Remembering Judith Jones, who brought the words of Julia Child and Anne Frank to America
"Absent Judith, cookbook publishing as we know it today would not exist."
That's how publisher Sonny Mehta described editor Judith Jones when she received a lifetime achievement award for her work.
People are now echoing that sentiment, after news broke that the culinary and literary icon died on Wednesday. She was 93.
Jones' influence on the American culinary scene was undeniable. Over her career that spanned decades, she worked on and championed a number of hugely influential cookbooks — including Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking.
But she also edited for literary giants like John Updike, Anne Tyler and John Hersey. And beyond that, without her work and discerning eye, many North Americans may never have read the diary of Anne Frank.
Bronwyn Jones Dunne is Jones' stepdaughter. She spoke with As It Happens guest host Piya Chattopadhyay about her stepmother's legacy and influence on American culture and cuisine. Here is part of their conversation.
What was it like growing up with a mom like Judith Jones?
There was something about her that I admired, enormously, right from the beginning. That's a funny word to use for your mother ... well maybe not, but she was a special person — I guess I'd put it that way — and very inspiring.
What did you admire of her from such a young age, when you were so young?
It was always fun to be with Judith and my father. I was going back and forth between two families so when I went to New York and spent weekends and holidays with them there were always parties and interesting people. Both literary lights, people who were well-known in the literary world, and then gradually the food world took over.
There were amazing parties that would go on all about food. We all had a marvelous time together. James Beard once gave a party for a book my father and Judith wrote together. It was called The Book of Bread. He was a family friend and so I was invited to go. I was terribly intimated because everybody else was either a famous cookbook author or chef and I brought my zucchini bread — which was really pretty pedestrian next to the other offerings that night.
I want to take a detour from Judith's love of cooking and cookbooks for a moment. She played such an interesting role in getting a book published in the United States that wasn't a cookbook. How did she see that Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl was published?
Books come into publishing houses and if they're not coming with an agent already in place or an editor who has already secured the book, they are put into what's called a slush pile.
Usually the lowliest of the low get to read that. If they get read, they're read by the intern or the very most recent young editor that has come into the publishing company.
That's where Judith was and she started reading that book. She saw that there was something was there. She had to persuade her boss at Doubleday that it was a book that they should publish. They didn't want to publish it because it was so close to the war and it took quite a while for people to grasp that aspect of World War II.
I know that sounds strange but there was kind of a gap in I think belief that anything that terrible could have happened. It was as though people really didn't want to get into it, but she prevailed.
And how did Judith get into editing cookbooks?
Well, that's a story about being, again, the sort of youngest editor at Knopf Publishing Company. They had never done a cookbook so the one thing that was working for her was that she had been in Paris and she had been very interested in cooking.
Alfred Knopf had eaten some of her meals so he said, "Let's let the little Ms. Jones try her hand at this." And that's how that book got started. It had been rejected all over the publishing world in America. I think it had even come back to Knopf. I think it had been there once before. She saw what was really such an astute thing to see, which was that American housewives were ready for something more complicated than the old Fannie Farmer.
Now, just to be clear, the cookbook you're talking about … it's not an unknown one — it's Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking.
She brought that out, I think, in every cookbook that she did. She heard the voice of the cookbook author and she made that the most important part of the book. In doing so, she connected people and made cookbooks much, much, more than just a collection of recipes.
This interview was edited for length and clarity. For more on this story, listen to our full interview with Bronwyn Jones Dunne.