Dan Pashman: So first off, just briefly tell me, Sara, how did you end up being friends with Judith Jones?

Sara B. Franklin: I was taking a course in oral history up at Columbia, and my professor received an inquiry on break, one day in the middle of our three-hour class, and she sort of looked up at me and she said, "Oh, you might be interested in this. You're a food person." And so, I looked over her shoulder and all I saw on the subject line was "Judith Jones Oral History". She was such an idol of mine at that point. And in short order, I had an offer to helm the project of running those oral histories. The one condition was Judith and I had to meet and she had to like me enough to work with me. And I had really delayed calling her up because I was so nervous to talk to this woman on the phone and I finally did, and she had this very low, almost Lauren Bacall throaty voice, and she answered the phone, she said, "Oh, I've been expecting your call," and I was like, "Oh, God, I've already messed up here."

[LAUGHING]

MUSIC 

Dan Pashman: This is The Sporkful, it's not for foodies, it's for eaters. I'm Dan Pashman. Each week on our show we obsess about food to learn more about people. I first heard of Judith Jones years ago and she's been stuck in my head ever since. The big headlines about her that got my attention? Well, she edited Julia Child's first cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking. That book not only launched Julia Child's career, but for reasons we’ll get to, it was also arguably the most influential American cookbook of the 20th century. The second headline about Judith? Early in her career, as a young assistant at a publishing house, she rescued a manuscript from the rejection pile and convinced the publisher to release it in English for the first time. The book? The Diary of Anne Frank.

Dan Pashman: Who was Judith Jones? Who was this editor who had such vision, who was able to see the potential in books that so many others dismissed? What’s her story? I always wanted to know. Then, earlier this year, that story arrived on my doorstep, in the form of Sara B. Franklin’s biography, The Editor: How Publishing Legend Judith Jones Shaped Culture in America. That was Sara you heard at the start of the show.

Dan Pashman: As Sara said, she met Judith a little over a decade ago, when she was hired to do a series of oral history interviews with her. But years before they met, Sara had already gotten interested in Judith.

Sara B. Franklin: I first learned about Judith Jones in 2007 when her memoir, The Tenth Muse, My Life in Food, came out, and I was in college at the time. I had no idea who she was. But the subtitle, which was My Life in Food, captured my intention. I was interested in food. I very quietly wanted to be a food and travel writer, but I didn't tell many people that because it didn't seem like a real job ... 

Dan Pashman: Right. [LAUGHS] 

Sara B. Franklin: And so I was busy studying other things in college. And when I discovered her book, it became clear to me that she was behind many of the best of the folks in that world. People I had taught myself to cook from: Joan Nathan, Edna Lewis, Lidia Bastianich, Julia Child, of course, Madhur Jaffrey, Claudia Roden, M.F.K. Fisher, right? And I really wanted to learn more about her in part because she was one of the few people I could find who seemed to have twin and equal passions for food and language.

Dan Pashman: Over the course of six months, Sara went over to Judith's house regularly. Judith was 88 at the time, and Sara was 25. They spent many afternoons together, always with the same routine — Judith insisted they cook lunch together first, before they turned the recorder on for the oral history. Although one time Sara did record them cooking together …

[COOKING] 

CLIP (SARA B. FRANKLIN): Maybe like half of those?  

CLIP (JUDITH JONES): Mmm, yep. 

CLIP (SARA B. FRANKLIN): Or so?

CLIP (JUDITH JONES): And you could chop up some of the stem ... 

CLIP (SARA B. FRANKLIN): For stock. 

CLIP (JUDITH JONES): But you know, once they've made a flower ... 

CLIP (SARA B. FRANKLIN): They're tough. 

CLIP (JUDITH JONES): The stem is inedible. 

CLIP (SARA B. FRANKLIN): Yep.

CLIP (JUDITH JONES): What's fun about all these things is that you're learning all the time. 

CLIP (SARA B. FRANKLIN): Mm-hmm. 

CLIP (JUDITH JONES): That's why I hate books that are too rigid. 

CLIP (SARA B. FRANKLIN): Yeah.  

CLIP (JUDITH JONES): Well, it's okay when you're learning, but I feel I've gone beyond rigidity now. [LAUGHS] 

CLIP (SARA B. FRANKLIN): Yeah, yeah.

CLIP (JUDITH JONES): I'm ready to be free of it. 

Dan Pashman: What kinds of things would she cook?

Sara B. Franklin: So we always cooked together. I think I was really being tested, right? [LAUGHS] This was the ultimate Judith Jones hazing. 

Dan Pashman: Right. [LAUGHS] 

Sara B. Franklin: She would just open her fridge and show me what we had, and then we would improvise together in the kitchen, which then resulted, usually in very simple meals. The first one, I remember, she had some leftover cold roast beef from a couple of nights before, and she put together — we put together a sauce gribiche, which is a French condiment made out of cornichon, hard-boiled eggs and vinegar and capers, and we had it on leftover baguette that she toasted up. Really simple food, right? And only after we had some coffee and wash the dishes did we then sit down and begin more of a formal interview. And she did not want to work with or associate with people who were really performing. She had an incredible radar for nonsense.

Dan Pashman: She didn't like bullshit, it sounds like what you're saying.

Sara B. Franklin: She did — That's right. [DAN PASHMAN LAUGHS] I didn't realize we could say the word, but let's go. Right. Her bullshit radar was very, very good. 

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHING] 

Sara B. Franklin: And it was interesting as I got into working on this book and was talking to other people about her, that was something everyone talked about is Judith remained very, very reserved and private until she had decided that she could trust someone else.

Dan Pashman: Over time, Sara was able to break through Judith's shell. The interviews she recorded are now at the Schlesinger Library at Harvard. That was one we just played a minute ago — and we’ll share more clips throughout this episode, so you can hear Judith in her own voice.

Dan Pashman: When Sara decided to write a biography of Judith, she used the interviews as a jumping-off point. She also talked to Judith's family, friends, and colleagues. After Judith died in 2017, her step-daughter invited Sara to go through Judith’s diaries and personal effects, which deepened her understanding of this woman she’d already gotten to know so well.

MUSIC

Dan Pashman: Judith Jones was born in 1924 and grew up in New York City. She had an older sister; her father was a lawyer and her mother didn’t work. 

Sara B. Franklin: Judith's mom, Phyllis, was a social climber. She came from an upwardly mobile British family, and part of that, based on her era, was to inhabit a kind of femininity that was at arm's length. So things like food and cooking and housekeeping and raising your children, changing their diapers, getting them dressed were something that you should outsource as a woman, if you could, and Judith didn't like that. From a very early age, she had an opposite sort of instinct.

Dan Pashman: Did Judith ever say exactly what it was that she didn't like about her mom's way?

Sara B. Franklin: Part of it was a snobbishness. Judith was really opposed and had a kind of gut revulsion, I would say, to this idea that people walked around thinking they were better than other people. So she talked to me about how Phyllis looked down her nose at other people. 

Dan Pashman: But there was someone in Judith's life who was a counterbalance to her mother: the family’s domestic worker, Edie. Here’s Judith talking about Edie:

CLIP (JUDITH JONES): I just loved her, because I saw a world beyond, somehow. 

CLIP (SARA B. FRANKLIN): Mm-hmm. 

CLIP (JUDITH JONES): And she’d tell me tales. She grew up in Barbados. 

CLIP (SARA B. FRANKLIN): Hmm. 

CLIP (JUDITH JONES): And I’d always ask her, “What did you have?” and “What did you eat?” And she’d tell me about hot peppers and what they did. And to me, it was just an exciting world!

Dan Pashman: What were some of the things that Judith would cook with Edie?

Sara B. Franklin: So at home, Judith always talked about how they eat a sort of plain English food — that was both of her parents’ preference. And so things like big roasts, roast chicken, roast beef, boiled vegetables — you know, you sort of think of the worst of New England cooking.

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS] 

Sara B. Franklin: That's the kind of food that she grew up on. But when Judith as a girl would come home early from school and they would cook lunch together, Edie would let Judith choose. And the things that she talked about really remembering was fresh artichokes from the grocer. So when they first came in, imported from Italy primarily at the time, that was something Judith loved to eat and she would dip them in butter and then be able to lick her fingers, right? You can already see, she's not a hands-off kind of a person. They loved to make macaroni and cheese together, and they would, of course, make it from scratch. So they were grating cheese and adding cream and breadcrumbs over the top.

Dan Pashman: Did Judith's mom know that Judith was hanging out in the kitchen cooking with Edie?

Sara B. Franklin: My guess is she didn't. You know, it's interesting. We never talked about it, but I think Phyllis was off having lunches with her friends or shopping for fabric. There was not a lot of oversight in the house. She didn't spend a lot of time with her daughters.

MUSIC 

Dan Pashman: At age 17, Judith went off to Bennington, a women’s college in Vermont, her father's home state. All students there did internships, which was pretty progressive for women at the time. At the end of her first semester, the U.S. had just gotten involved in World War II, and heating the dorms and other buildings during a Vermont winter was too expensive. So Bennington shut down for an extra-long winter break. Judith returned home to New York and did her first internship that winter. It was at Doubleday, the largest publishing house in America at the time.

Sara B. Franklin: Now, the U.S. 's publishing industry had been gutted by the war because most men went overseas to enlist. And so Doubleday was short of editors. And so when Judith was asked to come in as an intern, she was quickly given manuscripts and told to figure out how to edit them with no teaching, with no oversight, just based on her instinct. Judith was the kind of person that totally delighted in this. Other people would have panicked, but Judith was, again, roll up your sleeves and figure it out, get to it. She was so good at it that when she left to go back to Bennington that March, the editor-in-chief of Doubleday wrote her a letter and said how sorry he was to see her go. Her innate editorial sensibility and her sense of how to do this work was so good that they would have kept her, if she hadn't wanted to go back to school.

Dan Pashman: And she's a freshman in college at this point.

Sara B. Franklin: She is 17-years-old. She is a freshman in college and she had really just entered the world of professional publishing and editing.

Dan Pashman: As soon as Judith graduated from Bennington, she returned to New York and picked up where she'd left off at Doubleday. That's where she met Betty Prashker, the only other woman working in editorial there. Betty took note of how Judith operated.

Sara B. Franklin: They were stuck in a tiny little office together and they shared a telephone line. And a lot of the work of publishing, of course, is calling authors, calling agents. And Betty talks about how Judith would wait until she, Betty, left to go to the bathroom to make all her calls, that she was really secretive about all these connections that she had drummed up during her time at Bennington. She had really become immersed in the world of poets — a particular philosopher, Kenneth Burke, the poet Theodore Roethke became her lover. But part of the work was also going out and socializing, right? Betty and Judith both talked about how they all knocked off work at five o'clock and every day there were cocktail parties or book launch parties to go to.

Sara B. Franklin: Betty came to realize that Judith was this incredibly reserved, private, buttoned-up woman at work who did a lot of her work secretly. And then they'd go out at night, Judith would have a drink or two and she would be flirting. She knew everyone in New York, it seemed to Betty at the time, and had men lining up at her door to take her out on the town. Betty was quite jealous but also realized this was a real in, right, to meeting authors, to meeting talent in the literary world. And she realized that Judith had, by the age of 25, a huge leg up against any one of their peers.

Dan Pashman: But soon, Judith got bored of New York or maybe it was that she wanted to get away from a messy romance. Either way, in 1948, she moved to Paris.

Sara B. Franklin: Paris had really become the center of the literary world, much more so than New York at the time. Judith wrote a letter where she says, "No wonder New York seems so dull right now. Everyone's in Paris. Anyone who's anyone is over here." Judith completely fell in love with Paris. Part of that was because she had met this guy, Pierre Seria, who had become her lover. He had been part of the French resistance, but he was also a marvelous home cook. And Judith and he would cook together. They'd go to markets, and then they'd go back to his tiny little garret apartment and cook together. 

CLIP (JUDITH JONES): Food is such a part of French life and what a good time they have with it. 

Dan Pashman: This is Judith giving a talk at Google's New York office in February 2009.

CLIP (JUDITH JONES): Now they talk about it and take the whole family to the market and go to the charcuterie for this and the patisserie for this and the boulangerie for this. And the time is time spent on something they love, so that — it was a revelation.

Sara B. Franklin: Judith realized, you know, this is the ultimate form of foreplay to have someone cooking for you, with you, asking you to taste something, the heat, the smells, right, the sensuality of that. But also that it's a — it's such a tremendous way to get to know a place, right? That the kind of cooking she was learning to do there was particular to Paris.

Dan Pashman: Judith was having a great time, and wanted to stay in Paris for a while, but to do that, she needed money. Fortunately, she had an idea for how to make some, with her friend and roommate Paul Chapin ...

Sara B. Franklin: They could open a kind of underground restaurant, a sort of salon. And they put on, basically, this massive dinner party for pay. And it was really hard work. Judith talks about sweating and she's got fish scales all over her and her fingers ache from having, you know, trimmed beans all day long, but she loved it.

Dan Pashman: Not exactly the life that her mother had imagined for her though.

Sara B. Franklin: The literal opposite. 

Dan Pashman: Right.

Sara B. Franklin: And so at the end of this night, Judith is elated. You know, she's just lived what she considers one of the best days of her life and she writes a letter home to her mother and father describing the night and immediately they start sending cables saying, "Come home. [DAN PASHMAN LAUGHS] How could you — you know, this is not why we sent you to college. And this is not what you were raised for ...” You can almost feel Judith's delight from Paris that she's so far away, they can't do anything about it …

Dan Pashman: She had to have known when she sent that letter how they were going to react.

Sara B. Franklin: Oh my god, she is thumb in the face of her mother's wishes.

Dan Pashman: Judith would stay in Paris for the next three years. She met her husband, Richard Evan Jones, at one of her jobs — he was an editor, and also married at the time. The two of them shared a love of food, and would often cook dinner together. Judith eventually found a job at Doubleday's Paris office. But this time, instead of working as an editor, she was an editor's assistant.

MUSIC

Dan Pashman: One day, her boss dropped a huge pile of unsolicited manuscripts on her desk. These are books generally sent in by unknown authors hoping to be published, despite having no connections inside the publishing industry. Very few get the green light, and indeed, Judith’s boss had decided to reject all the books in this giant pile. He told Judith to write rejection letters to each of the authors. But as she's settling in to write the letters, she starts thumbing through the pile and something catches her eye. On the cover of one manuscript, there’s a photo of a girl.

Sara B. Franklin: Judith was arrested by the photograph and took the manuscript over by the fire while her boss was out that afternoon and read the entire thing in French in one sitting. And when he returned that evening, very surprised to see her still at the office, which was also his apartment, she stood up and said, "You've got to publish this book." The book was an advance copy of The Diary of Anne Frank, which was being published that spring, we're in early 1950 now, in French. And it was also going to be published in German and Dutch, right? But several American publishers had already decided they were passing Doubleday being one of them for many reasons. It was written by a young girl. It was written by a Jewish young girl. It did not feel sophisticated to many readers, and Judith's boss at Doubleday at the time, this guy, Francis K. Price, probably had barely given it a second look.

Dan Pashman: So Judith says, “You’ve got to publish this book … ”

Sara B. Franklin: And he said to her, "What? That book by that kid?", and she, really punching above her weight — she was his secretary! She made a really compelling case for how moved she had been by the voice, but also, her incredible kind of foresight in recognizing as an historical document how singular that book was, and how few things like it would ever be available, and the opportunity to publish it, was something Doubleday absolutely should not so quickly pass on. And so he sort of sighed and laughed at her. He was totally annoyed by the fact that his secretary was undermining him, but he did agree to take a second look. And he ended up sending the book on to New York saying, "You know, I actually think we should publish this book ... "

Dan Pashman: What was it that Judith connected with so much about this work?

Sara B. Franklin: Above all else, it was the voice. It was the clarity of Anne Frank's voice, it felt unvarnished. It felt unsophisticated in the best way — also so earnest and honest, right? She was talking about how she felt. She was talking about what goes on day to day in the hidden garret that the family was hiding in. She talks about crushes. She talks about food. She talks about moods. She talks about her parents and them being up her ass and how she just can't stand it. She talks about imagining her way to freedom and a future. But it was also by a girl. And so to the extent that we do have accounts of young people in the early 1950s, those books are not coming from women and girls. They are almost exclusively written by and for men. And so, Judith connected right away to the idea that this is a voice that is kind of coming in from the edges, that we would all do well to listen more clearly to.

MUSIC

Sara B. Franklin: Doubleday did publish the book in the U.S. in 1952 and it became a publishing phenomenon in the United States. It was an instant bestseller and Judith was never given credit for her role in that book's publication.

MUSIC 

Dan Pashman: In the years that followed, Judith made sure people in publishing knew she was behind Anne Frank’s publication, even if she didn’t officially get any credit. When she returned to the U.S., she found a new job at Knopf, another major publisher. Knopf was run by a husband and wife duo, Alfred and Blanche Knopf. Blanche hired Judith as her assistant, and Judith quickly gained Blanche’s trust. And because Blanche was getting older and losing her eyesight, Judith really became her right-hand woman. Within a couple of years, Judith was editing the likes of Langston Hughes and John Updike. 

Dan Pashman: In 1959, Judith was 35, and had more than a decade of experience in the publishing world. A guy very high up the chain at Knopf handed her a manuscript. It was 750 pages, and the working title was French Recipes for American Cooks, by three unknown authors: Louisette Bertholle, Simone Beck, and Julia Child. Now, the idea that Knopf, which prided itself on publishing fine literature and poetry, would even take a second glance at a cookbook? It didn't seem possible.

Dan Pashman: And you got to understand, in that time, cookbooks were very different than they are today. There were basically two types; There were those geared towards housewives who already knew how to cook, with recipes for very basic dishes with vague instructions like "put the meat in a low oven" or "mix the right amount of flour with eggs"; The other category was meant for cooks employed by rich people, so those books had elaborate recipes with expensive or precious ingredients that no housewife would ever make.

Dan Pashman: And that was the cookbook landscape at the moment when Julia Child and her co-authors submitted their manuscript for French Recipes for American Cooks. Here’s Judith on WNYC talking about what happened next…

CLIP (JUDITH JONES): The gentlemen of the publishing company called Mrs. Child in and they said, 'Mrs. Child, nobody, no woman in America wants to know this much about French cooking.' Well, I did. Sorry. [LAUGHS] And so when this — it landed on my desk. I think they thought that I would just get rid of it and give it a cursory glance. But, I took hunks of it home. I started cooking from it. I was just totally immersed in it. It was like a gift from heaven.

Sara B. Franklin: Since she had moved back from Paris, Judith had been going nuts, tearing her hair out, trying to recreate the dishes that she had learned to love in France. And try as she might, she could not anywhere find the recipes that would help her do that. So without realizing it, she had been perfectly preparing herself to receive this book. And the first recipe that she and her husband cooked together — they always made dinner together — was the boeuf bourguignon.

Dan Pashman: Boeuf bourguignon is a beef stew braised in red wine with vegetables and bacon.

Sara B. Franklin: The recipe is so clear in its instructions and its detail in the description of what you need to purchase in order to prepare this dish, what cut of meat, what kind of fat, how to cut the onions, how to brown the mushrooms just so, so that they brown instead of steam, right — this kind of level of granular detail so that you really actually felt like you were learning.

Dan Pashman: Now remember as I said, before this, books for home cooks generally didn’t teach you anything new. 

Sara B. Franklin: Judith came into the office the next day and, you know, "Oh, my God, it was the best boeuf bourguignon we'd ever had. You know, it replicated the best of what we had in Paris, and I was able to do it at home without smelling the dish in front of me, without having a cook at my elbow leading me step by step." She immediately realized that this book could revolutionize the landscape, and she had a hunch that there were people like her, who really wanted to learn how to cook better at home. She was working on a hunch.

Dan Pashman: But there were still a lot of obstacles in the way of Judith getting this book published. For one, as I said, there was a general bias against cookbooks at Knopf, because they were considered frivolous. The book was also very long, which meant that it would be more expensive to print, so they’d have to charge a lot for it, potentially hurting sales. Plus, Judith was a woman, and she was pretty new to Knopf. She still wasn't invited to the editorial meetings there, where decisions were made about what to publish, but she had a plan.

Sara B. Franklin: She sort of created an alliance with one of the senior editors at Knopf, who she also knew loved to cook and eat. And she had him look at the book. His name was Angus Cameron, and he came back to her and said, “You're right. This is an incredible book. And, you know, I think I think actually this could really make a splash.” He had had some experience publishing cookbooks earlier in his career. He was instrumental in the publication of The Joy of Cooking. But he said, "I've never seen anything like this either. And I think it's pretty unique and I think now is a good time to publish it." So Judith sat outside a closed door at her desk while this meeting, right, where this book was pitched on her behalf. And, you know, she sort of sat there biting her nails. And by the time the meeting was over, Angus Cameron came out and said, “You get your chance.”

MUSIC

Dan Pashman: Coming up, Judith tries to make the most of her shot, editing the 750-page manuscript with Julia Child all by mail. Then Judith expands her interests beyond French cuisine, and publishes more seminal cookbooks in the process. Stick around.

MUSIC

 

+++ BREAK +++

 

Dan Pashman: And now a moment from our partner, American Express. 

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MUSIC

Dan Pashman: Welcome back to The Sporkful, I'm Dan Pashman. Last week on the show we explore the life of a different American food icon: James Beard. You may have heard of the awards, but who was the man himself? Biographer John Birdsall tells me all about America’s first TV chef:

CLIP (JOHN BIRDSALL): He was a household personality and his popularity really kind of ratchets up in 1955. A writer for The New York Times dubs him "The Dean of American Cookery". 

CLIP (DAN PASHMAN): All while being deep, deep in the closet.

CLIP (JOHN BIRDSALL): Yes. I mean deep, deep in the closet, at the same time that he's living this very kind of robust gay life in private, publicly, it's absolutely, absolutely a secret. 

Dan Pashman: This is not only a fascinating portrait of a complicated man, but also a look at the ebbs and flows of queer acceptance in America throughout a lot of the 20th century. So, I hope you'll check it out. It’s up now. All right, back to the show ...

Dan Pashman: In the late ‘50s, Knopf gave Judith the green light to work with Julia Child and her co-authors on this manual of French cooking. It was a huge opportunity for Judith, but also a huge risk. The publishing world was cutthroat, people got fired all the time. If the book flopped after Judith went to bat for it, not only would she probably not get another chance like it — she might get canned. 

Dan Pashman: So she got to work. She wrote a letter to Julia, who was living in Norway at the time, telling her Knopf was buying the manuscript. Julia wrote back, said they'd have it ready in a month, but Judith had other plans. 

Sara B. Franklin: Judith Jones basically demands that they strip the whole book down to the studs and rebuild it again because it is too long, because Judith feels like there are certain appealing French recipes that are not included. She makes a strong case for including a cassoulet, for example, and Julia Child comes back and says, "That's peasant food." And Judith is saying, "I think people want to eat that peasant food. I think we need to include it in the book."

Dan Pashman: Now remember, this is all happening by mail — everything from the tiniest line edits to bigger questions about how to structure the book. Judith tested recipes for the book herself, a level of involvement that’s very rare for an editor. 

Sara B. Franklin: They both understood that if this book was going to succeed, it had to be perfect. And so they really challenged one another to bring the manuscript, to bring the recipes, to bring the prose to that level, and to do whatever it took.

Dan Pashman: One question that they struggled over was the title:

CLIP (JUDITH JONES): They had some horrible titles: French Cooking for Americans, I mean, or silly things ... but finally I said I think that it should be a continuing process. "The Mastery of French Cooking" is too scary, but "Mastering" …

CLIP (SARA B. FRANKLIN): It’s a bit of an invitation.

CLIP (JUDITH JONES): Yes! 

CLIP (SARA B. FRANKLIN): Yeah. 

CLIP (JUDITH JONES): And it’s a continuing process. 

CLIP (SARA B. FRANKLIN): Yeah, yeah. 

CLIP (JUDITH JONES): Which it is. And Julia wrote back, "I love the title! I love the gerund!"

CLIP (SARA B. FRANKLIN): [LAUGHS] 

Dan Pashman: In 1961, Mastering the Art of French Cooking was published. It brought a new dimension to what a cookbook could be. It taught readers new techniques and recipes, but even more than that, it ushered in an era of Americans doing high-level cooking in their homes. The book was aspirational.

Sara B. Franklin: That was both about the book itself, but also about Julia Child beginning to become a public figure and a celebrity. Julia Child and Simone Beck go on the Today Show, which had an enormous viewership of millions at the time, and they go to do an event at Bloomingdale's in New York the day after this TV spot, and they thought maybe they'd sell a handful of books and do a little cooking demonstration. And instead, there is a line out the door. They are swarmed by people, primarily women. People clearly want to meet the author of this book. They're not just interested in the book itself. And so the Julia Child phenomenon begins, and Mastering the Art of French Cooking becomes a publishing phenomenon, period, but certainly in the world of cookbooks, no one had seen its like before.

Dan Pashman: The success of Julia Child’s first cookbook got her a gig hosting the public TV show The French Chef. And she followed up the first book with a couple more that were also huge hits. But as her star rose, she also got pushback on her work.

Sara B. Franklin: Yeah, so right around the time that Julia Child debuts on TV in early 1963, Betty Friedan's book, The Feminine Mystique, also is published, and they're making really oppositional arguments about what it is to be an empowered woman or a liberated woman. Betty Friedan's book, which was a huge bestseller as well, really was urging women to get out of the house and out of the domestic sphere, which would include cooking, cleaning, child rearing, in order to pursue paid work because she believed that was their only viable path to empowerment and liberation from living under their husband's thumbs. Right? Judith and Julia had a very different idea about what empowered femininity looked like. And what they thought about the kitchen was what was so powerful about it was that it was a place where, on a day to day basis, a person could exercise a kind of creative ingenuity, a kind of improvisation, and also where one could access sensual pleasure — which when you think about the prevailing attitudes of postwar America, the idea that a person would eat or date or have sex just for pleasure was so forbidden, it was so taboo.

Dan Pashman: What did Judith make of this criticism?

Sara B. Franklin: Judith was not particularly interested in second-wave feminism, in part because she did not like Betty Friedan and her cohort's idea that the way that women might be able to get ahead was to be as much like men as possible. Judith also recognized that we might do well to not try to mimic men so much as bring a more feminine approach into any kind of public work.

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Dan Pashman: How does the success of Mastering the Art of French Cooking change things for Judith?

Sara B. Franklin: She bowled over her superiors. This book made Knopf a lot of money. So all of a sudden their attitudes, both about cookbooks in general, but also about Judith as an editor begin to really change. Judith began to think: If Julia Child can do this for French cooking, there must be other people who can do the same for other kinds of cuisines. And so Judith begins to sort of sniff around for other culinary talent to build a cookbook list. Her next big success, a name that people would know, is when she begins to work with Claudia Roden, who was the author of A Book of Middle Eastern Food. Judith encounters this book that has first come out in the U.K. and also been published in Israel. Her sister-in-law, who was living in Israel at the time, sends a copy across the ocean to Judith. Judith begins cooking from it and says, “Yeah, I've never tasted anything like this.” We're talking things that are now so commonplace in American food culture, like hummus, for example, but were so completely unknown in the United States. And Judith ends up acquiring that book, working with Claudia Roden to publish A Book of Middle Eastern Food in the United States. Hot on the heels of that book, she begins working with Madhur Jaffrey. Together, they publish An Invitation to Indian Cooking, 1973. This is really, when we think about Judith making her mark as kind of the queen of cookbooks, as the creator of a genre — this is the era we're talking about.

Dan Pashman: Both Claudia Roden and Madhur Jaffrey's first books with Judith are still considered seminal works on their respective cuisines today. A piece on Eater last year celebrating the 50th anniversary of An Invitation to Indian Cooking said the book wasn’t the first Indian cookbook in America, but it was the one that caught on. In it, Madhur Jaffrey worked to dispel myths about Indian food, explaining that it isn’t all spicy, and that Indian cooks don’t use curry powder. The idea of a single combination of Indian spices called curry is more of a British concept connected to colonialism.

Sara B. Franklin: Part of the prescience of publishing that book was that it allowed American home cooks to have exposure to a culture and cuisine in what I would say is a very palatable form: through personal storytelling through recipes that they can cook at home, that are intended for home cooks. Now, there's a counter-criticism to that, which is when you try to make something more palatable for a largely white audience, Judith would have said it's important to split the difference here, right? That we want both reader and cook to come a little bit to the middle so that we can expose one another across lines of difference. 

Dan Pashman: So, Sara, if all of these incredible cookbook authors were here in a room together, if we had Julia Child and Claudia Roden and Madhur Jaffrey, and I said to them: What's it like to work with Judith Jones? What do you think they'd tell me?

Sara B. Franklin: Well, she was an impossible taskmaster, so it was never good enough, and when it was time to send the book to print, it just had to be done. But she put her authors through their paces to make the book, the recipes, and the prose alike better and better and more refined and clearer. So she worked them very hard, which some people love and some people certainly are not going to come back for more of, once they've gone through it the first time. Marcella Hazan was one of those people who really didn't get along with Judith, and so they stopped working together.

Dan Pashman: They didn't get along because Judith was so demanding?

Sara B. Franklin: They just — yeah, they had a different approach. Judith was incredibly demanding. Marcella had a way she wanted to do it. Judith had a way she wanted to do it. There was no meeting of the minds there. Judith liked to have a certain amount of control with her authors, and so if someone wasn't going to cede a little bit of ground, it probably wasn't going to work out all that well.

Dan Pashman: A couple months ago we had the Jewish cookbook author Joan Nathan here on the show, and she was one of the authors who Judith edited. You can see Judith’s attention to detail in a letter that she wrote to Joan while they were working together. Here’s Joan reading it:

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CLIP (JOAN NATHAN): "As you know, I'm trying to get away from the formula recipe writing that everyone is subscribed to and to make food writing more direct and more literate. I don't like starting a sentence 'with in a bowl, place'. No one talks that way. You put something in a bowl. And the overuse of 'mixture' drives me crazy. Why not refer to it as the 'batter' or the 'filling' or the 'dough' giving it a name? Mixture upon mixture gets confusing and sounds so unappetizing. So I hope you will bear with me on these refinements. As you well know, this last phase of editing and fine-tuning the manuscript are essential to a good cookbook. I have done my part turning the chapters around as quickly as possible, but there's always further work to be done by any author in response to the editing. I know some publishers don't bother today with this kind of editing, and just turn everything over to the copy editor. But I don't think you get a reliable, well written cookbook that way."

Dan Pashman: As I said, Judith was much more involved than most editors are with their books. Sara quotes Madhur Jaffrey as saying that, "Judith knew the books as intimately as the author did." And that held true for another of Judith’s big cookbook projects — a project that really ended up changing the way Judith thought about cookbooks, and herself. It was Edna Lewis’s book The Taste of Country Cooking, which was one of the first major cookbooks written by a Southern Black woman without hiding her identity. This book was not an obvious one for Judith to edit. 

Sara B. Franklin: Edna Lewis was the first American-born cook cooking American regional food that really snapped Judith out of that sense of prejudice about the country into which she had been born and raised. 

Dan Pashman: The prejudice Sara is talking about is Judith’s feeling that only cuisines outside of America were worthy of their own cookbooks.

Sara B. Franklin: And part of that was because Judith realized she had no idea what Southern cooking was really about. And so when she first met Edna Lewis, which was in the early 1970s, Judith realized she knew no one like Edna Lewis. She had very few friendships or working relationships across lines of race. She did not know people who had grown up in farming communities, who had grown up in terms of material wealth, very poor. She did not know anyone who was related to formerly enslaved people. Edna Lewis's grandparents both were enslaved. And that there was a really interesting kind of corrective to be made about what American food was and where it came from, that Judith took on as a decades-long project that began with the book she made with Edna Lewis, The Taste of Country Cooking, that was published in 1976.

CLIP (JUDITH JONES): It really … My whole experience with Edna taught me a lot about what I care about in human nature.

CLIP (SARA B. FRANKLIN): And like, what sorts of qualities did you hone in on with her?

CLIP (JUDITH JONES): That you’re responsible for other people. That you’re not — nobody’s better than the other person. They’re different. They have different backgrounds. That you try to take people for what they are and isolate that quality and encourage it. And, of course, an editor’s in a good position to do that.

CLIP (SARA B. FRANKLIN): Right.

CLIP (JUDITH JONES): Because that’s exactly what you do in your writing.

CLIP (SARA B. FRANKLIN): Right, right.

Dan Pashman: Cooks in the South loved Edna Lewis's book, and it got some good reviews in national publications. But it didn't succeed commercially in the way Judith wanted it to.

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Dan Pashman: As Judith’s career continued, she saw the food media world change right in front of her, especially in the ‘80s and ‘90s.

Sara B. Franklin: The food world overall had grown and glossy food magazines, like Food and Wine, had come onto the scene. The New York Times food section had expanded and had more readership. But also we're talking about the sort of yuppification of cities in the United States. Some people have a lot of money and this coincides with the moment of celebrity chefs really coming onto the scene. So people are going out to very fancy restaurants to see and be seen, this way sort of idea of performative eating out. And it really changes the landscape for cookbooks because a lot of those celebrity chefs start getting cookbook deals. Judith had a real disinterest and dislike for that world. She understood that restaurant chefs had nothing relevant to say to home cooks for the most part, because the way you cook in restaurants is so different by design and also in what it's meant to do, right, which is dazzle. And also, that restaurant cooks, restaurant chefs, I should say, are really, really bad at writing their recipes. This is true then and remains true today. And so, Judith was interested in home cooks writing for home cooks. She remained really committed to publishing kind of niche cookbooks that were really specific in the region and culture that they were talking about. And she also understood she was working against the cultural current at this point, but she held out until the end of her career. The one exception to this was that she did a cookbook with Oprah's personal chef, a woman named Rosie Daly, which was a massive, massive bestseller. I think the figure I quote in the book is that it sold six million copies. I mean, just an insane number of copies and Judith felt like it was blood money.

Dan Pashman: As for Judith and her work with Julia Child, they remained collaborators throughout Julia's career. Their last book together came out in 2000. They saw eye to eye on many things, but their relationship was complicated.

Sara B. Franklin: Like a long marriage, you know, they went through real dips. Judith was really upset when Julia Child's agent asked for a million-dollar book advance. And Judith just thought that that was an absurd amount of money, that no one should get paid to make a book. It was an almost impossible amount of money to make back. However, until the very end, they shared such a commitment to excellence in cookbooks as form, the idea that they were always being written for actual home cooks, so they fell back on that. They never lost a sense of what value each played in the other 's life and their career, but it — you know, it wasn't without its bumps.

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Dan Pashman: Judith kept working into her 80s. When she was 81, she wrote an essay for Vogue called "A Recipe for Life: A Ripe Old Age". I asked Sara to read an excerpt from her own book. She starts by quoting Judith’s Vogue essay.

Sara B. Franklin: " 'We live in a society that disparages age. And it is easy to feel that you should be stepping aside to let someone more youthful take over,' she wrote. She knew people around her whispered, wondering why she wasn't packing it in. ‘Why do I continue to work? To me, it is more of a question of why retire? I find that the very word has unappealing connotations. To retreat. Withdraw.’ As she'd continued to accrue years of wisdom and experience, she felt she had more, not less, to offer and pass on. Aging, Judith had come to feel, wasn't something to be resisted, but rather a badge of honor one should wear with pride. 'Every office,' she wrote cheekily, 'needs to have a little ripe fruit and aged cheese around.' "

Dan Pashman: Judith did retire at age 87, and she died 6 years later, in 2017. We see her legacy today in the way so many cookbooks are focused on not just sharing recipes, but teaching readers how to cook. 

Sara B. Franklin: That's the promise of any kind of literature, right, is that it can open your world up, that you can both see yourself and push beyond yourself in those pages. And Judith's cookbooks were some of the first cookbooks that really delivered on that promise.

Dan Pashman: So what role did Judith's cookbooks play? Have they played for you in your life?

Sara B. Franklin: Oh, I mean, at this point, they're like family. I keep them so — literally, physically, I keep them very close to me. I mean, at base, they taught me to cook. I had a mother who was, like, textbook second-wave feminist and could not get dinner on the table fast enough. But of course, it fell entirely to her. My father did no cooking growing up, and she worked full time and it was, you know, last-minute kind of stuff. I really like to eat and so I found cookbooks. But I think, like many readers of Judith's cookbooks, the books that she worked on, I don't have to cook from them to spend time with them. I find myself reading them because I like the people who wrote them. And I really, at this point, love to think about Judith sort of urging them on to go deeper, to do more, to do better, to give more detail.

Dan Pashman: So when you open up one of those cookbooks, you can still feel like you're hanging out with Judith?

Sara B. Franklin: Judith sits on my shoulder, [DAN PASHMAN LAUGHS] like the way that I said, I think if you got all her cookbook authors in a room, the first thing they would do is sort of laugh at how impossibly perfectionist she could be. I still feel like she plays that role a little bit, which is, you know: Do it better, Do it again. Is it really as good as it can be? Think about it. Slow down a little bit. But also this kind of pushing me on to have a little more guts, a little more audacity to do the thing I'm not sure that I think I can do, or worse yet, that someone else might doubt in me. She really — [LAUGHS] I know it sounds kooky and woo woo, but she's with me all the time.

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Dan Pashman: That’s Sara B. Franklin, her book is The Editor: How Publishing Legend Judith Jones Shaped Culture in America. It’s out right now and it would be a great gift for the cookbook lover in your life this holiday season. We’re also doing a giveaway of Sara’s book to one lucky subscriber to The Sporkful newsletter. Just sign up for our newsletter by Dec. 2nd, and you’ll be entered to win. Go to sporkful.com/newsletter to sign up. If you’re already signed up for the newsletter then you’re automatically entered into this and all of our other giveaways. So get on that list! Open to U.S. addresses only. Again that’s sporkful.com/newsletter. 

Dan Pashman: Next week on the show, my friend Abigail Keel starts to have sudden attacks of vertigo ... and to feel better, she turns to the kitchen for help. But the solution is not as easy as she thinks it will be. That food-related medical mystery comes out next week. While you’re waiting for that one, check out which asks the question: Who was James Beard?

Dan Pashman: And hey, did you know that you can listen to The Sporkful on the SiriusXM app? Yes, the SiriusXM app, it has all your favorite podcasts, plus over 200 ad-free music channels curated by genre and era, plus live sports coverage. Does your podcasting app have that? Then there's interviews with A-list stars and so much more. It's everything you want in a podcast app and music app all rolled into one. And right now, Sporkful listeners can get three months free of the SiriusXM app by going to SiriusXM.com/sporkful.

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Dan Pashman: Thank you to our presenting sponsor American Express. AmEx Gold makes your dining experiences more rewarding so you can discover more, connect more, and experience more dining moments. Elevate every meal with the benefits that come with American Express Gold. For terms and to learn more, visit AmericanExpress.com/withamex.