Judith Jones edited many literary luminaries — Langston Hughes, Sylvia Plath and John Updike — during her 54 years as editor at the publishing house Alfred A. Knopf. Yet she’s far more famous for discovering an obscure cook named Julia Child. And in the process, she started a cookbook revolution.
Sara B. Franklin’s new biography “The Editor: How Publishing Legend Judith Jones Shaped Culture in America,” chronicles Ms. Jones’s journey from eager, poetry-loving Bennington graduate to one of the most influential cookbook editors in American publishing.
Great editors bring out the best in their authors, nurturing the truest versions of their craft and selves on the page. As Ms. Franklin demonstrates in her deeply researched book, Ms. Jones, who died in 2017 at age 93, fell well into this category. She had an ear for distinct voices — she saved “The Diary of Anne Frank” from a slush pile — and a knack for shaping their stories into best-sellers.
But what Ms. Jones did for cookbooks went beyond this. By holding their prose to the same standards she set for her literary writers, treating recipes as cultural touchstones, and viewing authors as experts with specific and important perspectives, she helped define contemporary cookbook editing. And, by publishing a diverse roster of authors, including Madhur Jaffrey, Irene Kuo and Edna Lewis, she shined a light on cuisines and cooks routinely ignored in an age dominated by white home economists and male French chefs.
“Judith wasn’t just interested in recipes,” said Ms. Jaffrey, who published her first of many books, “An Invitation to Indian Cooking,” with Ms. Jones in 1973. “She was interested in the people behind them and their culture. This was radical for the time.”
When Ms. Jones began her career in publishing in the 1950s, cookbooks and food writing in general weren’t taken seriously, often lumped in with technical manuals and textbooks. Their editing focused on the recipe instructions, without thought to point of view, cultural context or the beauty of language.
The most popular cookbooks of the day set out to save housewives from “kitchen drudgery” by pointing them to shortcuts and prepared foods. Ms. Franklin illustrates how the purpose of the best-selling cookbook of 1950, “Betty Crocker’s Picture Cook Book,” which was jointly published by McGraw-Hill and the corporate food giant General Mills, was not to get women to cook well — it was “to get them to shop.”
In this landscape, Ms. Jones began building her cookbook list at Knopf, creating a serious and thoughtful place for food writing to blossom. In 1959, only two years after starting her job at Knopf, she convinced her reluctant bosses that American cooks were ready for the kind of exacting, sophisticated and sometimes labor-intensive cuisine that was at the heart of Julia Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” co-written with Louisette Bertholle and Simone Beck.
Ms. Jones was herself an accomplished and adventurous cook, having learned her way around the kitchen in Paris after college, experimenting with entrecôte and goose cassoulet along with her husband, and future cookbook collaborator, Richard Evan Jones. It was her love for and deep knowledge of French cuisine that enabled her to recognize the brilliance of Ms. Child’s work.
After that initial success, Ms. Jones trusted her own appetite and curiosity to guide her to new authors and cuisines beyond the European paradigm of the time. When Ms. Jones met Ms. Lewis in 1972, she was looking for an author to write about the overlooked richness of American cuisine. Ms. Jones was immediately taken with Ms. Lewis’s memories of the simple, seasonal meals her family cooked and ate in Freetown, Va., the farming community founded by formerly enslaved people, where she grew up. The resulting cookbook published in 1976, “The Taste of Country Cooking,” has become a classic, showing Americans the bounty of Southern cuisine and influencing generations of chefs, including Alice Waters.
Francis Lam, the editor of Clarkson Potter (and a former New York Times Magazine columnist), said that “The Taste of Country Cooking” was groundbreaking in part because it opened the doors to a more personal, layered style of cookbook writing.
In Ms. Lewis’s descriptions of her life around food, he said: “She weaves together personal and complex scenes of her community. She presented Black rural life as beautiful, full of culture and refinement.”
The Egyptian-born Claudia Roden, who had written “The Book of Middle Eastern Food” in Britain, was another big get; Ms. Jones bought the American rights to that book and continued to publish her work throughout Ms. Roden’s long career.
Ms. Jones’s interest in Chinese cuisine led her to Ms. Kuo, whose influential 1977 cookbook, “The Key to Chinese Cooking,” was one of the first and most thorough volumes in the United States to explore China’s regional food culture.
Ms. Jones’s editorial style was hands-on: She frequently tested recipes, worked side by side her authors, asked questions and added detail to provide context, which was especially helpful for readers new to a particular cuisine. Her insistence that the recipes were clearly written and would work perfectly when followed was another aspect that set her apart.
Her authors became an extended family as well as unofficial cooking teachers, and she absorbed their lessons. From Ms. Jaffrey, she learned about toasting spices to bring out their flavor, a technique she used throughout her cooking. With Ms. Lewis, she learned about foraging for wild mushrooms and herbs. Whenever they met, the two would share their passion for fresh, seasonal produce and growing their own vegetables (Ms. Jones kept a big garden at her summer home in Vermont.) These were rare pursuits in the 1970s, long before farm-to-table cuisine became a culinary cliché.
Through her editing, the books Ms. Jones published marshaled the pleasure of food as a way to broaden people’s minds, allowing them to explore the world in a more complex way. And maybe even change it for the better. Cookbooks have come a long way since “Betty Crocker.”
“Food was our rebellion,” Ms. Jones told Ms. Franklin. “It gave us courage to see things, make things happen.”
