I hope you enjoy this issue of Between the Layers! If you like what you read and want to support my work, here’s an April special on a paid subscription. The Editor: Judith Jones + Chewy Butterscotch Cookies - No. 388Her cookbooks wove together recipes, wisdom, and resistance
HAD A COPY OF THE EDITOR not been on the bedside table when I visited my sister in Atlanta, I might have waited even longer to read it. But that night, I opened the 2024 book by Sara B. Franklin and was swept up in the world of the late Judith Jones. She was editor to Julia Child, and also Marcella Hazan, Edna Lewis, James Beard, John Updike, Claudia Roden, Anne Tyler, Langston Hughes, Madhur Jaffrey, Sylvia Plath, and many more talented writers. By bringing such an impressive list of books to publication, Judith Jones helped shape American culture. In 1960, Judith saw something in the 800-page manuscript from Julia Child, Louisette Bertholle, and Simone Beck that many editors might have missed. Mastering the Art of French Cooking wouldn’t just teach Americans how to cook French food. In a post-World War II world where Betty Crocker was instructing women to put their feet up and savor conveniences, Judith saw women walking into kitchens and cooking perfectly roasted chicken to be more liberating. Mastering was just the beginning of Judith’s impressive Alfred B. Knopf cookbook list that spanned a half century, from the end of World War II through the Civil Rights movement to the fight for women’s equality. She was the first editor to show a keen interest in the vegetarian movement by publishing Anna Thomas’s lovely The Vegetarian Epicure in 1972, followed by Kit Foster’s The Organic Gardener. I was so drawn into her story that on the drive home to Nashville I couldn’t wait four hours to keep reading so I downloaded The Editor on Audible and listened to it while driving. The next day, I listened to it while gardening and while walking my dog. And when I didn’t listen, I read the book’s pages.
Judith Bailey Jones was born in 1924, the second daughter to Charles Bailey, a lawyer, and Phyllis Hedley Bailey, a socialite from an upwardly-mobile pharmaceutical family. She was raised on Manhattan’s Upper East Side in a formal world where you ate quietly and appeared well-mannered. “I was told never to mention the food at the table,” Jones would tell biographer Sara Franklin in conversations beginning in 1988. Educated at Bennington College in Vermont in the early 1940s, Judith chose the school for its progressive ethos. She would intern at Doubleday & Co. during winter breaks and make connections that would last a lifetime. At Bennington students were asked to spend time gardening because the campus had once been farmland and the U.S. government was urging everyone during World War II to grow more food. Judith would write her father that she was being “uncooperative at the farm because I flatly refused to kill chickens.” You’ll have to read the book to find out how and why she moved to Paris, how she learned to cook in Paris, how she left her purse (and passport) on a seat at the Tuileries and missed her flight home…so she stayed in Paris a while longer. How she met newspaperman Evan Jones, who would become the love of her life, how they settled in New York City. How she would adopt two children, juggle work and home life like so many parents, weather ups and downs in her marriage, and finally find her home for good on a tranquil Vermont farm called Bryn Teg, Welsh for “fair hill.”
What took me so long to read about a talented, dogged woman who didn’t make vice president and get the Knopf corner office for 50 years? Someone who was no more than five feet tall but quietly powerful? Someone who didn’t fit the mold her mother wanted for her daughter but who saved The Diary of a Young Girl (published in the Netherlands in 1947) from the rejection pile while working in Doubleday’s Paris office? (Her Doubleday boss didn’t think Americans would find the diary of an 11-year-old Jewish girl interesting, but Judith did. Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl was published in 1952 and was a massive success. It has never gone out of print.) And mostly, as I have written about food for more than four decades, how could I have not known Judith Jones represented all of us who write and cook. “For a long time, the women—and they were usually women—who wrote about food were treated as second-class citizens,” Judith said in 2015. “All because they cook!” And just like the cookbook writers patronized by the literary world for writing technical manuals (that actually sell), Judith was similarly treated for editing them. To her, cookbooks were “vessels of story, memory, and voice.” One surprise when reading The Editor was discovering that my book editor, Rux Martin, is in the book. A fellow Vermonter, Rux knew Judith. Rux was the young Burlington Free Press newspaper reporter who interviewed Judith in 1984 when she and her husband Evan first came to Vermont. Years later, Rux would know Judith as a contemporary when Rux became executive editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. “She was deft in the way she communicated and made it seem like it was coming out of your mouth when it was Judith,” Rux said via telephone. She liked active verbs in recipes and brought specifics to the instructions, making sure her authors added information as to what the recipe looked like when it was done. “Above all, Judith would see that something needed to be published, and she fought against push back,” Rux said. “The fact that she understood immediately that Americans needed Julia Child at that time was just extraordinary.”
Judith Jones was a visionary. When the Mastering manuscript revisions were finished, Julia and Paul Child had moved from Paris to Cambridge, Massachusetts. While the couple took a short vacation to Maine, Judith delivered the manuscript to the printer, and before publicity departments became a thing, she plotted how to get the word out about the book. In the summer of 1961 she cold-called Craig Claiborne, food editor at The New York Times, and agreed to set up a scene for food photography on the roof of her apartment. He wanted to write an article about how she and her husband would climb out their apartment window, set the table, and throw summer dinner parties for friends. She said she’d pose for the camera as long as he took a look at Mastering when it was released. Claiborne and the rest of the world embraced Julia. Rux said you’ve got to be dogged if you want to be a great editor.
And then there’s Edna Lewis. Judith Jones worked alongside her and her niece Nina to record recipes and stories in the creation of Taste of Country Cooking, which was published in 1976, 50 years ago. Judith was Edna Lewis’s advocate and friend. When Knopf didn’t see the value of putting money behind marketing a cookbook written by an unknown African-American cook, Judith made some noise. She sent copies of Edna Lewis’s book to her more famous authors like Julia and James Beard and encouraged them to cook Edna’s recipes, and if they liked them, talk up the book, which remains one of the best examples of food storytelling that’s ever been published. In our world today where creativity and originality are being cast aside for AI, when we can’t tell if photos are real or fake, or emails legit or suspicious, books like The Editor remind us it doesn’t have to be this way. And in our callous world, where profanities come out of what should be a prestigious White House, good books and true stories bring solace, grace, and escape. Cheers to Sara B. Franklin for shining a bright light on Judith Jones. And cheers to all the editors. We writers appreciate you. - xo, Anne P.S. Judith Jones died in August of 2017 at 93. If you haven’t watched Julia (16 episodes) on HBO Max, starring Sarah Lancashire as Julia Child and Fiona Glascott as Judith Jones, what are you waiting for? It’s a fascinating, fun romp into Cambridge in the 1960s and explores not only the behind-the-scenes of the second volume of Mastering but the hard-fought creation of Julia’s PBS television series. Sadly it was not renewed for a season three! And also, for the Edna Lewis story, watch Finding Edna Lewis on PBS. What’s your favorite Judith Jones cookbook? What’s your favorite story or recipe from a cookbook?
THE RECIPE: Schrafft’s Butterscotch CookiesFor people who don’t gravitate to chocolate and would rather have a sugar cookie or an oatmeal cookie, this favorite cookie of Judith Jones is for you. It is butterscotch-flavored from the butter and the milk powder. The story goes that Judith was such a fan of this recipe she wanted to include it in her memoir/cookbook, The Tenth Muse (Knopf, 2007). She writes in the headnote that when she was a child growing up in Manhattan, one of her favorite treats was going to Schrafft’s restaurant for a milkshake and these butterscotch cookies. “Then Schrafft’s disappeared, and I despaired of ever tasting them again. But when we were working on the revised Fannie Farmer Cookbook, I asked Jim Beard if he remembered those butterscotch cookies so we could include them, and not only did he remember them with the same affection, but he called up the president of what remained of the Schrafft’s company and got them to give him their recipe.” Makes 32 cookies, about 2 to 2 1/2 inches Prep: 25 to 30 minutes Bake: 8 to 10 minutes
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