A scratch ’n’ sniff stamp with the image of a baguette was issued in France by La Poste in the spring of 2024. One only wonders why it took this long for la République to feature its famous loaf this prominently. Is the baguette perhaps so much a part of daily Gallic life that it can go unnoticed?
In 1970, Julia Child and Simone Beck were writing and revising volume II of the classic cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking, when Judith Jones, their editor at Knopf, noticed the glaring absence of a recipe for French bread and promptly asked for one from Child, who began investigating. It was Jones, who, ten years earlier, had corresponded and worked painstakingly with Child, Beck, and Louisette Bertholle on volume I (Bertholle bowed out for volume II), perfecting advice on cooking everything from hearty beef bourguignon to the lightest soufflé. It took a year for Child to settle on a bread recipe that passed muster before the uncompromising editor, having tried her hand at perfecting the recipe, too, sent volume II on to the printer.
Judith Jones had worked her way up, first at Doubleday, then at the prestigious rival house at 52nd and Madison, gaining the confidence of Alfred and Blanche Knopf. For decades, she was entrusted with such authors as Sylvia Plath, John Updike, John Hersey, William Maxwell, Anne Tyler, Elizabeth Bowen, Langston Hughes, and Sharon Olds. It was in the editing of cookbooks, however, that Jones made her most enduring mark. She worked first with Child but then guided many more culinary authors through the serpentine editorial process. In doing so, she carved out a niche for well-written, kitchen-worthy titles that could ably teach home cooks the regional cuisines of China, Italy, the Middle East, the American South, and many points between.
Sara B. Franklin’s NEH-funded biography, The Editor, sheds light finally on the lifelong dedication to good books and good taste of one of publishing’s unsung heroes. Franklin takes the reader through Jones’s love of France and French fare and her quiet, unassuming persistence, which jibed perfectly with the likes of novelist John Updike and poet Sharon Olds but also with the culinary force that was Julia Child and many other cookbook authors of note. None of her food writers were celebrity chefs but rather home cooks or small-scale restaurateurs with a passion for good, flavorful food.
Judith Bailey, born in 1924, grew up on the East Side of Manhattan, where she had her first forays into French cuisine, eating with her father. At home she ate bland English fare. At La Petite Maison in the East 60s, she wrote in her memoir, The Tenth Muse, she could “wallow in onions” as she “broke through the cheesy toasted crust of a soupe à l’oignon” or “savor seafoods wrapped in delicate warm crêpes.” She graduated from Bennington College, in Vermont, and while there also worked briefly as a junior editor at Doubleday. Once, at a publishing affair, she met and hit it off with the novelist Arthur Koestler. She then headed to Paris in the summer of 1948 for a vacation that turned into a semi-permanent move. Koestler provided contacts in the City of Light, including, munificently, André Malraux, Albert Camus, and Jean-Paul Sartre. Jones (who would become known to everyone in publishing simply as “Judith”) was not moving in those circles, but the extended stay lasted several years and resulted in her marriage to Dick Jones, an American magazine worker she met in Paris. Dick, an aspiring novelist, soon after changed his first name to Evan to avoid confusion with another Dick Jones, also a writer. Evan and Judith shared a love of cooking, dining, and entertaining.
While in Paris, Judith used her publishing connections to get a job, hooking up again with Doubleday. It was then that, one afternoon, having been told to write rejections for a pile of submissions from the slush pile, a manuscript caught her eye, and she began reading. In her hands was Anne Frank’s wartime journal, already published in Holland in 1947 and shortly thereafter in France by the house Calmann-Lévy. The French manuscript had then been submitted to the newly established Paris office of Doubleday for consideration. Judith brought the discarded manuscript to the attention again of her boss, who reread it. Eventually, the New York office was persuaded to buy the U.S. rights and publish it. Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl had a modest initial printing of 5,000 copies with Doubleday but went almost immediately into a second printing and soared in sales and has never been out of print in the United States. Judith’s role in that success was minimized by the higher-ups. Her eye for talent and good writing and how to nurture it, however, never wavered and would only grow keener.
Alfred and Blanche Knopf recognized Jones’s quiet pursuit of excellence and entrusted her with such valued authors as Elizabeth Bowen and William Maxwell.
—Photo by Carl Van Vechten / The Carl Van Vechten Papers. Yale Library of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
In Paris, she had been learning the rudiments of French cooking, how to detect the freshest ingredients, how to sauté sole meunière and not burn the butter in the process. This knowledge came by way of a Paris boyfriend whom Judith met before she met Dick, as a group of four young people and an older painter shared a spacious apartment owned and rented out by an aristocrat living in Italy. The apartment became the setting for sumptuous dinner parties. All this experience Judith was able to put to good use later, when, back in New York, she and Dick (now Evan) cooked and entertained for friends and the literati.
To avoid the sweltering summer heat in Manhattan, some of the dinners Judith and Evan hosted were staged on their apartment building’s roof deck. A New York Times food editor, Craig Claiborne, whom Judith contacted about the soon-to-be released Mastering, was intrigued by her descriptions of these breezy soirées and asked for an invitation. He thought the dinner parties might be a good angle for an article on home cooking. The evening was a success, and the Times editor marveled in print afterward about how well the food was prepared and presented. “They live,” Claiborne wrote about Judith and Evan, “by the dictum that food is fun and that cooking is a prime pleasure.” Judith was starting to give free rein to her publicity instincts, and after she’d piqued Claiborne’s interest in her home cooking, she hoped to steer his attention toward Mastering.
Judith Jones and husband, Evan, cooked for friends on the roof of their Manhattan apartment building. “That wouldn’t be a story today,” Judith said, but neighbors back then weren’t shy about calling out from their windows, “Those people, they’re gonna set the place on fire!”
—Courtesy Bronwyn Dunne
This was August 1961, and Mastering was finally on press, after a tortuous path had led Child, Bertholle, and Beck, les trois gourmandes, as they had become known, through a dark wood. Houghton Mifflin had signed a contract with the three in 1953 and in 1958 requested heavy revisions to the manuscript. The three soldiered on, Child leading the way, but the Boston house was still not ready to publish such a massive, detailed cookbook by the time they finished revisions in 1959. Houghton finally bowed out, the editor in chief at the house, Paul Brooks, suggesting they try another publisher. The women’s Massachusetts-based fiery, never-say-die agent, Avis DeVoto, sent the manuscript tout de suite to longtime Knopf editor Bill Koshland, who in turn handed the manuscript to Judith to have a look. She pounced on it and got the book back on track.
By the summer of 1960, Judith and Julia had finalized the title as ‘French Recipes for American Cooks.’ Then Judith wrote to Julia, still in France, “I think we have now found the solution by calling it: ‘Mastering the Art of French Cooking.’ ‘Mastering’ becomes an active verb now and it gives us everything we need to work with in terms of copy.” At Knopf, Judith worked by herself on the cookbook but relied on the house for marketing and sales support. She became largely responsible for developing the publisher’s house style on cookbooks. About copy editing and getting recipes into print, Franklin notes, “Judith relied on her intuition.”
When Mastering arrived at Knopf’s editorial offices on October 16, 1961, Judith immediately sent a copy to Craig Claiborne at the Times, who reviewed it, writing that the recipes were “all painstakingly edited and written as if each were a masterpiece, and most of them are,” adding that the three authors wrote in “the simplest terms possible and without compromise or condescension.” Mastering was a cookbook, he wrote “for those who take fundamental delight in the pleasures of cuisine.” If this weren’t sufficient to make a publicist’s mouth drool, a few days later Child and Beck were invited to appear on NBC’s Today Show. Child decided that to plug the book, she and Beck should cook on air. Franklin writes, “When the cameras rolled, Julia Child lit up the screen with her skill, her enthusiasm, and her dip-and-swoop voice.” In a perfect storm of publicity, a cooking demonstration by the two was scheduled for the next day at Bloomingdale’s department store, where they expected a dozen women but were, Franklin writes, “inundated by women who’d seen them on TV.” Department stores at the time had book departments that rivaled some of the best bookstores, but even so, stock quickly ran out.
Julia Child moved to Paris with her husband, Paul, in 1948 and got hooked on French fare upon her first bite of sole meunière. She then registered for classes at Le Cordon Bleu.
—Science History Images
Next up was a book tour to the West Coast, where demand again far outstripped supply. Paul Child, who accompanied his wife, wrote to Judith about the “awful dearth of books everywhere.” Franklin writes in The Editor, “Americans were smitten with French cuisine, and with its newest ambassador, Julia Child, too.”
Successful cookbooks were not complete rarities before this. In 1936, one of the best-selling cookbooks of all time, The Joy of Cooking by Irma S. Rombauer came out, and in 1950 McGraw-Hill and General Mills copublished Betty Crocker’s Picture Cookbook, intended to help postwar wives find “labor-saving tips for the kitchen.” Franklin writes about the Betty Crocker cookbook, “For those overwhelmed or exhausted by cooking from scratch, the message offered relief. But not everyone was on board.”
Judith Jones was among those not on board. For more than five decades at Knopf, she would continue to find culinary authors and publish cookbooks that had much more to offer than simply saving time.
Among the next cookbook authors Judith worked with were Anna Thomas (The Vegetarian Epicure), Claudia Roden (A Book of Middle Eastern Food), and Edna Lewis (The Taste of Country Cooking and In Pursuit of Flavor). Thomas, a film student at UCLA, arrived on the cookbook scene serendipitously in 1970 after a professor of hers sent her recipes to Manhattan-based literary agent Roberta Pryor, who sent them on to Judith. At about the same time, Roden, living in London after having grown up in Egypt, took up cooking as an adult to recapture the flavors of her childhood. A Book of Middle Eastern Food was published in England in 1968, and after Judith learned of its success there sought out Roden to discuss a U.S. edition.
“She thought Claudia Roden’s book had the potential to do for Middle Eastern food,” writes Franklin, “what Julia’s had done for the cuisine of France, and she was eager to bring it to the States.” As for Edna Lewis, Judith had a deep appreciation for the way the food from the Black family farm in Freetown, Orange County, Virginia, served as a bond in the Lewis family throughout their lives. This was in the mid seventies, when organic farming, vegetarianism, ethnic traditions, and the concept of small is beautiful, made popular by E. F. Schumacher’s best-selling book, were coming into their own. Before she turned to writing cookbooks, Lewis had been, starting in the late forties, co-owner and cook in a small restaurant in New York near the Queensborough Bridge. At Café Nicholson, she served up southern dishes that caught the attention of Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, and Truman Capote, all three craving the regional flavors they had grown up with. Judith coaxed and got more than straight-forward recipes out of Lewis. Before providing instructions for preparing braised forequarter of mutton, Lewis writes in Taste: “After the shearing of the sheep and the culling of the flock, mutton became available for a short period and it was a treat to sit down again to a meal of braised or boiled mutton and thin-sliced fried white potatoes, wild asparagus found along the fence row, and a beautiful dessert made from the abundant supply of milk and garnished with early ripened raspberries.” Before dipping into a recipe on preparing wild asparagus, Lewis observes: “Skillet-cooked asparagus have more flavor than steamed asparagus. They finish off bright green in color, brittle, and have a flavor of the butter they cooked in. They may be fried whole or cut into 2-inch pieces. If cooked in pieces, the tips should not be added till the stalks are nearly done, as the tips cook more quickly and have a tendency to scorch. If cooked whole, they must be watched carefully.”
In the New York Times, Mimi Sheraton, who had replaced Claiborne as the food editor, called the book a “rare combination of simplicity and sophistication,” penned with “style and precision.” Judith, however, would have preferred the book be reviewed not as a set of recipes so much as a literary work. Franklin writes that Judith “believed Taste transcended the food genre and deserved attention as a work of literature and cultural history.” Judith suggested to Bob Manning, an editor at the Atlantic, that Taste be excerpted, “It seems to me, too, that Edna Lewis says some good things about our heritage that I hate to see just buried in a cookbook.” She added that “Edna Lewis as a black woman writes in a way that no one else has quite done—since M.F.K. Fisher perhaps did with her much more privileged past.”
The baguette stamp, issued in France for international packages in May 2024, is scratch ‘n’ sniff, sending a whiff of the land’s cultural heritage—recognized as such by UNESCO—across the globe.
—Staff
In Pursuit of Flavor would be Lewis’s next offering. It came out after the departure of Knopf editor in chief Robert Gottlieb. Dapper, Cambridge-educated Sonny Mehta had crossed the pond to take the helm in 1987. The authors he had worked with in London included Germaine Greer, Ian McEwan, and Salman Rushdie. He had nothing but glowing memories of Judith when Franklin interviewed him for The Editor: “Judith’s cookbook line was the backbone of Knopf at that stage.” Mehta appreciated Judith’s “eye for small touches” and that she “never took an axe to a manuscript.” Judith also had backbone when speaking with her bosses and pushed back when Mehta cut the print run of In Pursuit from 25,000 to 17,500. Mehta, however, stood his ground, claiming that sales of cookbooks industrywide were declining.
Franklin admits that Mehta may have been right. “As glitzy cookbooks written by well-known restaurant chefs began to emerge on the scene in the mid-eighties,” she writes, “more modest books on home cooking had begun to lose their commercial edge.” In spite of the setback, Judith came up with a proposal for a new line of cookbooks at Knopf: “What makes American food so different is that it’s a melting pot or more accurately a flavorful stew of different waves of immigrants and what they brought with them, what they encountered when they got here, and how they adapted to new circumstances.” Beginning in 1990, Knopf Cooks American went on to publish such titles as Biscuits, Spoonbread, and Sweet Potato Pie by North Carolina-based cook Bill Neal, We Called It Macaroni: An American Heritage of Southern Italian Cooking by Nancy Verde Barr, Jewish Cooking in America by Joan Nathan, and Easy Family Recipes from a Chinese-American Childhood by Ken Hom. Los Angeles Times cookbook reviewer Anne Mendelson took the full measure of Judith in noting that it was her “finest and bravest project.”
Judith, seen here in Vermont, worked with cookbook authors such as Edna Lewis, whose The Taste of Country Cooking and In Pursuit of Flavor offered up recipes alongside plenty of milieu-setting detail.
—Courtesy Bronwyn Dunne
Judith continued to find and edit cookbooks throughout the 1990s and into the new millennium, among them, Lidia’s Italian-American Kitchen by Lidia Bastiannich. The two had cultivated a tight friendship. “I was afraid that it wasn’t good enough and that I wasn’t a writer,” she told Franklin. “I really began to expand myself in those books with her.”
Knopf published Judith Jones’s memoir of her life in food in 2007. In a tease about The Tenth Muse, Julia Moskin in the New York Times summed up Judith’s more than 50-year career: “Ms. Jones may not be the mother of the revolution in American taste that began in the 1960s and transformed the food Americans cook at home. But she remains its most productive midwife.”
