The Tenth Muse My Life in Food

Her mother, “well into her nineties”, had an urgent question: "Tell me, Judith, do you really like garlic?"

Sadly, Judith Jones did. And she also loved the foods of her youth that her mother's cook had lovingly produced:

I still feel nostalgic for the warm chocolate steamed pudding with foamy sauce, the bread pudding with its crusty top and raisins bursting inside, the apple brown Betty made with good tart country apples, the floating island with its peaks of egg white swimming in a sea of yellow custard. Then, when summer came, there were the summer puddings, a bread-lined mold steeped in just-cooked blueberries, raspberries, or blackberries as each came in season, pressed, chilled, and unmolded, with thick unpasteurized cream poured over each serving. Edie had some specialties of her own, such as individual warm nut-and-date cakes, and meringues (which we called kisses) topped with bananas and slathered in hand-beaten whipped cream.

When I was asked during my middle-school years what I would like for lunch on Fridays --- the day when we had to  stay in school until only one o'clock --- I knew exactly what I wanted: a whole artichoke, spaghetti and cheese, and fresh fruit or applesauce for dessert. The spaghetti and cheese that Edie made was more sauce than pasta (a term we didn't even know then --- it was either spaghetti or macaroni), enriched with massive gratings of good Vermont Cheddar cheese, then baked in a casserole with buttered crumbs and more cheese on top. I made a ritual of slurping down those hot creamy strands of spaghetti and alternately picking off artichoke leaves, one by one, dipping them in lemony butter or hollandaise, and scraping off the flesh with my teeth. I did it slowly, often turning the pages of a book. Then, when I got to the heart, I would carefully pull off all the thistles and revel in that concentrated, slightly grassy-tasting artichoke flesh.

This is writing of a fairly high order, and if it is about food --- one of the universal equalizers --- even better.

So who is this Judith Jones?

One of the most important people in publishing --- and, to what must be her pleasure, almost unknown outside it.

Judith Jones, now in her 80s, is the queen of cookbooks at Knopf, our most prestigious publisher. Julia Child? Her landmark first book was languishing at another publisher; Jones took it over and was Child's editor ever after. Marcella Hazan, Claudia Roden, Edna Lewis and Marion Cunningham --- she found or edited them all. Oh, and on the side, she edited literary fiction. Like...John Updike.

But now she's written a memoir, and while no great secrets are revealed, many great stories are told --- all of them proof that if you're gifted and determined and attractive, you might also get lucky. So....

In 1948, after a privileged New York childhood, she rushes off to Paris, and has exactly the kind of problem that A.J. Liebling confronted two decades earlier --- not enough money to eat three good meals a day. LIFE Magazine does a feature on “Young Americans in France” and she gets to enjoy, at the magazine's expense, a Mere Poularde omelette at Mont-Saint-Michel. Back in Paris, she runs into a friend who just happens to living in the apartment of his aunt, an Italian countess. (Their other roommate: the painter Balthus.) To make ends meet, they turn it into a restaurant. And all's well until....

In order to stay in Paris, she moves on to odd jobs  with occasionally unsavory characters (a “must” on the resumé of any proper young woman), meets the married man of her dreams, waits out his divorce, gets the ring, and, along the way, discovers a book by a murdered young Jewess named Anne Frank and arranges to have it published in America.

And so it goes. You could say there's a lot of name-dropping here, but that's to miss the point --- Judith Jones was there, she did these things, cooked these meals, “created” these people. But she is crusty and matter-of-fact about all of it (“Then I underwent a mastectomy”). Practical to the end: The recipes at the back of the book include a section called Cooking for One. Still looking forward: With her cousin, a farmer in northern Vermont, she's invested in Angus beef cattle who will “be raised on local grass with tender loving care.” And still tart: “I get so sick of the Food Network thing --- 'We're more than just about food.' Who wants it to be about more than just food? Food is a wonderful subject, endless.” 

Garlic. It's very good for you --- for Judith Jones, anyway.

--- Jesse Kornbluth, for HeadButler.com

To buy “The Tenth Muse” from Amazon.com, click here.

Copyright 2007 by Head Butler Inc.