An appetite for new voices

Editor Jones discovered chef Child and whipped up a cookbook revolution

Edna Lewis’ baked summer tomatoes, from “The Taste of Country Cooking.” David Malosh/The New York Times

Stir-fried chicken with mushrooms and snow peas, from “The Key to Chinese Cooking.” David Malosh/The New York Times

Madhur Jaffrey’s shrimp pullao, from “An Invitation to Indian Cooking.” David Malosh/The New York Times

Famed cookbook editor Judith Jones, who was best known for discovering Julia Child, revolutionized American cookbook publishing. She died in 2017 at age 93. Natalie Conn

Judith Jones edited many literary luminaries — Langston Hughes, Sylvia Plath and John Updike — during her 54 years as editor at the publishing house Alfred A. Knopf. Yet she’s far more famous for discovering an obscure cook named Julia Child. And in the process, she started a cookbook revolution.

Sara B. Franklin’s new biography, “The Editor: How Publishing Legend Judith Jones Shaped Culture in America,” chronicles Jones’ journey from poetry- loving Bennington graduate to one of the most influential cookbook editors in American publishing.

Great editors bring out the best in their authors, nurturing the truest versions of their craft and selves on the page. As Franklin demonstrates in her deeply researched book, Jones, who died in 2017 at age 93, fell well into this category. She had an ear for distinct voices — she saved “The Diary of Anne Frank” from a slush pile — and a knack for shaping their stories into bestsellers.

But what Jones did for cookbooks went beyond this. By holding their prose to the same standards she set for her literary writers, treating recipes as cultural touchstones, and viewing authors as experts with important perspectives, she helped define contemporary cookbook editing. By publishing a diverse roster of authors, including Madhur Jaffrey, Irene Kuo and Edna Lewis, she shined a light on cuisines and cooks routinely ignored in an age dominated by white home economists and male French chefs.

“Judith wasn’t just interested in recipes,” said Jaffrey, who published her first of many books, “An Invitation to Indian Cooking,” with Jones in 1973. “She was interested in the people behind them and their culture. This was radical for the time.”

When Jones began her career in publishing in the 1950s, cookbooks and food writing in general weren’t taken seriously, often lumped in with technical manuals and textbooks. Their editing focused on the recipe instructions, without thought to point of view, cultural context or the beauty of language. The most popular cookbooks of the day set out to save housewives from “kitchen drudgery” by pointing them to shortcuts and prepared foods.

In this landscape, Jones began building her cookbook list at Knopf, creating a serious place for food writing to blossom. In 1959, only two years after starting her job at Knopf, she convinced her reluctant bosses that American cooks were ready for the kind of exacting, sophisticated and sometimes labor-intensive cuisine that was at the heart of Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” co-written with Louisette Bertholle and Simone Beck.

Jones was herself an accomplished and adventurous cook, having learned her way around the kitchen in Paris after college, experimenting with entrecôte and goose cassoulet along with her husband, and future cookbook collaborator, Richard Evan Jones. It was her love for and deep knowledge of French cuisine that enabled her to recognize the brilliance of Child’s work.

After that initial success, Jones trusted her own appetite and curiosity to guide her to new authors and cuisines beyond the European paradigm of the time. When Jones met Lewis in 1972, she was looking for an author to write about the overlooked richness of American cuisine. Jones was immediately taken with Lewis’ memories of the simple, seasonal meals her family cooked and ate in Freetown, Virginia, the farming community founded by formerly enslaved people, where she grew up. The resulting cookbook published in 1976, “The Taste of Country Cooking,” has become a classic, showing Americans the bounty of Southern cuisine and influencing generations of chefs, including Alice Waters.

Her authors became an extended family as well as unofficial cooking teachers, and she absorbed their lessons. From Jaffrey, she learned about toasting spices to bring out their flavor, a technique she used throughout her cooking. With Lewis, she learned about foraging for wild mushrooms and herbs.

Through her editing, the books Jones published marshaled the pleasure of food as a way to broaden people’s minds, allowing them to explore the world in a more complex way. And maybe even change it for the better.

“Food was our rebellion,” Jones told Franklin. “It gave us courage to see things, make things happen.”