A senior editor at Knopf reflects on her long love affair with food and cooking, with friends and family--and with writing about them all. Jones has had a distinguished editing career. Early on, she urged Doubleday, her employer at the time, to publish The Diary of a Young Girl by unknown Anne Frank; at Knopf, she introduced the world to cooking mavens Julia Child, Claudia Roden and Marion Cunningham among others. Jones begins her memoir at home (her mother hated garlic), then moves gracefully forward, recounting an early trip to Paris that revealed to her the glories of cooking and eating. She soon met and married her husband of nearly 50 years, Evan Jones, who grew to share her passions. Many of the most tender moments in this most tender of narratives involve their elegant choreography in the kitchen. The author would eventually meet and befriend the world's most celebrated cooks and bakers (James Beard appears here regularly), and she soared to a spectacular career. Of course, there were problems and failures and losses: She recommended a series of cookbooks that bombed; she struggled with the sometimes cantankerous writers (including a contretemps with Marcella Hazan concerning yeast); she lost her husband in 1996 and faced for the first time in a half century a lonely kitchen--but not for long, as her vivacious grand-niece soon appeared. Jones offers some insider's detail--Beard kneaded bread with one hand; beaver tail is tough to penetrate--and appends a wonderfully eclectic list of recipes (brains with a mustard coating, anyone?), but it's regrettable that she does not always prepare her sentences as well as her sweetbreads. Clichs ("fell on deaf ears," "tough nut to crack," "crowning moment") appear with alarming regularity throughout and affect her prose in the way a single bad egg affects an otherwise fabulous omelet. Affectionate, passionate and informative, but lacks the deep reflection of the finest memoir. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

*Starred Review* In her entertaining, wondrously informative remembrance of her rich life, written with not a paragraph or even a word of pretension or boastfulness, cookbook editor Jones recounts experiences that food and book lovers will admire and envy and, when the book is finished, wish took up twice as many pages. Jones reaches back into her childhood for clear memories of signs and indications that food and its preparation would always be a source of delight. Clearly woven into her remembrances, like a bright thread, is her abiding interest in things French; in fact, after college, she journeyed there and took up long-term residence, meeting the man who would become her husband and absorbing the Gallic delight in scents and sauces. Once back living in New York, she worked as an editor at Knopf, sort of falling into editing cookbooks. Her crowning achievement was the acquisition of the manuscript to what would be called Mastering the Art of French Cooking, by the unknown Julia Child. Other important cookbook acquisitions followed, reflecting America's growing sophistication in the kitchen, and the last 100 pages of the book contain many of Jones' favorite recipes.--Hooper, Brad Copyright 2007 Booklist

The title of this testament to one woman's appetite comes from Brillat-Savarin, who wrote of a 10th muse-Gasterea, goddess of the pleasures of taste. Many food writers would argue that this 10th muse is actually Judith Jones. For nearly half a century, Jones, an editor of literary fiction and a senior vice-president at Knopf, has served as midwife to some of the most culturally significant cookbooks of our time, introducing readers to newly discovered talents like Julia Child, Marcella Hazan, Madhur Jaffrey and Claudia Roden, to name but a few. In this quiet, spare memoir, set against the shifting landscape of modern cookery in America, Jones reveals herself to be every bit as evangelical about good food and honest cooking as her authors, locating the points where her relationships with these writer-gastronomes and her own gustatory education converged. She ran an illegal restaurant in Paris, learned from Julia Child to de-tendon a goose (a set of maneuvers involving a broomstick), received a tutorial in fresh-bagged squirrel from Edna Lewis and counted James Beard among her mentors. At the end, the book is tinged with sadness over the decline of serious home cooking and the current fixation on dishing up fast and easy mediocrities. But Jones's belief in the primordial importance of cooking well is ultimately inspiring, and it fires these pages as it has fired her life. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

A legendary cookbook editor tells her story. In 1948, Life magazine included Judith Jones in an article about Americans in France. AN unintended consequence of Judith Jones's fine memoir is a wistful longing for the glory days of American publishing. Imagine how, in 1950, as a poorly paid assistant to Doubleday's Paris editor, working through "a pile of submissions that he wanted rejected," Jones could be drawn to a photograph on the French edition of "Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl." She did not stop until she had read the manuscript straight through (in French) and persuaded her editor to strongly recommend its publication to Doubleday in New York. Imagine another day, almost a decade later, when "a huge manuscript on French cooking" by "three totally unknown ladies with no particular credentials," twice rejected and overlong, lands on the desk of the same young woman, now working as an editor at Knopf in New York. Although she was still too junior to attend the editorial meeting to pitch it, Jones was not too young to realize, as she writes, that "this was the book I'd been searching for." And she was not too young to name it "Mastering the Art of French Cooking," nor to recognize a kindred spirit in Julia Child. Beyond Julia - and her future collaborator, Jacques Pépin - Jones knew and nurtured them all: Roy Andries de Groot, James Beard, Marcella Hazan, Madhur Jaffrey, Claudia Roden, Marion Cunningham, Edna Lewis, Lidia Bastianich and many more. This volume produces a powerful nostalgia for the days when food books could be culture shapers and not just party favors for TV chefs. No question Jones was quite often in the right place at the right time, though those times were hardly conducive to a life in food. Indeed, as a child in the 1930s, Judith Bailey found that the proper Manhattan dinner table was a place of privation. Except for "homemade desserts of British ancestry," she writes, "one wasn't supposed to talk about food at the table (it was considered crude, like talking about sex)." In her post-Bennington years, when she persuaded reluctant parents to send her to Paris, her letters home were filled with attempts to legitimize her growing love of food and explain away a dinner club she began in an apartment shared with an American man. Her parents were as much shocked by the cooking as by the cohabitation. Today, at least some of us would love to read this in a letter from a child: "I know you didn't send me to an expensive college to have me become a cook. But you must understand that in France cooking is not regarded as demeaning. It is an art." Throughout, fate seemed to be on Jones's side. Her purse, passport and return tickets, left on a bench in the Tuileries, went missing just days from her intended departure from Paris, forcing her to stay and look for work. Then she happened to overhear another American speaking to someone from Weekend magazine on the lobby phone in her hotel. That magazine's editor was the last on her dwindling list of job prospects, but she'd had no idea how to reach him. So she grabbed the phone - and thus met her life and cooking partner of almost 50 years, her husband, Evan Jones. Which is precisely when "The Tenth Muse" (the reference is to Gasterea, whom Brillat-Savarin summoned as a muse of taste) truly begins. Judith set up house with Evan, discovering their beloved boudin blanc at a local restaurant, shopping "like a Parisienne," at least twice daily. It was this experience, of learning French cooking in her own tiny kitchen, then trying to replicate those dishes in the New York she returned to in the early '50s, that made her the perfect (and perhaps the only) editor for Julia Child, who had begun a startlingly similar French housewife's existence in Paris a few years earlier. Jones endearingly titles her chapter about that relationship "Julia to the Rescue," but who was rescuing whom? If Jones had not been so receptive to Child's recipes and techniques that she began to test them in her own kitchen, one wonders if "Mastering" - long, complicated, intense and expensive - would ever have been published. Child, discouraged, revealed her worries in her own memoir: "Maybe the editors were right. After all, there probably weren't many people like me who liked to fuss around in the kitchen." Jones responds: "But there was one. Me. And if I was convinced that, if the book was so right for me, there were bound to be maybe thousands like me who really wanted to learn the whys and wherefores of good French cooking." Throughout her life, Jones is ever alert to the lessons her authors have to teach. As an editor, she loves to get in the kitchen with them as collaborator and student. Jones edits for the home cook - that is, for herself. Never dazzled by restaurant chefs, she doesn't fall into the trap of worshiping celebrities; she prefers, instead, to create her own. If we had in our libraries only the food books Jones has edited, what an impeccable culinary education that would be: a curriculum of foods of the world, rigorous, responsible and delightfully authentic. In a chapter called "Food as Memory," Jones writes: "With a new, exotic, unfamiliar style of cooking, more than ever we are flying blind - we may never even have tasted the dish we are trying to reproduce - and we need a lot of hand-holding. So I kept my eyes and ears, to say nothing of my taste buds, open to the kind of writer-cook who was particularly gifted, like Julia, at explaining the techniques of a different cooking culture." It seems fair to say that if Jones were less curious - or less in love with food and messing around in the kitchen - this country's culinary development would have been lurching and much delayed. Jones is a top-flight fiction editor, too - she has worked with John Hersey, John Updike, Elizabeth Bowen and Anne Tyler. Although those authors are peripheral to this book, it is clear Jones has a rare understanding of recipes as stories shared; they are reassuring notes from a journey, narrative signposts that show the way. They say to us: "Look, I've been there and if you follow my trail of bread crumbs through the forest, and watch out for flash floods and bears, it'll all work out." By the time you get to the 60 or so recipes Jones includes at the end, they seem like familiar characters we've met in the well-told tales that precede them. After Evan's death in 1996, Jones's tone remains plucky and optimistic as she revels in continuing their tradition of shopping and cooking well - for herself, "the lone cook." Stories from her Vermont house - skinning the tail of a nuisance beaver, then brining and frying it - reveal a gutsy connection with the land and water. Her observations, about things like those days when "the refrigerator suddenly becomes my worst enemy instead of my best friend, and when I have removed a mold-covered Bolognese sauce that I'd spent a whole afternoon cooking" ring especially true. We long for a touch more of this candor: we know that accomplishments like hers never come without struggle, profound disappointment, angst, even a touch of self-doubt. Jones is perhaps too much a lady, or too much a Vermonter, for such revelation. Instead, she chooses to stick to her subject, recounting her life in food, saving perhaps the messy bits (and the juicy bits) that have inevitably been a part of that life for the next volume. We're still hungry for more. Jones knew and nurtured them all: James Beard, Marcella Hazan, Madhur Jaffrey and many more. Dorothy Kalins, founding editor of Saveur and Metropolitan Home, is the director of Dorothy Kalins Inc.

Knopf senior editor Jones recalls the delights of French food, even during World War II, and her decision to publish Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking. With a seven-city tour. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.