The Tastemaker
On a dreary afternoon in 1949, Judith Jones perched at her typewriter in Doubleday’s Paris office. As she composed rejection letters for unsolicited manuscripts, a slim volume buried in the slush pile caught the 25-year-old secretary’s eye. The cover photo was a haunting image of a young girl with a searching gaze and dark, wavy hair. The book, an advance copy slated for a limited print run in France, was a diary by a 13-year-old German Jewish girl named Anne Frank who had spent years hiding in an Amsterdam attic before her death in a Nazi concentration camp. Jones read the entire book in one sitting, transfixed by the intimacy of the diary entries and the author’s singular voice.
Stunned that the book had been relegated to the reject pile, Jones pleaded with a senior editor to buy the English-language rights and publish the diary for the American market. As Jones later recalled, he asked, “What, that book by that kid?” Jones persisted, urging him to reconsider. It was a tough sell: In the postwar environment, publishers were reluctant to revisit the dark days of the Holocaust. But it was good—and lucrative—advice. When Doubleday finally published the U.S. version of Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl in 1952, it was an overnight phenomenon, soon dubbed a “classic” by The New York Times. Anne Frank became one of the best-selling books in history and, in 2000, was ranked number two on the Boston Public Library’s “100 Most Influential Books of the Century.”
One might assume that it was Jones’s discovery of Anne Frank that launched her luminous, era-defining career. But as the historian Sara B. Franklin writes in The Editor, the first book-length biography of Jones, that’s not what happened. Indeed, Jones’s pivotal role in Anne Frank’s U.S. publication remained publicly unacknowledged for decades. In the almost uniformly male world of 1950s book publishing, Jones was still treated as little more than a secretary for years after the memoir’s publication, without standing to acquire her own authors or attend editorial meetings.
It would take her improbable discovery of a second overlooked manuscript to later appear on the “100 Most Influential Books” list to finally change that. Nearly a decade after the U.S. publication of Anne Frank, Jones was back in her hometown of New York City and working at Alfred A. Knopf when she came across the manuscript of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, a 750-page tome of authentic recipes written by an unknown American expat named Julia Child and two French colleagues.
The story of her discovery of Mastering, and her four-decade partnership with Child, provides the spine of this delightful biography that explores Jones’s instrumental role in fostering a literature dedicated to the celebration and culture of food in America, while simultaneously contributing to the American canon of literary fiction and poetry. Franklin convincingly argues that Jones’s impact was expansive, shaping “what we cook and eat, the stories we read and the ones we tell.” And yet Jones remains relatively unknown to the public. This biography, Franklin writes, “is my attempt to give the editor, the woman, her due.”
By the time Mastering’s massive manuscript arrived at Knopf, it had been rejected by multiple publishers. It was perceived to be too long, too technical, too expensive to print, and, in 1950s America, where postwar cooking was characterized by canned ingredients and prepackaged foods, too old-fashioned. And yet Jones, by then a junior editor, was instantly charmed. During her years in Paris, she had become a proficient home cook, even briefly cohosting a pop-up restaurant. Back in New York, she struggled to re-create beloved French dishes. Jones took the manuscript home, and over the course of months, tested dozens of recipes.
At the time, cookbooks were little more than dull manuals. Mastering seemed a marvel—exquisitely detailed, with step-by-step instructions, tailored to home cooks lacking professional skills, and with an eye to ingredients available in American supermarkets. “Reading and studying this book seems to me as good as taking a basic course at the Cordon Bleu,” Jones told her fellow editors. And the cookbook was more than a how-to book—it teemed with discussion of French culture and history, and practical, even cheeky, advice. A section on making quenelles, for example, was labeled “In Case of Disaster,” and counseled the reader that if a prepared cream paste turned out to be too soft, “it will taste every bit as good if you declare it to be a mousse.”
Jones’s pivotal role in the U.S. publication of Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl was publicly unacknowledged for decades. In the male world of ’50s book publishing, Jones was still treated as little more than a secretary for years after the memoir’s publication.
Still, there were formidable hurdles to publication, beginning with Jones herself. While she had edited some of Knopf’s most promising authors, including John Updike and Elizabeth Bowen, she did so anonymously, rarely working directly with the writers. With limited standing at the publisher, Jones worried that her own reputation might suffer—that she might be “pigeonholed as unserious and unduly interested in ‘women’s stuff,’ ” Franklin writes. Equally important, cookbooks were well outside Knopf’s usual literary wheelhouse and of little interest to the predominantly male editorial team.
Without a seat at the editorial table, Jones worked behind the scenes, trumpeting the manuscript to her colleagues. To her delight, a senior editor greenlit the manuscript and it was assigned to Jones. With no house style for cookbooks, Jones created her own.
Editing Mastering took two years. Jones helped the authors “organize, clarify, and finesse” their manuscript, and gave substantive advice, like adding a chapter on hearty peasant dishes. Julia Child “used me as a guinea pig,” Jones recalled, sending her to scout American grocery stores for “obscure” ingredients, including, astonishingly, mushrooms. Jones tested hundreds of recipes in her own home kitchen.
When First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy hired a French chef for the White House, the timing for Mastering’s release in October 1961 seemed propitious. After Craig Claiborne at The New York Times praised the cookbook as “the most comprehensive, laudable and monumental work on the subject,” Jones booked an appearance on NBC’s Today Show, where Child and coauthor Simone Beck prepared a French omelet live on the air. Jones scheduled a book signing and demonstration at Bloomingdale’s for the next morning; the authors were mobbed by crowds. By the end of the first week, Knopf had doubled the initial press run of 10,000 books and arranged for a third. Jones hurriedly organized a West Coast tour with live demonstrations and book signings. In an era in which virtually all the publicity done for a new release consisted of courting book reviewers, Jones was an early innovator in using promotional campaigns to market books.
Jones continued to build on Mastering’s momentum. That winter, a guest spot on the Boston public television station, WGBH, to promote the book led to an invitation for Child to pilot a live cooking show, The French Chef. National syndication followed, along with surging book sales. Jones capitalized on the synergy between Child’s cookbook and her television program, with the show driving book sales and the book attracting viewers. She wrote to Child, “I am flabbergasted at the way you seem to have catapulted into fame overnight.” Buoyed by the success of the TV show, Knopf published a follow-up called The French Chef Cookbook; it sold 200,000 copies.
The extraordinary, unprecedented success of Mastering ignited Jones’s interest in cookbooks of all kinds, and bolstered Knopf’s confidence in their marketability. Following Mastering’s blueprint, Jones innovated a whole new genre, elevating cookbooks to a literary form.
Jones ambitiously aimed to expand the nation’s palate. In an age in which the most outré “ethnic” dish Americans were comfortable with was chicken chow mein, she published Claudia Roden’s A Book of Middle Eastern Food, Madhur Jaffrey’s An Invitation to Indian Cooking, and Irene Kuo’s The Key to Chinese Cooking. Jones was drawn to each author not merely for their culinary expertise, but also for their ability to write. Kuo “had a gift with language,” Jones recalled. “She talked about ‘velveting’ little pieces of chicken, ‘slippery coating’ them. You could practically eat the words, they were so seductive.”
Jones actively sought out many of her cookbook authors, ignoring celebrity chefs in favor of authentic regional and ethnic cooks like Edna Lewis, the granddaughter of an emancipated slave raised in a town in Tidewater Virginia founded by freedmen. Lewis’s The Taste of Country Cooking was as genuinely vernacular as American jazz, Franklin notes, blending local ingredients like catfish with the French haute cuisine enslaved cooks had prepared for the planter elite. Lewis’s book, which combined recipes with memoirs and history, marked a turning point for Jones, who embarked on a sort of culinary anthropology tour with her husband, traveling across the U.S. and sampling regional foods. Jones published previously unknown American cooks like Bill Neal (Biscuits, Spoonbread, and Sweet Potato Pie) and Himilce Novas (Latin American Cooking Across the U.S.A.), as well as more established names, like Joan Nathan (Jewish Cooking in America) under a new imprint, “Knopf Cooks American.” The series helped popularize the idea of food as culture. The elevation of diverse voices contributed to a celebration of a rich multicultural American identity that today seems self-evident.
Jones was as responsible for the culinary transformation of 20th-century America as anyone. “Food started getting serious respect largely because of her,” Ruth Reichl, former editor of Gourmet magazine, once commented. “When you talk about the cookbook revolution, she was the revolution.” But while Jones’s legacy rests primarily on her work with cookbooks, her career was equally notable for its extraordinary breadth. She spent more than 50 years at Knopf, the apogee of literary publishing, working well into her 80s, and her impeccable taste made her a legend in her industry. She shared in Knopf’s erudite, prodigious talent pool, working with authors like Updike, Anne Tyler, John Hersey, and Peter Mayle, whose A Year in Provence sold 6 million copies and bridged the gap between literary memoir and food writing. Jones’s true love was poetry, and she edited collections by Sylvia Plath, Langston Hughes, and Sharon Olds.
Part of Jones’s success was her ability to identify large cultural shifts and take advantage of emerging markets. She did so in the world of literature, editing Updike’s Couples, an early literary exploration of sexual freedom published after the “summer of love,” and in the world of cooking, capitalizing on the back-to-the-land movement and vegetarianism, with Kit Foster’s The Organic Gardener and Anna Thomas’s The Vegetarian Epicure.
Jones was a hands-on editor, beloved by her authors. Those who required constant attention—like Updike, who “knew everything that he wanted,” Jones said—received daily calls and letters. The food writer Phyllis Richman praised Jones’s restrained editorial style, saying, “The gentle handling that a soufflé requires is nothing compared to the handling of an author.” With no budget for recipe testing, Jones joined her food writers in their busy kitchens, taking copious notes and sampling unfamiliar ingredients. Jones was “there all the time,” Madhur Jaffrey recalled, and grew to “know the book intimately, just as intimately as I know the book. How rare is that?”
Jones nurtured collegial, collaborative relationships among her authors, encouraging them to share publicity strategies and contacts, and to host events for one another. She gathered her cookbook authors together in her own kitchen and joined them as they prepared meals. And she distributed copies of their books among her other writers. Updike remarked in one letter that the newly published Anne Tyler was “not merely good, but wickedly good.”
“The work of editors,” Franklin notes, is “inconspicuous by design.” To read Jones’s authors is to encounter “the invisible hand of an extraordinary editor,” as Julia Child’s own biographer, Laura Shapiro, put it. “Of course you don’t see her. That’s why she was great.” But while invisibility might be a desirable trait in an editor, it can be befuddling for a biographer. Reading The Editor, it can be hard to discern the exact nature of Jones’s contributions to the novels and collections she edited. Franklin endeavors to meet the challenge, thanks to a rich archive comprising oral histories and decades of personal and professional correspondence. The result is a joyful feast for students of literary history. Still, the more serious reader of Updike or Tyler might be stymied in their desire to understand more explicitly how Jones’s invisible hand shaped beloved characters or specific themes.
The story of Jones’s discovery of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and her four-decade partnership with Julia Child, provides the spine of this delightful biography that explores Jones’s instrumental role in fostering a literature dedicated to the celebration and culture of food in America.
Franklin links Jones’s editorial invisibility to a second kind of invisibility—her virtual absence from popular recognition. She argues that Jones’s “veiled historical import owes much to the fact that she is a woman; misogyny shaped the arc of her life and career and continues to diminish her legacy today.” Indeed, as Franklin illustrates, Jones’s professional colleagues at Knopf—unlike those in the culinary world, who lauded Jones as a visionary—were slower to recognize her legacy. Throughout her career, she was woefully underpaid and underappreciated, a fact Franklin attributes to her gender.
Most significantly, Franklin asserts, “Judith’s impact on American culture and literature has been further muted due to the genre with which, to the extent she is known at all, she is associated: cookbooks.” Perhaps no longer. With Franklin’s sterling new biography, Judith Jones finally takes the seat of honor at the head of the table.
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