Judith Jones signs a copy of her book for an admirer. Photo by Joseph Gresser
The Tenth Muse — My Life in Food by Judith Jones of Walden; published in 2007 by Alfred A. Knopf in New York; 290 pages; hardcover; $24.95
Reviewed by Joseph Gresser
HARDWICK — “I’m a Vermonter,” Judith Jones declared at the beginning of a reading at The Galaxy Bookshop here Thursday evening, November 15. Ms. Jones’ proud pronouncement underlined one of the themes of her recently published book, The Tenth Muse, the connection between place and cuisine.
Ms. Jones is an enthusiastic cook who, by good luck, became a renowned editor of cookbooks, not incidentally including Mastering the Art of French Cooking, the book that put Julia Child on the map and revolutionized the way Americans eat.
In The Tenth Muse Ms. Jones traces her life story through the development of her appreciation of culinary traditions.
Her story starts at her family’s table, overseen by her mother who forbade the cook to use onions or garlic except for the carefully calibrated number of pearl onions allowed in lamb stew.
Ms. Jones begins her book by telling how her mother, when she was in her nineties, asked, “Do you really like garlic?” Ms. Jones told her Hardwick audience that when she admitted to really liking garlic her mother knew that “her fallen daughter was beyond redemption.”
The family cook, Edie, was from Barbados. Edie, when asked by the young Ms. Jones, then Miss Bailey, what she planned to make for her boyfriend on her day off, described a very different style of cooking than what was served in the Bailey household.
“I wanted to go to Harlem,” Ms. Jones said, as she recalled her curiosity about Edie’s real style of cooking.
Instead Ms. Jones went to Vermont. Her father hailed from Montpelier, but the family lived in New York City during the winter and spent summers in Greensboro. One year Ms. Jones persuaded her family to let her stay the winter in Montpelier with her grandmother.
Ms. Jones says her grandmother wasn’t much of a cook. But her aunt Marian, who lived nearby with her husband, a local doctor, was a person who expressed her love through the food she served.
Even Ms. Jones’ noncooking grandmother made sure that her cook prepared enough at every meal so no one who stopped by the house would ever be sent away hungry. She recalls the cook proudly showing her the mark hobos made on a nearby tree to tell others of their brotherhood that a generous soul lived in the house.
Ms. Jones learned from these cooks what food can express, but she didn’t really learn to cook. That part of her education had to wait until she graduated from Bennington and went to Paris for a three-week vacation that eventually lasted three and a half years.
During her stay in France, Ms. Jones encountered a culture with an entirely different and more direct appreciation of food. While talking about food at her family table was regarded as vulgar as discussing sex would be, the French were enthusiastic and vocal in their appreciation.
Ms. Jones relates how one day while standing in a line outside a bakery she saw a man break open a baguette to discover the loaf was white inside. His joy at the return to fine white flour after the deprivations of the war years was contagious. He passed the loaf around, and soon the whole crowd joined in his vocal delight.
Although Ms. Jones’ family had a fairly bland diet, they did enjoy delicacies like sweetbreads and other organ meat. As a result, Ms. Jones says, she was well prepared to taste anything set before her.
In addition to developing a good working knowledge of French food, Ms. Jones met her husband, Evan, during her Parisian sojourn. The two shared a love of good food and enjoyed cooking together.
All was not wining and dining. Ms. Jones worked as an assistant at the Paris office of Doubleday, the publishing company. One day Ms. Jones was told by her boss to write a batch of rejection letters.
While looking through the books that were thought unworthy of publication, Ms. Jones’ found herself interested in one volume, which she spent the rest of the day reading. When her boss returned she informed him that Doubleday simply had to publish the book Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl. It became, of course, an immediate classic.
Eventually the Joneses decided to return to the United States. There, on the strength of her success with Anne Frank, Ms. Jones got a job with eminent publishing house Knopf.
But something was missing. New York in the fifties was a culinary wasteland. When they wanted to cook some of their favorite French dishes, the young couple found that the ingredients were not to be found anywhere and they had no idea how to substitute other available ingredients for those that were missing. Nor did they really know the proper techniques to prepare the food.
So when a cookbook unlike any other appeared at the Knopf office, Ms. Jones knew what she had. Written by a trio of women that included one Julia Child, the book carefully explained in a comprehensive fashion, the basics, and more, of French cuisine.
Ms. Jones’ colleagues asked, “Who would want such a book?” The answer, Ms. Jones said to the Hardwick audience, was “I would.” And she knew that if she was interested there would be many others who would feel the same way.
She worked with Ms. Childs and her colleagues, tested recipes, and even came up with the eventual title — Mastering the Art of French Cooking.
The quality of the book and Ms. Childs’ larger-than-life personality as seen on television sets across the country made it a big hit. As home cooks expanded their culinary repertories, they demanded the necessary ingredients from their local stores.
Items that just a few years before were hard to find in Manhattan became widely available across the country.
After conquering French cooking, Ms. Jones went looking for people to do the same for other regional cuisines. What she found was a small number of people who shared one thing in common, that they had been suddenly removed from their homelands.
Ms. Jones worked with Claudia Roden, who missed the foods of the Middle East after her family was pushed out of its Cairo home, and Irene Kuo, who fled China with her family. These cooks, and many others, worked with Ms. Jones in her kitchen in New York and later on in her Vermont home on Stannard Mountain.
Many of the books she helped to develop became classics. At the same time, Ms. Jones deepened her appreciation of the way food can bring people together and how it defines us.
In her book Ms. Jones gives repeated examples of the generosity of those cooks who have shared their love of good food with her over the years. She allows her readers to experience some of the delights she has enjoyed by means of a lengthy section of recipes that parallel the stories in the book.
Today Ms. Jones lives alone. Evan, her husband, died over a decade ago. Although she says she feared that she might never learn to enjoy cooking for herself, the reality has proved very different. Ms. Jones told the large crowd at The Galaxy Bookshop that she is thinking about writing a book on cooking for one. It will not focus on single dishes, though, but on how to use foods in several meals over several days.
In The Tenth Muse, she gives an example of what she means by providing a variety of dishes that can all be prepared using just a single duck.
Ms. Jones said she fears that young people today are not learning the pleasures of cooking. But Ms. Jones’ pioneering work leaves them little excuse. By being so deeply inspired by the tenth muse, Gasterea, who presides over the sense of taste, Judith Jones has remade our culture.
