Judith Jones with Julia Child (c. 1959)
Image by Thomas Cizauskas
Judith Jones, the legendary editor who rescued Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl from a publisher’s reject pile and later introduced readers to the likes of Julia Child and a host of other influential cookbook authors, died 2 August 2017 at her summer home in Walden, Vermont. She was 93. The cause was complications from Alzheimer’s disease.
▶ Pictured (circa 1959): Juliet Jones (r); Julia Child (l).
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▶ “Mrs. Jones helped open a world of cuisines to a public previously bound by convenience foods, and her impact on cookbook publishing, home cooking, and the American palate was monumental.
The list of these scholar-cooks who owe her their career includes Madhur Jaffrey, Claudia Roden, Marcella Hazan, Joan Nathan, Edna Lewis, Lidia Bastianich, Anna Thomas, Hiroko Shimbo, Michael Field, and Nina Simonds. She also edited some of Alfred A. Knopf Inc.’s most famous fiction writers, including John Updike and Anne Tyler.
Without her discovery of Frank’s memoir, while she was at Doubleday in Paris, American readers might never have been introduced to Frank’s startling, first-person narrative, one of the first Holocaust accounts to reach the United States. Her role was small but pivotal, and it was enough to get her noticed — and hired — by Knopf co-founder Blanche Knopf in 1957.
As a junior editor at Knopf, Mrs. Jones began primarily as a translator of such French writers as Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, and she had no intention of editing cookbooks, the work for which she became famous.
One day in 1959, a huge manuscript arrived on her desk. […] This was also the book that Julia Child, with co-authors Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle, had spent six years unsuccessfully trying to shorten for an editor at Houghton Mifflin. […]
As Child’s editor, Mrs. Jones got her hands, and kitchen, dirty. She scouted for ingredients and equipment, practiced making omelets and ‘fluting’ mushrooms, and gave recipes to a cooking neophyte in the Knopf office to try — all to make sure the recipes would work in American kitchens. She even was responsible for the book’s title, Mastering the Art of French Cooking.
‘When I triumphantly showed our title to Mr. Knopf, he scowled and said, ‘Well, I’ll eat my hat if that title sells,’ ’ she wrote. ‘I like to think of all the hats he had to eat.’ […]
In 2006, Mrs. Jones was awarded the James Beard Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement Award. She retired from Knopf in 2010 as senior editor and vice president.”
—Joe Yonan, at Washington Post
2 August 2017.
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