was business," said the editor. The two, and Simonds's husband, Don Rose, traveled all over the Far East recently.
At a luncheon last spring to celebrate Jones's 50th anniversary at Knopf (she is a senior editor and vice president), a table of writers were asked by Knopf head Sonny Mehta to talk about their editor. Simonds recounts an exchange:
"It means so much to me to see a 'nice' [on a manuscript]," Joan Nathan said.
Jeffrey Steingarten, another author, responded, "Gee, I've never gotten a 'nice.' "
Simonds: "I've never gotten one either!"
"It was almost like we were all her children," Simonds recalls, "looking for her approval."
Freelance writer David Nussbaum, who was brought in to work with Lidia Matticchio Bastianich on "Lidia's Family Table," says that the two often had cooking sessions with Jones, including many days at Bryn Teg, along with Bastianich's mother and her mother's companion. Jones's demands on her food writers are the same as the expectations she has of her literary writers, says Nussbaum. Behind the reserve, he says, is "a gentle person. And she doesn't like confrontation. I come from a different background. I bring out my best manners when I'm with her."
But she has another side. "She likes to be bawdy and coquettish at times," he says. "You can still see the beautiful girl who knocked Evan Jones down in Paris when he met her."
As for any stories she left out of her memoirs, "It's my life in food," she says. "If someone wants to know if I slept with the chef, they'll just have to guess." 