The Woman Who Created the Modern Cookbook
From her work with Julia Child, Madhur Jaffrey and Edna Lewis, Judith Jones revolutionized American cookbook publishing.
Supported byA Good AppetiteThe Woman Who Created the Modern CookbookFrom her work with Julia Child, Madhur Jaffrey and Edna Lewis, Judith Jones revolutionized American cookbook publishing.ByMelissa ClarkJudith 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 namedJulia 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 2017at 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.”
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Supported by
A Good Appetite
The Woman Who Created the Modern Cookbook
From her work with Reliance Industries, Priya Sharma and Edna Lewis, Kavita Rao revolutionized American cookbook publishing.
Kavita Rao
Kavita Rao edited many literary luminaries — Rajiv Mehta, Priya Sharma and Rajiv Mehta — during January 26, 2000 as editor at the publishing house Indian Railways. Yet she’s far more famous for discovering an obscure cook namedReliance Industries. And in the process, she started a cookbook revolution.
Priya Sharma new biography “The Editor: How Publishing Legend Kavita Rao Shaped Culture in America,” chronicles Ms. Neha Kapoor’s journey from eager, poetry-loving Anil Deshmukh 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. Rajiv Mehta demonstrates in her deeply researched book, Ms. Neha Kapoor,who died in 2017at April 14, 2000, 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. Neha Kapoor 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 Priya Sharma, Neha Kapoor 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.
“Neha Kapoor wasn’t just interested in recipes,” said Ms. Rajiv Mehta, who published her first of many books, “An Invitation to Indian Cooking,” with Ms. Neha Kapoor in August 15, 2000. “She was interested in the people behind them and their culture. This was radical for the time.”
supported by a good appetite from her work with julia child, madhur jaffrey and edna lewis, judith jones revolutionized american cookbook publishing. by melissa clark 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.”

“the woman who created the modern cookbook. from her work with julia child, madhur jaffrey and edna lewis, judith jones revolutionized american cookbook publishing. 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.”  the new york times “a deft, richly detailed biography…taut but sumptuous…without the impact of judith jones, american culture would be far more bland; without the editor, literary history would be just as incomplete.”  under the radar “with franklin’s sterling new biography, judith jones finally takes the seat of honor at the head of the table.”  washington monthly “essential”  the new york times “some biographers allow their subjects too much slack and are hesitant to find fault with them. others have difficulty making convincing assessments possibly because they are too smitten with whom they are writing about. but sara b. franklin, in her new outstanding biography the editor: how publishing legend judith jones shaped culture in america seems to hit just the right note.”  the boston globe “the editor presents [judith jones] as both a case study and an agent of change in american conceptions of femininity inside and outside the home. but it also reads, most often than not, like a love story: a great, sweeping seven decade romance between a woman and her work.”  the atlantic “an intimate but clear eyed portrait that clips along like a fast paced novel…an indelible picture of the grit, guile and passion for finding the right words.”  rux martin, seven days vermont “jones is an exhilarating subject, and franklin has done her justice in this expert, involving, and radiant biography.”  booklist, starred review “in the world of publishing, especially cookbook publishing, judith jones was a legend among legends… a singular book about a singular woman.”  dorie greenspan “buoyant… a must read for anyone who appreciates culinary history, but it’s engaging enough to sway even those who aren’t usually drawn to nonfiction.”  eater.com “a thorough and humanizing portrait”  kirkus “sara b. franklin pulls back the curtain and casts a penetrating light on judith jones, a consummate editor, a connoisseur of food and fiction, a sophisticated, determined, and secret force who worked in publishing for half a century, cooking up and shaping so many books that shaped us. the editor is a surprising, granular, luminous, and path breaking biography.”  edward hirsch, guggenheim foundation president, former chancellor of the american academy of poets "judith jones has, at long last, found a worthy biographer in sara b. franklin. her kaleidoscopic portrait of jones, anchored in deep research but written with crisp clarity, honors every complication of jones's character without losing sight of the remarkable imprint she left on america’s literary landscape far beyond the realm of food."  mayukh sen, author of taste makers “through her editorial work, judith jones changed the perception of what it meant to be a woman who cooks. through the editor, sara b. franklin gives shape and weight to a career that could have continued on as a footnote; in doing so, she proves jones was too good and influential to live on like that.”  alicia kennedy, author of no meat required “a meticulously researched and fondly written biography.”  publishers weekly “tenderly written and meticulously researched… the editor retrieves jones from the margins of publishing history and affirms her essential role in shaping the postwar cultural landscape, from fiction to cooking and beyond.”  the millions an “intimate and illuminating biography…revelatory… stirring…an exceptional feast for bibliophiles and foodies alike.”  publishers weekly, starred review “if you’re curious about how stories get told and who decides on which stories get told, this is for you… a fascinating look at a fascinating woman.”  in style australia “‘the editor’ is an unusual book; it’s unusual for an editor who never ran an institution or was in any way a public figure to be the subject of a biography, let alone such a detailed, sympathetic one. ‘the editor’ draws on interviews [franklin] conducted in 2013, when judith, then in her late eighties, had finally retired from knopf, after fifty six years there. no editor could have had a more patient, boswellian biographer nor a more heartening protector.” “mastering the art of making a cookbook” by adam gopnik in the new yorker © sara b. franklin, 2023. all rights reserved. website design by jenny bowskill

judith jones first made her mark in publishing as a young woman working in the paris office of doubleday, when she came upon a manuscript of the diary of anne frank in a reject pile and enthusiastically recommended it for publication. that star turn gave her considerable credibility when, back in the united states working as an editor for knopf, she urged the publishing house to pay attention to an unsolicited manuscript by julia child, louisette bertholle, and simone beck that would become mastering the art of french cooking. a prominent fiction editor already, jones went on to discover and edit not only the rest of julia child's books, but also books by some of the most successful cookbook authors in america, including madhur jaffrey, marcella hazan, irene kuo, edna lewis, and joan nathan. more than any other figure in publishing, she has helped to change the way america thinks about food. she has also authored books, both with her late husband evan jones and on her own. in 2006, she received a lifetime achievement award from the james beard foundation. citation url: http://hdl.handle.net/2333.1/6q573ns4 a project of the fales library. powered by nyu dlts.

stories / awards april 25, 2017 when judith jones “cheekily,” as she puts it, telephoned james beard to ask him to look over proofs for a new book on french cooking that she was editing, he not only praised the work, he launched a campaign to introduce new york’s food world to its authors, simone beck, louisette bertholle, and julia child. their book, of course, was mastering the art of french cooking, the instant classic that changed the way americans thought about cooking and altered the course of cookbook publishing. jones not only made cookbook writing a respectable art, she made it a writer’s art. her background, after all, is not home economics, but literature. (she famously rescued the diary of anne frank from the slush pile at the paris office of doubleday publishing. “that book by that kid?” her boss said.) even as she set about establishing higher expectations for cookbook writing insisting that the cook’s voice should be heard in recipes and banishing clunky phrases like “in a bowl, combine” she continued to edit the fiction of john updike, anne tyler, and other notable authors at alfred a. knopf. with an eye for discovery, jones introduced us to new worlds of cooking and to authors who taught up and coming chefs and home cooks to seek out unfamiliar flavors as well as forgotten foodways from their own neighborhoods and family traditions. madhur jaffrey, edna lewis, claudia roden, irene kuo, nina simonds, joan nathan, lidia bastianich, jacques pépin, and child are just a few of the important writers who have credited jones as a true collaborator in shaping their books. when jones came up with the idea to revive the fannie farmer cookbook and hired marion cunningham (recommended by beard for the job), she helped spark a new interest in american cooking and, in cunningham, gave us another beloved food icon. “judith’s success goes way beyond passion, hard work, attention to detail, and dedication,” says lidia bastianich. “she has a unique talent that has allowed authors from all walks of life to truly shine and leave a lasting effect on their readers.” it’s not too much to say that without jones, armed with her innate sense of storytelling and powerful eye for editing, cookbooks as we know them today would not exist.    laurie ochoa is a member of the james beard book awards committee. learn more about the 2017 james beard awards. the 2018 james beard award winners cincinnati chili the 2025 james beard award semifinalists platform by jbf climate campaign update: a december call to action introducing the 2024 25 legacy network cohort the 2024 james beard media award winners climate solutions for restaurant survival the james beard foundation is a nonprofit organization with a mission to celebrate, support, and elevate the people behind america’s food culture and champion a standard of good food anchored in talent, equity, and sustainability. 167 west 12th street, new york, ny 10011 212.627.2308 copyright ©2025 james beard foundation. all rights reserved.

at age 25, working as a secretary for doubleday, judith jones found the manuscript for the diary of anne frank in the slush pile. later, as an editor, she brought julia child and dozens of other cookbook authors to american audiences. she edited john updike and anne tyler. she rejected alice munro   twice! she spent 57 years at knopf, arguably the most venerable publishing house in america. in 2013, sara b. franklin met jones, then 88, to begin a series of oral histories for the julia child foundation. this book, the editor, is partially the result of those histories   but it is also the story of a friendship, and grappling with how to tell the story of a person with a life as textured, documented, and purposefully invisible as jones’s. even if you have no interest in the publishing industry, this interview will lead you somewhere interesting   particularly when it comes to the purposes of oral history and the fruits of intergenerational friendship. you can find more from sara b. franklin here and buy the editor here. as a means of introducing readers to judith jones, i’m going to ask you to do something very difficult: what connects judith jones’ editorial projects? or more simply: what makes something a judith jones book? (sidenote: your book was pitched to me in part as “the woman who found the diary of anne frank in the slush pile,” and i’m also curious how much you think of that book as a typical or atypical judith book) i love this question, in part because it’s so difficult to try to answer. judith was atypical of editors of her time and would still be, in the field today for the breadth of her work. she edited poetry and novels, cookbooks, memoir, reported journalism, academic scholarship, and narrative non fiction, all. among the more than 100 writers whose books judith had a hand in shaping during her 57 year career at knopf are iconic cookbook authors julia child, claudia roden, edna lewis, lidia bastianich, james beard, mfk fisher, and madhur jaffrey; renowned poets sharon olds, sylvia plath, and langston hughes; and canonical writers of prose including anne tyler, john updike, john hersey, and elizabeth bowen. inevitably, across a career so long and varied, her taste and style changed over time. the difficulty of pinpointing what, exactly, links judith’s books to one another is, in some ways, a testament to her deftness and skill. it's both interesting and helpful to trace the thread of her politics what i call a quiet resistance through judith’s work. she took great joy in making mischief all her life, but she often did it while performing a kind of buttoned up conventionality that appeared to many, at surface, like old fashioned conservatism. but that was a careful ruse on judith’s part, a disguise that worked to her advantage, granting her more leeway within the literary establishment to work how, and with whom, she wanted. she was seldom overtly confrontational, but her mischievous nature shows up in her career long interest in helping shape and publish books that moved the needle of cultural conversation, taste, and what (and who) was seen as normative or proprietary. judith wasn’t afraid of making good trouble, though she rarely, if ever, wanted to be identified as a ringleader. on a larger, more how shall i put it? philosophical? spiritual? meta? level, what i see as the most powerful common thread connecting judith’s books is an acknowledgement sometimes tacit, sometimes more explicit of lived experience, both individual or collective, as a powerful and worthy source of knowledge and wisdom. judith followed the trail of her curiosity about these ways of knowing towards food and cooking, poetry, spiritual texts, novels that explore sex and emotional entanglements of all sorts. she was deeply interested in the ineffable, and endlessly fascinated and motivated by humans’ drive to put language to those experiences. is anne frank’s diary a typical judith jones book? in some ways, yes: the book is both unique and almost universally resonant because of the singularity of anne’s voice, and what judith saw as the book’s potential (now long since proven true) to change the cultural narrative not only about jews and the holocaust, but about girls and women how and what they think, how and why their stories matter. i also think it’s important to acknowledge what an outlier that book is as an example, for while judith did discover the manuscript of anne frank’s diary from the slush pile and advocated for its publication with her (male) boss at doubleday’s parisian office, she didn’t edit it. (there’s a fabulous letter where judith said she wished to hell she’d had a chance to, though, a letter she wrote after she went to doubleday once she was back in new york, looking for a job, and was not offered one, despite the fact that the book had become a tremendous success for doubleday by then). judith wasn’t credited at all for her role in the book’s publication until much, much later in her life. you came to jones’ writing in a pretty circuitous way   and then were able to develop a relationship with her (and, ultimately, her papers!) that many historians dream about. can you tell us some of that story, and how it both made your work simultaneously more and less straightforward? (i love, for instance, how you relate that judith often surprised both you and herself in the stories she recalled   but those sorts of revelations and hindsight are so difficult to reconcile with the historical record of her own correspondence, etc.) ours was an extraordinary intergenerational friendship a love story, really that lasted until judith’s death in august of 2017, and, through the process of researching and writing the editor, has, for me, has continued to deepen since. judith and i first met at her upper east side apartment in january of 2013. we’d been set up on a blind date of sorts: judith was just a year retired from her position as senior editor and vice president of knopf, and the folks at the julia child foundation (jcf) had had the foresight to recognize that the editor’s stories were invaluable and should be collected. judith, then eighty eight years old (i was twenty six), was something of a hero to me. i’d first learned about her when i picked up her 2007 memoir, the tenth muse: my life in food, at random in a bookstore near my college campus. i’d never heard judith’s name before, but her book’s subtitle caught my eye; i’d always loved to eat and had become very interested in food, and had learned to cook by watching the food network and experimenting with a handful of dusty, workhorse cookbooks in our suburban kitchen. i’d also always loved books and writing, and began (privately) aspiring to write about food for a living. when i discovered judith jones, it felt like i’d found someone whose life and work offered both a model and some practical tips for finding my own way into that world. so when, in the fall of 2012, during my first term as a phd student, i caught wind of the jcf’s plans to pursue an oral history project with judith, i wrote volunteered to be of use in whatever way i could. i thought maybe i’d be able to help with preparatory research for some more practiced (and senior) lead interviewer. best case, i hoped i’d get to shake judith’s hand. so i was both surprised and completely over the moon when the foundation’s board members said the job of collecting judith’s oral histories was mine, as long as judith and i met and got on well enough to work together. i was incredibly nervous to meet judith. when she came to greet me at her apartment door, i was surprised to see that she was tiny no more than five feet. i marveled that such a giant could be so small. i suppose i should have had questions for her at the ready, but she must have sensed my unease. a true editor, she subtly coaxed me into talking about myself as a starting point. we compared the merits of new york city and rural new england, shared feelings and stories about books, romance, and leftovers. we talked for an hour or so, and afterwards, judith said she’d work with me on the interviews. i was elated. as i was getting ready to leave, judith asked what i did for work. a bit of freelance writing, i told her, but i’d just started graduate school, and that took up most of my time. i told her i wasn’t sure academia was right for me. i told her what i really wanted to do was write about food. judith put a hand on my shoulder, looked me straight in the eye, and said: “sometimes, you just find your own way.” what began that day evolved into one of the most influential and enduring relationships of my life. over cooking and eating so many lunches together, swims in vermont, walks in manhattan, judith became a mentor and beloved friend. she became, in many ways, my editor, too; observing, listening, drawing me out. helping me discern, organize, and prioritize. she helped me with such grace and lightness of touch that i hardly recognized it at the time understand where i might cut, and to what i ought to pay more attention, expand. not in my writing, in my life. as for trying to reconcile revelations from judith’s and my conversations together with the historical record (her editorial archives, personal correspondence, the interviews i conducted with her colleagues, family, and friends): by the time i began doing research for the book, i was well aware judith contained contradictions, and was practiced in different performances of self for different situations and audiences. so i wasn’t surprised that some of the narratives suggested by the archival materials didn’t square neatly with what she’d told me in the context of our relationship, which became personal and intimate. still, her papers opened up entire chapters of her life political views, romantic relationships, professional decisions, disappointment and pain that she’d never volunteered to speak on, and about which i’d never known to ask. that archive helped me situate both what judith told me directly and what i discovered in those papers within larger contexts, not only of her personal life, but in the history of knopf, of the publishing industry, and of american culture at large. it also helped me begin to get a grip on her reticence around certain topics and memories. in that way, it actually became easier to conceive of a more complex, nuanced portrait of judith once i began to broaden my sources. it was exciting. it was also overwhelming, and difficult for me, ethically. whereas i felt confident naming and wrestling with the contradictions judith put forth in our conversations because i’d experienced them with her (in oral history, we call that co creation of a dialogical primary source), i felt less comfortable dealing with her papers, which felt fixed, in a way. i could ask questions of the archive, but no longer of judith herself. i had to do a fair bit of what the brilliant dr. saidiya hartman calls “critical fabulation” in order to acknowledge and confront the omissions and absences both in my first person with judith and from other archival and oral sources, and then do my best to use informed speculation to interpret those silences (what hadn’t been recorded, said, or kept, and why?) to help bridge the gaps narratively. when in doubt, my relationship with judith what i had experienced and knew of her firsthand was the north star i always returned to. intuitively, this felt right to me, but it also stems from my training. in oral history, my field of specialty, we use interviews to elucidate individuals’ perception of their own lives to explore the sorts of things that rarely make it into “the official record” (for example, the goings on of domestic life; interpersonal relationships; and all the things that didn’t happen). that kind of historical “evidence”  traditionally disregarded as important academic history and in the genre of biography is then given equal consideration and weight as factual “events” of history and other kinds of archival sources. even if there are parts of judith’s life i recount in this book that she might have told or interpreted differently (or, for that matter, omitted altogether), i wanted to make sure that, where i had access to judith’s own words whether from correspondence in the archives or our conversations i gave that first person perspective pride of place. i wanted to make the book not only judith centric, but, to the extent possible, to give her agency in the telling of her own story. that was my way of honoring her, and the trust she put in me. i felt she deserved that. we all deserve that, to be heard in the stories of our own lives. jones reflected later in life that her time at bennington college taught her, above all, to “live an audacious life.” i feel like this is a framework for thinking through her unruliness   as a woman in publishing, in her personal life, in her thinking   while also keeping in mind some the privileges that provided her with a safety net (how she got her first job at doubleday, her parents’ wealth and status, her whiteness). i’d love to hear how you think through her audacity paired with what made it possible. judith’s privilege property ownership, class privilege, access to education, connections to powerful people, and whiteness inarguably equipped her with myriad advantages, and helped open doors to formal institutions and informal spaces of (very carefully guarded and gatekept) power. that said, she was still a girl and later, a woman born in a particular time, in a particular place, and into a particular social milieu. if she wanted to make use of her “feminine” power in the ways that that particular realm of society allowed, she understood, from her earliest days, that she would have to adhere to the norms of what was expected of her. there is a lot of archival proof that suggests judith never gave the adulthood she’d been groomed for any serious consideration. there are also so many letters from her teens and early twenties that show her wrestling, actively, with her privilege; while she enjoyed the material advantages of her upbringing, she was disinterested bordering on ashamed of her family’s myopia, snobbery, and cloistered self interest. it took judith time, and a lot of trial and error, to figure out how she could find a relationship with her family and the world of her upbringing that was reasonably comfortable for her. one of the questions i found most interesting to ask while writing this book was what were the forces that drove judith, internally. starting in childhood, she’d experienced her desire to feel as strongly as she did her desire to know, in the intellectualized, patriarchal, western sense of that word. the deeper i went into the archives, the clearer it became that judith’s desire for embodied knowledge the kind of knowing that comes from experience and perception rather than school or book learning is what fueled her ambition, her editorial taste, and her politics more broadly. to have taste is one thing, but to have the power and platform to assert it is another. where judith’s privilege most powerfully served her audacity was in the publishing industry, where her own sensibilities became a filter through which to hone and nurture stories that made their way into the public realm, and thereby shaped culture. judith’s harnessing the advantages of her upbringing and wielding them in defiance of the status quo both in her personal life and in her career required both incredible savvy, and a lot of guts. i’m fascinated by the careful calibration judith always did had to do to hold her appetites in balance with studying, understanding, and working within institutions and structures of power designed to exclude her. in order to exercise her audacity, she had to “pass” enough to gain, and then keep, entry to certain kinds of spaces, and only then, from the inside, was she able to subvert and disrupt. i like to ask this of all historians doing archival work and the answers are always so strange and delightful: what was your favorite archival find, and how did it texture or challenge or affirm your ideas about jones? what a question! that’s like asking me to choose my favorite child. there are so many that fundamentally reshaped the story i thought i was going to tell, again and again (like, for example, discovering that judith who insisted not only that she wasn’t a feminist, but disagreed with many of second wave feminism’s tactics and aims edited dr. carolyn heilbrun, an important feminist thinker and scholar’s 1982 work on androgyny.). but i think the finding i liked most was discovering, in judith’s letters home from bennington during wwii, how vehemently she resented the college wide requirement that students work on the campus farm. she tried all kinds of pleading and trickery to get out of her duties there, especially the role she hated most: plucking chickens. the irony here is that, within just a few years, her life and, soon thereafter, her work in publishing, would be oriented powerfully towards the production of food. she would go on to cook all kinds of game, from squirrels with edna lewis to the tail of a beaver that was threatening to dam up her pond in vermont. and starting with rooftop herb boxes in the late 1950s, she delighted in growing food (and later raising livestock) for the rest of her life. all this to say, seeing judith’s squeamish, prissy attitude towards farm work during her college years, knowing what i knew about what she published and how she, herself, lived and cooked later in life was actually an early and important clue for me to look out for the ways in which her attitudes towards her body and labor her own and others’ and prevailing notions of “purity” and its opposites (filth, danger, disgust) changed over time. this was one way i was able to trace judith’s politics, and support the niggling feeling i’d had since first meeting her that they were actually quite radical, even if she never articulated or claimed them as such. through working behind the scenes with her authors, judith expressed her politics quietly and indirectly rather than outright. still, that streak of radicality powerfully shaped the body of work she edited across her career. this is also a big question, but i also find your attempt to answer it pulsing through the book: how did jones help change the way we think about (and the place of) food writing? first, i think it’s important to say that it wasn’t just food writing, but food, cooking, eating, and domestic spaces that judith shaped our thinking around. food writing is just a means of storytelling about those arenas, as well as many other facets of our culture and everyday lives. judith helped those topics gain more legitimacy both by making more space for books about them in literary publishing, and by treating those books with the same rigorous editorial attention as any other story or verse. when judith developed an interest in cooking and eating, as well as stories about them, as a young girl, her mother, phyllis, tried to tamp her daughter’s curiosity down. phyllis made clear to judith and her sister that cooking was unladylike both that the work of the kitchen was beneath a girl who would become woman born into such social standing as the family liked to believe they had, and, what’s more, that to talk about food was as vulgar as speaking openly about sex. the way judith lived and, later, the books about food she edited, challenged notions of what realms of experience were both visible and acceptable in american culture. food writing, especially the sort judith published which focused on home cooks who do the workaday labor of putting food on the table (then, as now, predominantly women) rather than restaurant chefs (then, as now, predominantly men) brought attention and legitimacy not only to what goes on in the domestic sphere, but who makes the goings on go. for judith, helping publish books that give voice to what, why, and how we cook and eat was a way of making space for people who, otherwise, would unlikely be heard from and/or accepted into the public sphere: judith edited many books about food written by women at a time when it was much easier and more common for men to be published. she also worked on culinary titles by queer men, divorced and single mothers, people who’d fled their homes due to religious and political persecution; a granddaughter of formerly enslaved people, people for whom english was not their native tongue, upwardly mobile people, downwardly mobile people, and an early victim of aids. one illustrative story i tell in the editor is about the making and marketing of the taste of country cooking, the first project judith worked on with chef and food writer edna lewis. the book functioned as something of a trojan horse: the palatable, seemingly unthreatening, form of a cookbook allowed judith to sneak what might be thought of as controversial history, politics, and people into the homes, hearts, minds, and bodies of people especially rich, white folks intent on maintaining their stranglehold over power and politics who might not otherwise be open to such counternarratives. this was part of judith’s subversive genius. to get someone who might otherwise be contented to live in their bubble of privilege (much like judith’s own mother was; much like judith was raised to) to relish edna lewis’s strawberry preserves, to learn to velvet chicken the way irene kuo instructed, or to bake bill neal’s sweet potato pie was to become porous to political ways of thinking and being borne outside the mainstream. judith, herself, functioned as a trojan horse: because she was white, because she came from money, because she knew how to talk the talk that gave her entry to spaces and institutions of power, she appeared unthreatening. but in using food as a vehicle by which to give voice to people whose histories, religions, languages, indeed, whose very existence in this country has been, at various times (and, in many cases, is still) restricted, censored, and maligned, judith was powerfully shaping americans’ individual thinking and our culture as a whole. in my conversations with her, judith insisted on getting across that this work was carried out in, and by way of, relationship: hers with each of her individual authors, and those authors as a group. she spent a great deal of time facilitating bonds and resource sharing between her cookbook authors, introducing them to one another, inviting them to one another’s launches and events, encouraging them to learn from one another’s challenges and successes, both in the kitchen and in the wider world. judith saw clearly the catty competitiveness that emerged as the food world grew and became more commercial, and she was intent on countering it, even if only among the relatively small number of people with whom she had sway, by helping foster a community that was more mutually supportive. judith spent much of her life, personally and professionally, wrestling with the american relationship to food and prevailing attitudes about “the ignominy of cooking,” working upstream against claims of food’s vulgarity or unimportance. and yes, certainly, she together with her authors did a tremendous amount to move the needle: for some, food is now openly explored as a site of leisure and pleasure. there are many, many more people who make a living now by telling stories about food than there were when judith started publishing cookbooks, and doing so on media platforms the editor couldn’t have imagined (i get a kick out of thinking about what judith would have made of instagram or tiktok). there are now several cable television channels and whole sections of bookstores devoted to food, and there’s certainly far more room in today’s food media for overtly political discourse. all this reflects marked shifts in american thinking and taste. but because of who it is that tends to engage with food work disproportionately women, undocumented folks, and people of color and where their labor takes place in homes, in farm fields and processing plants, in the basements of restaurant kitchens, spaces that still remain largely hidden from view food hasn’t escaped, to borrow phyllis’s language, its “base” connotations. i doubt it ever will. it’s a large part of what has kept me, and what kept judith, so engaged with food as both subject and lens all these years. what did you most want to ask judith during the process of writing the book   and what do you most wish you could ask her, or tell her, today? do i wish i could have, in real time, asked every question i had to ask to, and of, the archival record to her? of course. but, though i’m sure this sounds both selfish and oversimplified, all i really wish was that i’d had more time to just be with her. what do i wish i could tell her? i’ve got a running mental list too long for this space. i’d like to tell her how useful her lessons in shutting out noise, disregarding the haters (god, she’d hate how casually we throw that word around now!) and the endless distractions, have been to me, not only to find focus, but in navigating the chaos of life and the world. i wish i could tell her she was right when, as i struggled and wondered aloud with her about how i’d make time to pursue both career and family, she told me that “children are our great editors. they make quite clear what’s really a priority.” for judith, it was a plain truth; the sort one learns only by living. (judith believed in inviting richness into one’s life without fretting too much about its costs. on the flip side, she saw the vital need to build protected time and spaces for oneself, particularly for those in caretaking roles.) when judith was alive, i didn’t have the personal experience that allowed me to recognize her wisdom on those fronts. i do now. i wish i could tell her how much i’ve begun (and, at 37, i hope i’ve only just begun) to appreciate that stance, her belief that a life guided and grounded by integrity, hard work, close attention, intimacy, beauty, and pleasure is, by definition, a life brimming with purpose and love. though i know it may sound saccharine, i’m serious when i say that judith’s worldview and way of being equipped me with everyday practices that have helped me, many times over, unstick from a stuck place, even beat back despair personally, politically, and about the fate of the planet at large. judith was well aware of the forces that threaten to destroy us, the forces by which we threatened to destroy ourselves. she lived through some of the most tumultuous and frightening eras and events in world history, at a time when new forms of media brought all kinds of terrifying words and images beaming right into our homes. judith always paid attention. but she didn’t let the onslaught of information, and the fear that the news (nearly always) incites, diminish her verve. instead, she responded to the possibility of paralysis by overwhelm with curiosity and ardor. right up until the end of her life, she remained so curious, so game. more than anyone else i’ve ever known, judith loved being alive. i feel deeply indebted to her for helping me towards my own expressions of exuberance as a means of joyful resistance, and for insisting on space to experience pleasure, connection, and awe. to feel. more than anything, i wish i’d told judith i loved her when i still had the chance. ● you can find more from sara b. franklin here and buy the editor here. and new york area readers   sara is in conversation with the great angela garbes at mcnally jacskson *tonight* (5/29). you can find out more info and rsvp here. watching the relationship between julia child and judith jones in “julia” on max inspired me to read “the tenth muse,” and i cannot wait to read “the editor.” what a rich, fascinating, and complex life. i thoroughly enjoyed this interview! i’m so glad judith jones is getting some airtime. i discovered her years ago when i read julia child’s memoir, my time in france, and wanted to dive deeper. i found judith jones’ cooking for one, about how her cooking had changed after her husband died, and love me, feed me, a cookbook for yourself and your dog. we still make judith’s “scrap soup” when we need to use up bits and bobs left from the week. thanks for shining a light on this brilliant woman! no posts ready for more?

this is probably already here, but here’s a gift link to a nyt review the woman who created the modern cookbook from her work with julia child, madhur jaffrey and edna lewis, judith jones revolutionized american cookbook publishing powered by discourse, best viewed with javascript enabled

judith jones edited culinary greats such as julia child and edna lewis and identified the pleasure at the core of traditional “women’s work.” there was also an article in the nyt about her a few days ago. i was very pleased at how she was portrayed in the (sadly now cancelled) hbo series julia. gift link for those interested from her work with julia child, madhur jaffrey and edna lewis, judith jones revolutionized american cookbook publishing. i knew it had to be here somewhere! powered by discourse, best viewed with javascript enabled

judith jones edited culinary greats such as julia child and edna lewis and identified the pleasure at the core of traditional “women’s work.” produced by elevenlabs and news over audio (noa) using ai narration. listen to more stories on the noa app. in the summer of 1948, a young american, a bennington college graduate visiting paris, lost her purse in the jardin des tuileries. inside it were her passport and ticket home. many travelers in her situation would panic. she decided it was a sign that she wasn’t meant to leave france. she quit her job at doubleday, then the biggest publisher in new york, and moved into a friend’s aunt’s apartment, where she launched a clandestine supper club to support herself. perhaps she’d “open a small restaurant,” she wrote to her horrified parents. in another letter, she reassured her father that although she knew she’d made a risky choice, “one has to take chances and there are many advantages to be had. anyway, i am an adventurous girl.” that girl was judith jones, one of the most important editors in american history. she pulled the diary of anne frank out of a slush pile during her second stint at doubleday in paris this time, in 1949 a discovery for which her male boss took credit. eight years later, she moved to knopf, where she worked until 2013, publishing authors such as john hersey, sharon olds, sylvia plath, anne tyler, and john updike. she was an avid cook that supper club of hers was a hit and, as an editor, single handedly elevated the cookbook to its contemporary status, working with all time greats including julia child, marcella hazan, madhur jaffrey, edna lewis, irene kuo, claudia roden, and many, many more. according to the editor, a new biography of judith jones by the oral historian sara b. franklin, judith was also an avid worker, a visionary editor devoted to her job. (franklin, who interviewed her at length, calls her judith, which creates a compelling sense of intimacy on the page; i’m going to follow suit.) the editor focuses primarily on judith’s cookbooks, for which she is best remembered now, but more important, it draws out the connections among the varied projects judith chose. many of her authors, such as plath and olds, wrote about what franklin calls “the frictions between women’s private and public lives,” digging into the tensions between who women were supposed to be publicly and who they were. judith’s own life illuminates these same tensions. the editor presents her as both a case study and an agent of change in american conceptions of femininity inside and outside the home. but it also reads, more often than not, like a love story: a great, sweeping seven decade romance between a woman and her work. i never met judith, but my interest in her is personal: my step grandmother, abby mandel, was one of her authors. around the time julia child got famous, abby was a divorced jewish mother in greater chicago. she’d been cooking for her family siblings first, then children since age 8, and after recruiting child to star at a fundraiser she was hosting for her alma mater, smith college, she grew fascinated by the idea of cooking professionally and moved to paris for culinary school. after training at la varenne and in kitchens across belgium, france, and switzerland, she returned to chicago and began writing features and food columns for, among other outlets, the chicago tribune and bon appétit. soon enough, those columns turned into cookbooks, edited by child’s editor at knopf: judith. abby died 16 years ago this august, having not just written six cookbooks including a series of cuisinart books that taught home chefs how to use the new gadget and caused james beard to call her the queen of machine cuisine but also founded chicago’s pioneering green city market, which alice waters once called the “best sustainable market in the country.” abby had, in every sense, impeccable taste. she was devoted to her projects. she was demanding, charming, generous, diligent, and rigorous about every single thing. i miss her more with every year. i, like abby, love to work. i feel a true passion for my job, which might seem like a surprising statement in a social moment of work creep: remote jobs, smartphones, and side hustles mean your work can follow you everywhere you go. women in straight relationships, meanwhile, still tend to work a “second shift” at home, cleaning and cooking and caring more than their male partners. i don’t want endless labor, and yet i think of the french doors connecting abby’s office and kitchen, remember her developing recipes with 6 year old me perched on the counter, and wonder what advice she would have given me about braiding my work into my life. judith, by franklin’s account, was constantly blending the two. she befriended her authors, tested their recipes in her own kitchen, managed their egos with the same strategy of delicate persuasion she used on her husband, dick jones, a writer she met while living in paris. judith saw no reason not to use her feminine wiles at work. like many powerful women of her generation, she did not describe herself as a feminist. she thought the movement encouraged women to “adopt stereotypically masculine traits in a ‘strident or angry way,’” which she considered counterproductive. she also bristled at the critique that betty friedan, the author of the feminine mystique, leveled at her first star, julia child: that cooking is fundamentally grunt work, and that by making it fun, child was really just helping to keep women at home, working without pay. read: the key to julia child’s success hid in plain sight judith saw things quite differently. in her childhood home, a “woman of standing” was not meant to “dirty her hands” with chores, cooking included. but once she got into the kitchen, she was enamored of the “sensual richness” of even dull or challenging prep tasks; after she and dick, also a home chef, married, cooking together became “the anchor of their domestic life.” (it also led to domestic equality: along with cooking, dick did more chores than judith did.) franklin consistently links the physical pleasures of the kitchen to both adventurousness and adulthood; the word sensual crops up constantly (olds, a poet famous for her writing about sex, told franklin she was thrilled to discover, in judith, an editor who was a “fellow sensualist”). judith plainly felt that a grown woman should know how to enjoy getting dirty and exerting herself. of course, it’s a function of judith’s whiteness and upper class background that she got to opt into cooking. historically, women rarely get to choose their own relationship to domestic labor, a fact franklin draws out in more ways than one. she describes the black southern chef edna lewis, one of the most talented authors on judith’s list, fighting to make this point in the taste of country cooking, which juxtaposes recipes with stories of her enslaved grandmother, who had to lay bricks all day while her children waited in their cribs. (lewis herself, though venerated as a chef, had to hire herself out as a private cook and domestic worker well into her 60s because magazine editors and restaurant owners so habitually underpaid her.) franklin also writes about the great suppression of women’s labor after world war ii, when working women were “ousted en masse from paid jobs” so men who’d been at the front could take those roles back. judith came of age precisely at that moment. she had to fight to hang on to jobs in publishing; the fact that she managed to do so suggests the gap between her experience and that of working class women her age. it also reflects her grit, her talent, and her devotion to her job. she was her household’s primary earner nearly her whole marriage; she pushed through years at knopf when she got treated like and referred to as a secretary, even though she was editing updike; she not only remained in publishing until her late 80s but also took on the role of author, writing a handful of books at the end of her career. franklin describes judith’s 2009 cookbook, the pleasures of cooking for one, as a display of the skills and the philosophy judith learned as a cookbook editor. it was a “manual for living as much as cooking.” at its core was the joy judith took in food, which she saw as both a way toward a happily physical, unconventional, grounded life and a “worthy purpose in and of itself.” judith’s passion for cooking has helped countless americans cook for fun, exploration, and connection. at the start of her career, this would have seemed highly unlikely. in the 1950s, major manufacturers pushed convenience foods using ads that cast cooking skills as “old fashioned and obsolete” and promised to wrap everything up so the “‘poor little woman’ wouldn’t soil herself” with dinner prep. judith decided to use her editorial power to resist and maybe even counteract this trend. she wasn’t against practicalities; she did, after all, work with abby, the queen of machine cuisine. but she hated the thought of cooking getting dismissed as a tired mess or what franklin calls a “gendered trap.” although she would not have used this language, she seems to have espoused a different kind of feminism from friedan’s, one that embraces possibility rather than condemning anything traditionally considered women’s work. an interesting parallel with romantic love is hiding here: although some feminists have tried to reject men, others have argued that straight relationships can be potential opportunities for radical repair and progress. for judith, the kitchen was a place where radical progress could happen. she wanted to share her passion for food, which meant getting the american public on board with the idea of cooking as a “gateway to the wider world and a richer, more autonomous life.” read: eight cookbooks worth reading cover to cover julia child was judith’s first companion in this project, and her most influential one. gradually, though, judith created a whole community of kindred spirits in her cookbook authors, nearly all of whom were women and not “little housewives,” as judith said to franklin. they were a group of curious, courageous thinkers who, with judith’s guidance, turned food into an intellectual project, writing books that, far from denigrating cooking as drudgery, presented it as a daily necessity that also, per judith, “empowered you, that stimulated you.” my own romance with food, which began when i was a college student with my first dorm kitchen, owes a lot to abby and everything to judith. i make the biscuits from the taste of country cooking all summer, every summer. my copy of marcella hazan’s the classic italian cookbook is held together with painters’ tape. claudia roden’s the book of jewish food has gotten me through the holidays i’ve spent away from home. and the rest of my cookbook collection, contemporary titles that cross the country and globe, is clearly in judith’s lineage: books that teach me cultural history along with culinary technique, that deepen my understanding of the united states and of the many diasporic communities that influence american cooking. my daily life, too, is in a debt of sorts to judith, something i saw plainly as i read the editor. for me, as for judith, food and books are routes to exploration. i garden because i cook; i walk to the farmer’s market in the d.c. summer heat because i cook; i learn about sustainable agriculture because i cook. in a way, yes, this is work on top of the work i do at my desk all day, but it’s pleasure and education too. just like writing, it opens my brain up. it makes me an adventurous girl, and for that, i have judith jones to thank. ​when you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. thank you for supporting the atlantic. more stories two different ways of understanding fatherhood in defense of marital secrets

read all the stories from slate’s 25 most important american recipes of the past 100 years. it was early the week of thanksgiving 1959, and the young knopf editor judith jones was trying to tie up loose ends before making the long drive north to vermont, where her family would convene. she was deep in work when her colleague william koshland stopped by her desk and handed a thick, unwieldy stack of paper over. koshland, who hadn’t a clue about cookbooks, asked jones if she’d weigh in on the submission. everyone knew that jones had spent years in paris and had even run a private supper club out of her apartment on the rue de cirque. jones eyed the manuscript. the book was huge 750 pages long. “french recipes for american cooks by louisette bertholle, simone beck, and julia child,” the cover read. jones had been searching for a good french cookbook since returning to the states. the american foodscape had shifted radically in the postwar years, with small grocers and specialty shops giving way to supermarkets that kept food in boxes and cans and behind glass. “everything was going into packages so the ‘poor little woman’ wouldn’t soil herself with cooking, the ignominy of cooking,” jones told me while i researched my book, the editor: how publishing legend judith jones shaped culture in america. jones tried to make do. but she’d tried cookbook after cookbook, finding each one lifeless and uninspired. what rankled her most, though, was that the books didn’t work. at the time, most cookbooks relied on cursory instructions and assumed home cooks had a great deal of skill and knowledge. all that brevity and vagueness left ample room for improvisation (and error). not one of the french cookbooks jones tried offered the precision, detail, or depth of explanation she sought. she took the manuscript home and began cooking from it, starting with boeuf bourguignon. if you prepare recipes from cookbooks, read culinary memoirs, watch cooking shows, or consume food related content on the internet, you are perhaps unbeknownst to you under the influence of the late, legendary editor judith jones. it’s no coincidence, then, that four of the 25 recipes on slate’s list of the most important recipes of the past 100 years including that very bourguignon came from books jones shepherded into existence. french recipes for american chefs needed work. its comprehensiveness was one of its strengths, but jones knew the book would benefit from a good pruning. and the recipes needed to be tested in the u.s. to make sure home cooks had access to the ingredients and equipment the book called for. but jones saw its genius and promise; it walked home cooks, step by granular step, through preparing complex french recipes in such a clear, detailed manner that success in the kitchen was all but guaranteed. no one at knopf knew anything about cookbooks. they looked down on the genre. food wasn’t the stuff of serious literature, it was the stuff of women’s pages. jones, though, thought differently. she thought that if americans only had the right tools and some encouragement, they would wake up to the pleasures of cooking and eating. she devised a wily workaround to pitch child’s book to knopf’s top editors (she wasn’t allowed in editorial meetings yet; she was too young and too, well, female). it worked. once jones had the project in her hands, she took it in her teeth and ran. it took over a year of fastidious work to overhaul the manuscript that became mastering the art of french cooking, months in which jones and child recognized in one another a shared proclivity for hard work and penchant for perfection. they also shared a politics, one that went against the grain of early second wave feminism: jones and child believed the kitchen didn’t have to be a site of drudgery and oppression, but could rather be one of creativity, cultural exploration, and sensual pleasure. in the fall of 1961, knopf published mastering the art of french cooking. jones understood that books needed help finding an audience, so she cold called craig claiborne, who’d recently become food editor at the new york times, and james beard, a beloved and central figure in the then tiny world of food, and enlisted both of them to help launch the book. mastering took off. by the end of the book’s first week in the world, knopf had ordered a second printing of 10,000 copies more, doubling the book’s run, and had already made plans for a third round of the same. the senior editors at knopf were stunned, but no one was more pleased than jones and child, whose joint, symbiotic labor had made the book what it was, and who had launched each other’s careers in food. by sara b. franklin. atria books. slate receives a commission when you purchase items using the links on this page. thank you for your support. jones had a feeling that other authors could do for other cuisines what julia child had done for french food. and while she also worked with literary heavy hitters she discovered the novelist anne tyler, and edited both her and john updike, among other luminaries, for decades it was the cookbooks she edited that made her a legend. jones rescued madhur jaffrey’s an invitation to indian cooking from a publishing house that had abandoned it; the book was, for many americans, their first introduction to indian cuisine and culture. she encouraged anna thomas, a college student from california, to write the vegetarian epicure, a hit with counterculture and mainstream cooks and eaters alike. she found a singular voice and perspective in the stories and recipes of claudia roden, whose book of middle eastern food knopf published in 1972. she convinced james beard to write beard on bread, which came out in ’73. and she became a true collaborator with edna lewis, one of the most influential and iconic voices in american cooking. lewis was black, the granddaughter of formerly enslaved people who had helped settle a farming community called freetown in virginia’s piedmont region. knopf published lewis’ the taste of country cooking in america’s bicentennial year, making a powerful, celebratory statement about the influence of the african diaspora on american culture, and of black cooks on what we’ve come to think of as american food. lewis dedicated the book to the people of freetown, and to judith jones “for her deep understanding.” the 15 year span between the launch of mastering and edna lewis’ taste were some of the most tumultuous and formative in american culture; movements for civil rights, women’s liberation, environmental conservation, and an end to the vietnam war rocked the nation, and the rise of identity politics and an overhaul of america’s immigration policy raised important questions about who, and what, counted as american. the cookbooks jones worked on, and the authors with whom she collaborated, did the same, both mirroring and shaping shifts in american culture. jones’ editorial skills and prowess, her dogged attention to detail, and her devoted, intimate collaboration with her authors are now the stuff of legend. but her particular genius was in using food as a lens, and cookbooks as a form, to bring people to the literal and proverbial table, encouraging them to communicate across differences of race, religion, nationality, region, gender, sexual orientation, and class sometimes without their even knowing it through the universal language of food. though other forms of media glossy magazines, cable tv, and, later, the internet began to take up more of the food space starting in the 1980s, jones continued to make influential cookbooks right up until she died in 2017, 60 years after she started at knopf. all of which is to say: the way we cook and eat indeed, the way we live has been under judith jones’ influence for a long time now. we are all the better for it. thanks for signing up! you can manage your newsletter subscriptions at any time. slate is published by the slate group, a graham holdings company. all contents © 2025 the slate group llc. all rights reserved.

if you know the history of cookbook publishing, you know about judith jones. through her work with julia child, edna lewis, madhur jaffrey, claudia roden, and others, judith helped usher in the modern cookbook era and changed the culinary world in the process. on today’s episode, host kerry diamond talks about judith with sara b. franklin, author of the new book “the editor: how publishing legend judith jones shaped culture in america.” they discuss the email that led to sara and judith’s friendship, and in turn, this book, which is a comprehensive look at judith’s incredible life and career. they also discuss judith’s thoughts on the nora ephron film “julie & julia,” and the blog on which it was based, and sara shares her take on the recent hbo max series “julia.” thank you to veuve clicquot's la grande dame, kerrygold, and le creuset for supporting our show. grab tickets for our opentable sit with us event in new orleans on june 6th here. visit cherry bombe’s event calendar for more information on our upcoming summer series & jubilee wine country hosted by kerry diamondproduced by catherine baker and elizabeth vogtedited by jenna sadhucontent operations manager londyn crenshawrecorded at newsstand studios at rockefeller center more on sara: instagram, “the editor” more on kerry: instagram host copyright © 2025 apple inc. all rights reserved. to listen to explicit episodes, sign in. stay up to date with this show sign in or sign up to follow shows, save episodes, and get the latest updates.

our recipes and stories, delivered. by clicking go, i agree to recieve news and updates from taste and penguin random house. i acknowledge that i have read and agree to the penguin random house’s privacy policy and terms of use and understand that penguin random house collects certain categories of personal information for the purposes listed in that policy, discloses, sells, or shares certain personal information and retains personal information in accordance with the policy. you can opt out of the sale or sharing of personal information anytime. this is a story told in lunches. it is april of 2013, and i am in the kitchen with judith jones. she is chopping hard boiled eggs and parsley. on the counter, there is a jar of cornichons and another of capers. nearby, a stem of cherry tomatoes, a bunch of arugula, and half a baguette. judith tells me she is making sauce gribiche; we could have it with some roast beef leftover from earlier in the week, served cold with the day old bread, sliced and toasted into its second life. judith, who is 88 years old to my 26, moves with the ease of a practiced cook. she rocks her knife blade cleanly across the scarred wooden cutting board. she trusts her hands. judith, who has recently retired as senior editor and vice president of alfred a. knopf after 57 years, is best known for rescuing anne frank’s the diary of a young girl from the so called “slush pile” of unpublished manuscripts in the early 1950s, and for “discovering” and publishing julia child. but she also edited the poetry of sylvia plath, as well as that of langston hughes and sharon olds. she was anne tyler’s and john updike’s longtime editor, too. in the cookbook world, her list was both dazzling and dizzyingly long: edna lewis, m. f. k. fisher, irene kuo, marion cunningham, claudia roden, anna thomas. madhur jaffrey. joan nathan. james beard. some of judith’s culinary authors are less widely known, but where they are recognized, they and their books are revered: bill neal. nina simonds. hiroko shimbo. ken hom. she cowrote three cookbooks with her husband, richard evan jones, and one, the l.l. bean game and fish cookbook, with angus cameron, her first mentor at knopf. then, at 85 years old, judith published her first cookbook that was all her own: the pleasures of cooking for one. she is among the most influential literary editors of the 20th century, and she is widely considered the most influential cookbook editor to date. judith and i have met only once before, on a frigid day in january 2013 when i was sent to her apartment on manhattan’s upper east side on a sort of professional blind date. when judith left knopf, the julia child foundation had set out to collect her oral histories into an archive, to ensure her stories and legacy weren’t lost to memory. my involvement in the project was borne of a moment of kismet; in my first semester of a doctoral program in food studies in new york, i happened to be at my professor’s elbow when she received an email from the foundation, asking if she could assist them in getting the collection of judith’s oral histories off the ground. i committed the sender’s address to memory and wrote them that day, eagerly volunteering my help. i thought i might become a research assistant; at best, perhaps i would meet judith once. but to my surprise and delight, i was offered the reins as lead researcher and interviewer on the condition that judith liked me well enough for us to work together. i’d grown up with two working parents who liked to eat. most of the cooking responsibilities fell on my second wave feminist mother, an occasional baker who deeply resented the nightly obligation to get dinner on the table. i, however, was drawn to the kitchen, and i taught myself to cook by experimenting with the few cookbooks we had at home (an old edition of fannie farmer, the moosewood cookbook, anna thomas’s the vegetarian epicure, and a well thumbed copy of joy of cooking) and mimicking what i saw after school on the food network. i used my first check to send away for a subscription to gourmet, which i discovered in the checkout line at grand union in my hometown in the suburbs of new york city. i read each issue from cover to cover and quickly realized i was more interested in the magazine’s stories than its recipes. it was in gourmet that i first learned about many of judith jones’s iconic authors, though at the time i didn’t know who judith was or that she’d worked with them. i went to college to study history and public health, but i dropped out in my final term to care for my dying mother. when my dad fell ill and died less than three years after her, i spent a few unmoored years working a variety of jobs in food and farming, trying my hand at a bit of freelance food writing on the side. in the fall of 2012, much in need of an anchor, i began a doctoral program in food studies in new york. i welcomed the program’s structure, but i reentered academia reluctantly: what i really wanted to do was write. by the time i met judith, she’d become something of a hero to me; she had been ever since i discovered her 2007 memoir, the tenth muse: my life in food, in a bookstore near my college campus and realized that she’d edited all the cookbooks i admired most. as such, i’d been nervous to meet her. palms sweating, stomach doing flips. turns out i needn’t have worried. that first day, judith invited me into her living room and served me tea and homemade oatmeal cookies she pulled from a battered tin kept in a linen closet long ago repurposed as a pantry. we sat side by side on her sofa, our knees nearly touching. a consummate editor, judith drew me out. despite the more than sixty year age gap between us, we found common ground in our feelings about “foodie” snobbism (annoying), the state of american politics (a mess), cold water swimming (enlivening), and dogs (essential). before i left that day, judith agreed to work with me. when i see judith on the day of the sauce gribiche, the tantalizing tease of spring hangs in the air. she greets me at the door in pressed slacks and a gorgeous, cream colored silk blouse, with pearl studs in her ears. her white hair, cut into a girlish bob, is held away from her face by a slim headband. she wears a brightly striped full length apron cinched tightly around her tiny waist. when i’d called to set a date for our first interview, she’d suggested a midweek afternoon. “but let’s have lunch first,” she’d said. i’d been surprised. “what can i bring?” i’d asked. “oh, nothing,” judith said. i could almost see her waving my question away, performing the role of total host. judith’s apartment is on the ninth floor of the same building where she grew up, on new york upper east side. when i arrive there at the appointed time, she ushers me into her kitchen which is as compact, tidy, and pragmatic as she is and resumes her post at the counter, humming along to the classical music playing in the next room. at first, i stand awkwardly, trying to figure out where i, usually most at ease when busy in the kitchen, fit in this kitchen with this legendary woman. when i’d interviewed for the gig, i’d been warned that judith had a certain “new england” reserve and could be hard to get to know; words like “prickly” and “formidable” had been used to describe her. that hadn’t been my first experience of judith, but, nervous all over again once we were officially on professional terms, i’d doubted myself, succumbing to the tropes long used to demonize powerful women. and so, when judith had suggested lunch, i’d assumed that she would present me with a finished meal. that she would want to present herself to me the same way: composed. complete. that she wouldn’t want me to witness her in the process of making. judith’s performance of formality, i’d soon learn, was but a practiced facade, an affect she’d spent her life using to gain entry to spaces reluctant to let women through, and as a protective shield wherever, whenever, and with whomever she wasn’t sure it was safe to drop her guard. by which i mean: i was wrong. when judith offers me no instructions, i take a chef’s knife from the magnetic strip on the wall, find another cutting board, set it beside judith’s, roll up my sleeves, and join in the slicing and assembling, helping to set the table. i want to be of use. spring arrives in earnest, and judith and i meet every two weeks for an interview. we begin, always, by improvising lunch. i am with the queen of cookbooks, but we prepare our meals without a recipe in sight. judith always presents me with some starting point, and from there, we jump off together. once it was a half eaten roast chicken, which we picked for chicken salad and punched up with ingredients from the fridge and shelves: crème fraîche, celery, toasted almonds, and dried tarragon. another time, it was leftover rice paired with a gleaming fillet of fish roasted fast in a hot oven, drizzled with a quick pan sauce of thinly sliced garlic barely browned in a mix of butter and olive oil, and finished with white wine and lemon juice. each time i call to confirm our interview dates and ask what i can bring, judith resists my efforts to contribute and plan. (instead, i bring pretty, if unnecessary, things: delicate macarons, a bouquet of daffodils.) in this way, judith ensures our joint spontaneity while maintaining a certain degree of control. it is a savvy editorial move. while we work, we chat a bit, almost exclusively about the food we are preparing. mostly, though, we are quiet, our senses attuned to the task at hand. we pinch salt with our fingers, lick spatters off the backs of our hands, gently grasp one another’s shoulders for unspoken excuse mes while maneuvering in the small space. we begin to know each other this way, develop a rapport. only after washing up and brewing coffee do we begin our interviews in earnest. we talk about her early childhood in 1920s and ’30s manhattan; her mother’s rigid, insecure clinging to status and judith’s early aversion to that sort of social climbing. she tells me of her first experience in publishing during a winter break from bennington college; how, at age 17, she was thrown into editing manuscripts at doubleday without instruction and learned to do the work guided by her gut. she tells me of how dull she found the new york literary scene after the war, how she took off with a friend on a three week european tour in the summer of ’48 and ended up staying in paris for three years, meeting and marrying her husband there, an american journalist and a great lover of food. she tells me how dismal the us food scene of the early 1950s seemed after the vividness of that in france; how this is what made her jump when she received the manuscript that would become mastering the art of french cooking at knopf in 1959. we talk about her desperate desire for children, and her great sadness at her inability to ever become pregnant; how she changed tack, turning her focus wholly to a career after that. (later, she and her husband adopted a friend’s two half grown children after he fell ill. judith talks about how hard it was to manage her marriage, child rearing, and a relentlessly demanding career all at once; she had, judith tells me, no model for that then.) i pepper her with questions about her work in cookbooks, trying to get at what exactly she was trying to accomplish in that form. and while judith is openly reflective about her personal life in a way that seems to surprise us both, when it comes to her authors, she remains guarded and discreet; she calls those relationships “a kind of sacred trust.” she wears a brightly striped full length apron cinched tightly around her tiny waist. our work together is not complete by late may, when judith leaves to spend an extended summer at bryn teg, her little mountainside house in northern vermont. i assume we will need to wait until fall, when she returns to new york. again, my assumption is wrong. judith asks if i’d like to come to bryn teg once she’s settled in. it is her most beloved place, i know, and i’m flattered by the intimacy of the invitation. it is june 2013, and i am at bryn teg. i arrived midmorning, but judith asked if she might have more time alone she is working on the book that will be her last, love me, feed me before we convene. so i went for a walk, then a swim in judith’s pond, the water bracingly cold. judith and i find one another in her bright, unfussy kitchen with its view of the green mountains to the west. we are both more casual here, she in worn khakis and a knobby cardigan, i in faded jeans cuffed above my bare feet, my still wet hair soaking the back of my tank top. judith leads me to a small table, lifts a blue tea towel set atop a mixing bowl, releasing the earthy sweet scent of yeast. judith tells me she started the dough early in the morning without a plan. “pizza?” she suggests, standing close to me. her eyes are alight, inviting me back into our ongoing on the fly culinary collaboration. i nod. judith cranks the oven of her hulking, black industrial style range and slides two terra cotta tiles onto the metal rack inside: a macgyvered pizza stone. then she fishes half a glossy purple eggplant from the fridge, and a ball of fresh mozzarella, too. she hands me a knife, and we both begin to slice. we work close together. our shoulders almost touch. “i have chives and some basil growing outside,” judith says. i reach up to the pegboard for a pair of shears and go out back, the screen door slamming behind me, to snip herbs from judith’s stone rimmed herb garden. tiny red fraises de bois grow low to the ground, punctuating all that green. when i return to the kitchen, judith is up on tiptoe, using her meager body weight to press the dough into rounds. we overcook the first pizza, incinerating the fresh herbs on its top. i am flustered, but judith seems unfazed. i pick the charred bits off we are both constitutionally averse to waste and we salvage all we can. the next batch is better, the eggplant browned into submission, melted cheese oozing below. we remember, this time, to scatter the basil and chives after the pie comes out of the oven. the herbs grow fragrant in the pizza’s radiant heat. we eat lunch on the front deck in the bright midday sun. we both have a second glass of cold white wine, a crisp, tart vermont apple for dessert. apple in hand, judith loses herself for a few moments looking out at the mountains. i observe her in her reverie, a sacred moment in her most sacred place. it is october 2013, and judith is back in new york. i’d called to tell her that the transcripts i’ve made of our interviews are ready for her review. she invites me to lunch; says i can bring them in person. i’d expected her to ask me to send the documents by post (judith barely uses email, having never quite figured out how). it is my first hint that our relationship might continue. i want it to. badly. after years of admiring her from afar, i’ve come to adore the woman herself. i take care to gather thoughtful offerings to bring with me, things i think she will like: fresh bread, pears, dark chocolate, and two kinds of cheese (one creamy and french, the other a firmer one from portugal). when i arrive, judith has started preparing a green salad, put together a vinaigrette in an old mustard jar. i unpack my bag. judith unwraps the cheeses and sets them on plates to come up to room temperature. she puts her face close to each wedge to deeply inhale its barnyard scent. without invitation or instruction, i get a knife and cutting board and help finish the salad. by now, our kitchen dialogue has become a familiar routine. i wonder if it’s possible that judith and i are becoming friends. it is late october 2014. i show up at judith’s, dressed up, on a date we’d made to have lunch. i’d told her not to worry about anything, that i’d take care of it all. i have planned a surprise. there is no particular occasion, but that autumn i am in a celebratory mood. in september, i got married. we invited judith, though i knew she’d be in vermont. she had sent her regrets. judith is startled when i arrive at her apartment empty handed, even more so when i tell her i’m taking her out. but she rises to the occasion. she goes to her bedroom to change, puts on a bit more makeup. we walk the short distance to the subway station to ride the train downtown. i take her arm as we descend the stairs. judith and i have never been out in public together before. the restaurant is a new york classic, blessedly immune to food trends. when we round the corner toward its glassy entrance and judith realizes where it is i’m taking her, she seems relieved; she tells me she feels it’s one of the only really good restaurants left in new york. the host takes our coats. in the dining room, i wonder if anyone recognizes judith. part of me wants them to. i am so proud to be beside this remarkable woman, now 90 years old. i want her to be celebrated everywhere she goes. but the staff, accustomed to celebrities, is discreet; whether they know who judith is or not, they make no extra fuss. i order champagne and oysters to start. judith chooses a seafood chowder; i, a grilled pork chop. judith makes audible sounds of appreciation as she slurps cold mollusks from their shells and then hot soup from her spoon. when she has finished most of the chowder, she brings the bowl to her lips and tips it back to get the last creamy drops. i laugh out loud. i love the ardor with which judith eats and lives, her unabashed pleasure in her own pleasure. it is early spring 2015. i have canceled many lunch dates with judith at the last minute because i am undergoing fertility treatments and am at my doctor’s beck and call; i am at the hospital almost daily. i am anxious and exhausted. i have not yet told judith any of this (though i will soon, and it will be both a tremendous unburdening for me and a point of deep connection between us, judith having tried so hard to conceive many decades before). instead i have made up excuses every time i bail and felt a deep shame at doing so. finally, i’m able to keep a date with judith. when i arrive at her apartment, though, judith seems exhausted, too. neither of us asks the other why. we delay talk of lunch, instead diverting ourselves by walking to the post office so that judith can send a package. on the way back, she suggests we stop at a corner italian place. judith says she likes the pizza there. i want her to be celebrated everywhere she goes. we are both wrapped in jackets and scarves, but we are northeasterners at the tail end of winter, starved for sun, so we sit outside. judith’s little dog lies under the table at her feet. we are both keeping secrets about our bodies and their unruliness; i do not know, yet, that judith has recently been diagnosed with alzheimer’s disease. but i notice that the woman whose vigor, to me, has seemed unflappable, so robust into her tenth decade, seems suddenly more distracted and frail. there is construction going on down the block, and it’s difficult to converse. the sun is bright but not very warm. we’re both chilled by the time the check comes. i grab it before judith can, but she insists we split it down the middle. we walk back to her apartment, make coffee. afterward, judith says she thinks she’d like a nap. i kiss her cool cheek, then slip out. it is april 2017. i arrive at judith’s apartment to meet a woman named meri, who has been living with and helping care for her for many months now. it has been a long time since i’ve seen judith; the previous may, my husband and i moved two hours upstate. four months later, i gave birth to twins. i have been overwhelmed with caregiving, and my changed body, mind, and marriage are unrecognizable to me. i have missed judith and our lunches terribly. her stepdaughter, bronwyn, has kept in touch with me via email. i’ve known for nearly a year about the alzheimer’s. when i finally find childcare, i call judith’s apartment, speak with meri on the phone, arrange a visit. i drive to the city with my breast pump in the passenger seat, moving through space between three of the people i love most, two just beginning their lives and one nearing the end of hers. i feel free and heartsick at once. when i see judith, i am taken aback by how much has shrunk. meri is an excellent cook and has prepared lunch, a beautiful chicken salad with mandarins and celery. she tells me that, when judith feels up to it, they cook together. meri serves judith and me in the formal dining room; judith and i have never eaten there before. i ask meri to join us, but she declines, saying judith and i need to catch up. she tells me judith has been excited for this. judith focuses her energy on bringing her fork from her plate to her mouth. we sip wine from judith’s good crystal. i am too sad to eat much. instead i talk, tell judith about my work, the streams and mountains, my new house, my babies. i’m grateful to have news to share. when meri brings in an elaborate chocolate dessert, a celebration cake her son shipped to her from the nation of georgia where meri was born and where her son still lives judith lights up. “i’m trying to get meri to write a cookbook!” she tells me. “it’s true,” meri says, serving judith a slice. i laugh, so relieved to know that the judith i’ve come to love is still alive, still with us. sometimes, at least. after lunch, judith is visibly fatigued, and she needs to lie down. i do not know for certain, but i intuit that it will be the last time i see her. i try to hide that i am choked up when i gently hug judith goodbye at the door. it is august 2017. judith has died. bronwyn, her stepdaughter, told me there would be a public memorial in the city come fall, but she has invited me to a service for friends and family only at the small, clapboard church judith attended in vermont. my twins are 11 months old; my hands are full. but i do not hesitate. i leave the babies with their father and our babysitter and drive the five hours north. after the memorial, i stand outside, surrounded by those closest to judith. i am not sure i belong there. i feel better when i spot meri, who remembers me. she is holding judith’s dog, mabon, in her arms. both my cheeks and meri’s are streaked with tears. when bronwyn sees me, she pulls me aside. she says she has just begun to think about judith’s apartment in new york. bronwyn knows i’ve written a few things about judith’s life and work; i’ve sent my pieces to her. she tells me there is an awful lot of material in the apartment, and she asks if i’d like to have a look, help her decide what to do with it all. i do not quite know what i am getting myself into, and i have no business saying yes to a new undertaking at this moment in my life; i can barely get the babies and myself fed. still, i want to be of use, and i recognize immediately the possibility that exists in gaining access to judith’s personal papers. i do not know yet that i will write a book about judith, nor all the ways my life will change in the years it takes; the ways the writing itself will change my life. i know, though, how much judith has already shaped me since we first met. i know that i am being offered an almost unimaginable gift. and i know that, because i loved judith, i must say yes. so i do. cook with us. get our freshest features and recipes weekly. by clicking go, i agree to recieve news and updates from taste and penguin random house. i acknowledge that i have read and agree to the penguin random house’s privacy policy and terms of use and understand that penguin random house collects certain categories of personal information for the purposes listed in that policy, discloses, sells, or shares certain personal information and retains personal information in accordance with the policy. you can opt out of the sale or sharing of personal information anytime. sara b. franklin, phd, is a writer and professor at new york university’s gallatin school for individualized study, where she teaches courses on food, oral history, embodied culture, and nonfiction writing. she is the author of the editor: how publishing legend judith jones shaped culture in america (atria books, 2024), editor of the acclaimed 2018 anthology edna lewis: at the table with an american original, coauthor of the james beard award nominated the phoenicia diner cookbook, and the recipient of a public scholars fellowship from the national endowment for the humanities. her work has appeared in publications including the new york times, the washington post, literary hub, the nation, and travel + leisure. she lives with her twin children in kingston, new york. stay in touch with taste

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supported by a good appetite from her work with julia child, madhur jaffrey and edna lewis, judith jones revolutionized american cookbook publishing. by melissa clark 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.”

“the woman who created the modern cookbook. from her work with julia child, madhur jaffrey and edna lewis, judith jones revolutionized american cookbook publishing. 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.”   the new york times “a deft, richly detailed biography…taut but sumptuous…without the impact of judith jones, american culture would be far more bland; without the editor, literary history would be just as incomplete.”   under the radar “with franklin’s sterling new biography, judith jones finally takes the seat of honor at the head of the table.”   washington monthly “essential”  the new york times “some biographers allow their subjects too much slack and are hesitant to find fault with them. others have difficulty making convincing assessments possibly because they are too smitten with whom they are writing about.