Constance Carter: Good morning.   I'm Constance Carter, acting chief
of the Library's Science Technology and Business Division.
I'm delighted to welcome you to the Library
of Congress and today's program.
This event is one in our series of talks in which we learn
from important writers, thinkers and practitioners in the various fields
of science, technology, business and economics.
These programs are also a means of introducing you
to the extensive collections of the Library of Congress.
Our speaker today, Judith Jones, is very much in the news.
Perhaps you've seen the articles on her book, "The Tenth Muse:
My Life in Food," in the November issues of "Bon Appetite,"
"Eating Well" and the "New York Times," or had a glimpse of her
on Channel 9 this morning.
Today we celebrate her contributions to the world's culinary history
through her life in food, and a fascinating one it is.
"The Tenth Muse" is filled with stories,
anecdotes and reminiscences.
I'm especially taken with her view of food as the tie
that binds family, friends and generations.
I first heard Judith Jones speak at Alice Waters' Edible Schoolyard,
which was in the Smithsonian's Food Culture U.S.A. in 2005,
curated by Joan Nathan, who's in the house today.
Judith was sitting in a director's chair beneath the Ramada talking
about improving school lunches, and the joy of cooking with family.
She talked a little about a book she co-authored with her late husband,
Evan Jones, entitled "Knead It, Punch It, Bake It!"
The Ultimate Bread Baking Book for Parents and Kids."
Indeed, should Judith want to retire tomorrow,
she could do it simply based on the number of copies of" Knead It ..."
that I have bought and distributed myself.
[ laughter ]
It is altogether fitting that Judith Jones speak on "The Tenth Muse:
My Life in Food" at the Library of Congress.
She has probably edited more books
in the Library's collections than any other editor.
She is revered not only for her work in the culinary world,
for which we honor her today, but for her work
with many distinguished literary authors including John Hershey,
Langston Hughes, William Maxwell, Anne Taylor and J.F. Powers.
During the last 40 years she has edited 50 books
for John Updike alone.
She was also responsible for "The Diary
of Anne Frank" being published in America.
Many of you have already looked at a few of the many cookbooks
that Judith Jones has edited on display in the foyer.
We especially enjoyed bringing the titles of her
"Knopf Cooks" American series together, as she had hoped
that they would appear on bookstore shelves.
I invite the rest of you to peruse these titles and the selection
of books on food writing that Allison Kelly has pulled today
from the Library's collections.
Judith Jones, a senior editor and vice president of Albert A. Knopf,
has won the James Beard Lifetime Achievement Award
and other prestigious awards.
She has also edited many of your favorite cookbook authors
such as James Beard, Marcella Hazan, Edna Lewis and Joan Nathan.
Judith Jones was the first to champion Julia Child and to espouse
and promote the kind of cookbook in which the author enables us,
ordinary cooks, to create the extraordinary
by defining culinary terms, demonstrating techniques
such as boning and braising, and providing explicit directions
and detailed explanations of what we are to do.
They put us at ease and give us the confidence we need to make
that exceptional dish and to reap the joy therein.
Judith Jones is the tenth muse, a modern-day Gasterea who has,
with wit and wisdom, encouraged her authors
to share their secrets with us.
Please join me in welcoming the esteemed Judith Jones,
an American icon, to the Library of Congress.
[ applause ]   Judith Jones: Thank you so much.
Thank you all for coming.
I wanted to talk a little bit about the odd thing
about Americans' attitudes toward food.
I would call it a kind of love-hate relationship, almost schizophrenic.
On the one hand, we're probably the most sophisticated country
about food today; we welcome new flavors,
we make everything part of our American cooking.
And on the other hand, we're afraid of everything, and this seesaw back
and forth, I think, is a strange phenomenon, and peculiarly American.
Part of it was that we have this Puritan heritage.
And to the Puritans food was fodder, a gift to be grateful for,
but you didn't fuss about it; you didn't spend time,
you didn't indulge and talk about it.
And then at the same time that you had that attitude,
you had in the South a real love for food; Jefferson, for instance,
going to France and bringing back plantings and beautiful fruits
and vegetables and starting the first vineyards here.
And he had a wonderful table.
But at the same time, when he was President,
John Adams wrote very disparagingly of him, looking askance
at the exotic table that Jefferson had in the White House.
And then, in the 19th century again, you had people like Jim Brady
and his lady Lillian Russell, both plump and fat
and enjoying food and lusty about it.
And there was even a book that was put
out in Chicago called "How to Be Plump."
[ laughter ]
At the same time you had Sylvester Graham exhorting people about all
of the terrible food they were eating, and they were all flocking
to Battle Creek, Michigan to eat his so-called health food.
And then, during the last -- it really goes back to the last part
of the 19th century -- I think the food industry played a tremendous
part in making the little woman feel as though it were demeaning to cook.
I mean, this was the beginning of the freedom of women
and you didn't want to spend all that time over food.
There was "Woman's Home Companion" and the "Ladies' Home Journal"
and Godey's Lady's Book."   It's fascinating to look at them,
because you keep getting this message from the food industry.
And then they decided to call it a science
because that elevated it a little bit.
How about calling it an art?   But anyway...
[ laughter ]
People did buy into that; there's just no question.
And this attitude really prevailed well into the 20th century,
and it was the attitude in my house.   That's what I grew up with.
My mother was English and we had good food.
It was healthy, nourishing, but you don't suppose we had garlic.
Or if we had a couple of onions, it would be just for a lamb stew.
We didn't want any leftover in case somebody put raw onions
in with a tuna fish sandwich.
And when my mother was well into her 90s, she called me and said,
"Judith, I want to ask you a very serious question."
I thought it was going to be something
about whether I believed in an afterlife or what.
I was all prepared.
And she said, "Do you really like garlic?"
[ laughter ]   And I had to say, "Yes, I do."
And I can still see the look on her face; that crushed,
fallen look that this wayward daughter was beyond redemption.
[ laughter ]
So I think that my love of food sprang
from a kind of rebellion, really.
And I longed to experiment, I longed to learn more.
And when I went off to Paris, for my first time in Paris for a two
or three week vacation, what did I do the two days before I was
supposed to go home?
I sat in the Tuillery Gardens and when I got up,
weeping because I was leaving this beautiful place, I put my purse
on the bench behind me and I walked off and left it.
So within minutes I'd lost my whole identity.
I'd lost my passport, my ticket home, my traveler's cheques,
and there I was, little Judy Bailey, without any identity.
And I decided somebody's telling me something.
I'm supposed to stay in Paris.
So, I stayed for three and a half years.
[ laughter ]
And that's where my love of food just --
I just found the right homeland.
And it was very interesting to me, and it was one of the things
that started me writing this book.
I found in my mother's attic a whole little trunk full of letters
that I had written home
to my parents during those three and a half years.
They're hysterical.
I looked at them and I thought, the audacity of this young girl.
Who was she?
So manipulative, and the cry was constantly of --
in France food is treated as an art; it is not demeaning.
And I wrote things like, "I know you didn't send me
to an expensive college to become a cook, but you must understand
that in France cooking is not regarded as demeaning.
It is an art."
This is to try to explain to them that I had gotten together
with some friends and we were in the Princess Caetani's apartment --
she was a great patroness of the arts.
And she had invited her nephew to stay, and he'd invited me,
and there was a painter who had another room.
It turned out to be Balthus, but I didn't know that then.
[ laughter ]
And so she was in Rome and we were all living in her apartment,
and we decided that if we could just find a way of feeding ourselves
for nothing, we'd be all set.
And so, why not feed ourselves by feeding others?
And so we decided to have a little Cirque au Cirque.
The street the apartment was on was the Rue de Cirque,
so we had what might be called a little restaurant three times
a week.
And I had a French beau then who was a newsman, loved food and loved,
with that wonderful French condescension,
teaching Americans about food.   [ laughter ]
So he was eager to be the chef, and Paul, the young nephew
and I were the sous-chefs.
And I learned how hard it is to be a sous-chef,
particularly when we had none of the equipment and we literally had
to put fish through what's called a tamis
[ French ]
, which is a very, very fine sieve, rub pounds of fish
through this sieve, just to make a fish soup; just the beginning course
[ laughs ]
. So we worked pretty hard, and that was when I wrote my parents about,
"I know you didn't send me to college
for this," but I kept trying.
And later on I also got a job at a magazine, and the editor turned
out to be the man I was to marry later.
Well, I moved in with him and some of his editors
and this is what I wrote to my parents.
Dearest ones, About the question of cohabitation, one might call it,
I know it is hard for you to accept the idea of guys and ladies all
under one roof, but practically, in terms of expense,
it is not possible for me to live alone.
The only way you can beat the rent racket is
to get a large place and share it.
And I couldn't stand living with four
or five girls dormitory fashion, stockings drying all
over the place, et cetera.
They, the boys, have a little Alsatian maid
who babbles a strange combination of French and German
and is a most economical cook.
That means I shan't be cooking for the boys,
which you were distressed about.   [ laughter ]
Now, if that isn't manipulative.   Anyway.
[ laughter ]
Through writing this book I got to know this young girl and sort
of re-live some of the experiences and started really trying to trace
where my love of food led me.
And it was interesting, because Julia Child was in Paris
at exactly the same time that I was during those three
and a half, four years.
She might easily have come to dinner at the Cirque de Cirque.
She didn't, but it could've happened.
But our paths never crossed.
They didn't cross until I got back to New York and had a job at Knopf.
And I had really been hired as an editor to work on French text
with translators, so I had never done a cookbook, but people knew
that I loved French cooking.
So one day on my desk arrived this huge tome by three ladies;
Julia Child and her two French co-authors.
And they gave it to me simply
because they thought I'd be interested.
And I started to read it, and I worked my way through it.
I must've kept it a month.
And I had made a bourguignon that was so perfect
because I followed every little instruction like drying the meat,
because otherwise it steams, or putting a little oil
with the butter, because butter burns, you name it.
It was a lesson in a recipe, and this was what I had been dying for,
because I could cook, I could talk to the butcher or the l'ecpicier
[ French ]
man and get a few tips, but I didn't really know the nuances
of French cooking, which is really the backbone of western cooking.
It is the codified version of how to cook properly.
And so I just absolutely fell in love with this book.
And here I was, this young editor, and who were Julia Child
and these two French ladies?   Nobody'd ever heard of them.
So Alfred Knopf was pretty skeptical and Blanche was openly opposed,
because I was her editor.
She didn't want me, like my parents, going off
[ laughs ]   , concentrating on food.
But to make a long story short, I finally persuaded him.
And when I told him what the title was that we had arrived at, I said,
"We're going to call it 'Mastering the Art of French Cooking.'"
And he scratched his head and he said,
"If a book by that title sells, I'll eat my hat."
I love to think of all those hats he ate over the years
[ laughs ]   .
[ laughter ]
Anyway, that got me started on a sort of quest for other books
that did the same for Italian cooking or more exotic cuisines
like Indian and Chinese and Middle Eastern.
And I found one interesting thing, that very often the author
who wrote well about that kind of food was somebody
who had been wrenched from his or her homeland, and food was memory,
and they wanted to bring back all of the tastes
and memories of childhood.
And so somebody like Claudia Roden wrote about the Middle East
when they had to leave Cairo.
Hers was a Sephardic family growing up there,
and went to Paris and later London.
She wrote to all sorts of friends and relatives to get these recipes
and pull them all together; and the same with Madhur Jaffrey who grew
up in a very privileged Indian household.
I don't know whether you've read her memoir,
"Climbing the Mango Trees," but it's wonderful.
And she got to London and she missed these foods.
Don't forget that this was way back in the '50s and '60s,
and there wasn't an Indian restaurant on every corner
and a Chinese restaurant.   And they were often the good writers
because they had had to learn from scratch.
So they were like you and me and they were able
to translate their experience to the page and write very lovingly of it.
I think voice is so important in a cookbook, the individual voice,
so you really feel that that person had experienced this
and is enabling you to carry on in your own little empty kitchen
when nobody's standing beside you.
And it's particularly true of very exotic dishes,
because you're flying blind.
You may never have made something that you are trying to create,
so you need somebody to tell you what it should look like,
what it should taste like, what you serve it with and so on.
So I sort of went on that quest to find these books.
And then later I was very interested in, well,
what is American food, after all?
It's such a conglomerate of everything,
and it's such a hard story to tell.
My husband had written a book called "American Food:
The Gastronomic Story," which does a wonderful overview, but there were
so many separate parts that one wanted to look at.
And I wanted to do a series of books that would tell us
about American cooking in its many, many parts.
I even did a book on sausage that looked at sausage as it is eaten
in different parts of the country; New Orleans, Italian,
the German sausages in the Middle West.
There's a wonderful book by Bruce Aidells.
And Joan Nathan told us all about Jewish cooking in America.
I don't think anybody had put together those recipes
from different parts of America where Jews settled
and kept on their traditions.
But you know, I was a little bit too idealistic, because I thought,
of course this would be welcomed as a library,
and you would add to it year by year.
But the bookstores didn't quite go along with me, and you know,
it's a different kind of thinking because each season is new to them.
And one day I was looking in a bookstore,
and Nancy Verde Barr's book
about Italian American cooking called "We Called It Macaroni."
Where was it?
It was in the Italian section, not the American section.
So I thought it was kind of a lost cause.
Some books did very well; Joan's did wonderfully.
But the more obscure ones, like the sausage book,
I'm afraid kind of died aborning.   So, you live and learn.
And after that my husband and I -- I had always gone to northern Vermont;
my father came from there.
But we got a place of our own up there on a hilltop
that is what they call the Northeast Kingdom, full of French Canadians
who have a lusty appetite for life.
And for the first time we had a garden,
and that fun of discovering things and foraging for things,
and it led to a much closer connection with food; you know,
the joy of going out and suddenly finding a patch of mushrooms
in the woods or little wild sorrel or wild garlic
and the wild asparagus in the spring,
sort of all through those months of summer;
how that feeds your taste buds in a very, very special way.
And now I just want to give you one quote, because I think it sums
up what I want to say here.
As Wendell Berry -- I don't know if you know him,
but he's a wonderful writer about naturalist foods.
As Wendell Berry wrote in "The Unsettling of America,"
"If you take away from food the wholeness of growing it,
or take away the joy and conviviality of preparing it
in your own home, then I believe you are talking
about a whole new definition of the human being."
And I think that's something we have to hang onto.
I'm beginning to talk like an Evangelist these days.
[ laughter ]
But it is so important that we know the sources of our food.
And there has been a huge new awakening to this, really --
Alice Waters, of course, is at the forefront of this --
and teaching our children where food comes from.
And then they learn to appreciate it in a very special way,
and don't fall for this hideous fast-food stuff that's everywhere
and making everybody overweight.
And this even led me to, last year, invest in six big black Angus cattle
with my cousin, who is a real farmer up in Vermont.
I'm not the farmer.   [ laughter ]
He takes care of them, and we're going to just raise them, a few,
on a very small scale, for locally fed, grass-fed, humanely cared
for beef, because I think if you're going
to be a carnivore you ought to be a responsible one.
And I got a wonderful e-mail last spring, just as this book was going
to press, and I managed to juggle some pages
so I could tell this story.
But I got a note from my cousin's wife because she had gone
out to feed the cattle -- there were only six of them,
and they were all pregnant when we got them.
And it was 37 below that night, it was early March,
and she found this little calf on the ground,
just been born, almost frozen.
They put him in their Subaru -- the little calf --
brought him to their kitchen, fired up the wood stove,
got out the hairdryers, got out a big sweater of their son's,
and pretty soon this little fellow staggered to his feet
and he was fine, but he needed his mother's milk.
So they had to take him out again   [ laughs ]
in 37 below, let him find his mother's milk, which he did.
And when he was happily full, he started to shake again
and his mother kept licking him, which was the worst thing
because the saliva was literally freezing on him.
So they brought him home again and they made a little pen
in the kitchen and he spent the first day
of his life in their kitchen.
Now, that's what I call tender loving care.
I don't know how I'll feel exactly when he goes to market,
but I think that's my responsibility   [ laughs ]
. So anyway, I've had a great time with it and I think one
of the things that's been particularly pleasurable
to me is working with authors.   I mentioned voice.
I think it is so important
that a cookbook writer really express him or herself.
And so I like to get out in the kitchen with them, and particularly
if they're using a writer or recipe testers who don't watch them
at work, because, you know, I'll put my nose into the pot and say,
"Now, why are you doing that?"   For instance, Lidia Bastianich,
when she makes a sauce sometimes she'll make what she calls a hot
spot, a dry hot spot, pushing the onions and so aside.
Then she'll put in the tomato paste and toast it and then swirl it
into the sauce, and that just develops the sweetness,
the almost caramelization of that tomato paste.
And it's just one little trick, but it makes the difference
between an okay cook and one who's pretty special.
So I do spend a lot of time learning how.
But I just wanted to read you this little passage about learning
from Julia one time when we went over to Provence for Christmas.
And I went over to her house to see if I couldn't help
with the Christmas dinner, to help stuff the goose before dinner:
After showing me how to judge the approximate age of the bird
by pressing the breast and breastbones,
which should not be too rigid, Julia pointed out how important it was
that the feet were still attached.
Whereupon, she cracked one of the anklebones with a solid,
single whack, slit open the skin enough to reach in
and wind her fingers around the tendons, then plunked the bird
on the floor, positioned a broomstick over the ankles,
and, straddling it, pulled.
Lo and behold, after one hefty tug the tendons came out whole.
"Just like pulling the cork out of a bottle," she declared.
[ laughter ]   It was another lesson to tuck away.
Although, when I would have a chance to use it, I wasn't quite sure.
I also have found that being alone, rather than lessening my interest
in cooking, has in some ways almost heightened it.
I'll just read you a passage from the last section of the book called
"The Pleasure that Lasts the Longest."
After Evan died in the winter of 1996,
I doubted that I would ever find pleasure in making a nice meal
for myself and sitting down to eat it all alone.
I was wrong.
I realized that the ritual we had shared together
for almost 50 years was part of the rhythm of my life,
and by honoring it I kept alive something
that was deeply ingrained in our relationship.
In fact, more than ever I found myself
that mid-afternoon letting my mind drift toward what I was going
to conjure up for dinner when I got home, instead of walking
into what might have seemed an empty apartment.
Actually, I've always had a dog who was hungry to greet me.
I gravitate toward the kitchen, as I did as a young girl,
to bask in Edie's -- that was our cook --
warmth, and I can't wait to bring it to life,
to fill it with good smells, to start chopping or whisking
and tossing and smelling up my hands with garlic.
I turn on some music, then have a glass of Campari or wine, and it is,
for me, the best part of the day, a time for relaxation.
When at last I sit down and light the candles,
the place across from me is not empty.
And I do talk, too, about the pleasures of not only working
with authors in the kitchen, but of traveling with them.
And so this last section is full of some of those wonderful adventures.
I'll read you this wonderful old Italian saying
that Lidia Bastianich gave to me.   A tavola non s'invecchia
[ Italian ]   . Sorry my Italian isn't very good,
but it means "At the table, one never grows old."
Isn't that reason enough to come home at the end of the day,
roll up one's sleeves, fire up the stove and start smashing the garlic?
[ laughter ]
As Brillat-Savarin wrote, "The pleasures of the table are
for every man of every land,
and no matter of what place in history or society.
They can be part of all his other pleasures, and they last the longest
to console him when he has outlived the rest."
I say amen to that   [ laughs ]
. So that's pretty much the story of this book.
And I've covered a lot of years, so you may want to ask some questions
and join in and have a conversation.
Constance Carter: Well, I was just going to say when I came to the end
of the prose in the book, I thought, oh, I don't want it to be over!
Why didn't she make it longer?
And the, all of the recipes are at the end,
and it's just like reading more prose.
She's put such wonderful little anecdotes and information
and explanations into the reference and into the recipes,
so it's like going on and on.
But I do have one question to start you off.
What made you do the children's book,
the "Knead It, Punch It, Bake It!?"
Judith Jones: Well, that was very interesting,
because my stepdaughter, when she was in her early teens,
was taking a sculpture class at the Museum of Modern Art.
And one day I came home and she and her father were making bread.
It was a hot summer day, we had a little penthouse apartment,
and they'd never made bread before.   And I said, "What's up?"
[ laughter ]   And Evan said, "Well, you know,
I was trying to tell Bronwyn how related working with clay
and working with dough is."   And that's how they started.
And I thought this was a great story, and I told him
to tell an editor about it, so it appeared in "Quest" magazine,
and then of course a bright young editor, juvenile editor,
saw it and said we should write a book about baking with children.
It's particularly magical because not only do you have the fun
of the mixing and the kneading, but when you leave the bread
and you put a little blanket over it and you go out and play
and do something for an hour or two and come back and it has risen,
I mean, there's something still magical about it to me.
And I remember my little nephew looked at me
and he said, "I'm a baker!"   [ laughter ]
And then they love it when they have an audience, and I said,
"And who'd like to punch it?"
And a roar goes up and they all come up.
And so it's a great exercise and a great introduction
to the pleasure of cooking.   Constance Carter: Other questions?
Yeah? Female Speaker: I have a question, which is you're the editor
for these famous, wonderful cookbook writers,
but also for these incredible authors, fiction writers.
Is it hard to switch gears?   [ Unintelligible ]
in a book is telling great stories?   How do you...?
Judith Jones: It isn't hard to switch gears,
and in fact I think it's so much better to be a general editor,
because it makes you more selective.
You're not just turning out cookbooks, and you know, too many.
And I think one informs the other.   Again, voice is the important thing.
I work much harder on cookbooks, but that's my fault.
Most people aren't as crazy.
Constance Carter: Because you have to invite them all home to cook.
[ laughter ]   Judith Jones: That's right.
And I like to watch them and --
Constance Cook: You have to clean your kitchen!
Judith Jones: Yeah, yeah.
Whereas, I don't have to invite John Updike home to watch him --
[ laughter ]   -- write a story.
Although he's such a good writer
that I always make him write his own copy.
Yes? Male Speaker: I have technically two questions.
One is based upon the review in the "New York Times" on Sunday,
and the other is something I had read
on the West Coast writer talking about Julia Child's school mates,
friends in New York City, and   [ inaudible ]
and how   [ inaudible ]
. The writer, or the critic, had said that Julia Child was walking
through a McDonald's and having French fries,
and then how Alice Walker would sort of not want to go in there.
So, that's a question of personalities here.
And the other question with Julia Child, the reviewer said
that you had in your book the Julia Child rescued you.
And the reviewer said it should be the other way around,
that you sort of rescued her.
But also, there's a restaurant in Boston, Legal Sea Foods,
which is also here now, and when Julia Child had that TV program
in Boston she used to buy seafood from them.
Well, apparently -- of course, it was in a magazine years later
that I had read because I never watched it on TV, that she had sort
of built up Legal Sea Foods, and then apparently TV helped her
and you helped her, and how this   [ inaudible ]
worked around   [ inaudible ]
. Judith Jones: Yeah.
Well, your first point, I think Julia came of a school
that if you cooked really well, paid attention, cooked with finesse,
you could almost make any ingredient taste good.
Now, that doesn't mean that she wasn't for, you know,
using fresh when you could.
But I think Alice Waters, she starts with the ingredient
and that is all-important to her.
So there was a little conflict there, but that's okay.
It helps to have conflict.
And I think you've got to find your own middle ground.
There was a story recently in the "Time" magazine about a woman
who was a mother, who has two kids, and she felt more and more guilty --
never feel guilty, but anyway -- she felt guilty she didn't cook.
So she invited Alice Waters to come to her house to show her how
to cook through the week.
And the first thing Alice Waters said was,
"Get rid of all of those spices.   They're too old.
Throw them out.
You've got to buy some new spices every month."
Well, that's a little hard --   [ laughter ]
-- on a mother trying to feed a family.
And I have this trouble sometimes with, particularly chef cooks,
because they have at their fingertips truffle oil,
four kinds of fresh herbs, and they don't always have to be fresh,
and part of enabling the home cook to cook well and think
for herself is to be able to judge.
And if you don't have fresh tarragon, try that dried tarragon.
If it really tastes dead -- use something else.
Or if you don't have a lemon -- a drop of vinegar.
And that's part of the creativity of cooking.
I'm not sure I really addressed the second part of your question,
but that was more a comment.
Male Speaker: Well, the article was just right.
It said that you more or less rescued Julia Child,
but when Julia Child had that --
did she ever talk to you about Legal Sea Foods, for example?
Judith Jones: Uh-huh, yeah.
Male Speaker: Because apparently, because of her talking about her
[ inaudible ]   , is how it became very well-known.
Is that true, basically?   Judith Jones: Uh-huh.
No, she could put something on the mouth like that.
In fact, she was very careful not
to endorse things for that reason, because
[ laughs ]   if she so much as uttered a word
of praise it was blown out of huge proportion.
She had an impact that's hard to -- you couldn't have predicted this.
And I mean, it was nice that "Mastering ...
"did well before Christmas; we had a second printing.
Craig Claiborne called it a classic and it had justified itself.
But it was when she got on television and really, I think,
broke that hold that this Puritanism had had on us,
and suddenly it was okay to say num, num, num and smack your lips,
to slap that little chicken's breasts.
And somebody once said, "Why are you massaging it?"
And she said, "Well, I think it likes it."
[ laughter ]
And these were totally spontaneous, and it gave you that sense of fun
and earthiness in the kitchen.   So she was quite something.
Yes? Female Speaker: Do you test all of the recipes of the books?
Judith Jones: No.   No, I couldn't possibly.
Female Speaker: Does somebody in the --
Judith Jones: No, it's the author's responsibility.
And sometimes authors hire a recipe tester.
But I feel it's very important that the recipe tester isn't testing
out there, but is there in the kitchen so that if something,
you know, was too dry or it's too wet or this or that,
the adjustments can be made with the author of that recipe.
Female Speaker: Because sometimes I read in a cookbook a recipe,
you know, and then the ingredients are not written there,
and yet it's written in the instruction how to cook it.
Or sometimes it's the other way around; you know,
it says there is whatever in the instructions; there is nothing.
What do you do with this ingredient?
Judith Jones: You mean sometimes there's the ingredient called for
and then they don't address it?
Well, that's bad cookbook writing, bad editing, bad copyediting.
[ laughter ]
But I'll have to tell you in this little book
of mine I have something called "Frenchified Meatloaf."
I sent it back to my parents
and told them how they could jazz up their meatloaf.
And I saw it, my editor saw it, the copy editor saw it,
and Bob Gottlieb, who used to be the editor of Knopf
and got a sneak preview of this book, was the only one
who discovered that I'd left out the meat.
[ laughter ]   I was mortified.
Not to excuse myself, but I went back to check,
and when I had sent it to my parents in the head note I had talked
about the kind of meat and the mixture
and about how much you needed, but I hadn't put it in the list.
And all those people just let it ride right by.
So, it's scary   [ laughs ]
. We all make mistakes, but that shouldn't happen.
Yes? Female Speaker: "Mastering the Art
of French Cooking" was a huge, huge, huge success.
Did you edit any cookbooks that you thought should've been big successes
and weren't?   Judith Jones: Yeah.
Female Speaker: The sausage book?   Judith Jones: The sausage book.
For that series, Ken Hom wrote a wonderful book about growing
up in Chicago in a Chinese family -- his father was not with them,
but his mother cooked, and the whole community.
And wonderfully simple Chinese recipes; I mean,
there are still things I can do in 10 minutes when I get home
at night, from that book.
But for some reason it was just that that series didn't catch hold.
But yeah, I published a book last year by Katie Sparks.
She was a chef, and she's a young woman who also has a son,
a little boy of about six years old,
and had chef jobs in various kitchens.
She had a very good restaurant in Greenwich Village.
And I liked it because she was really translating some
of these ideas to what she did at home,
and we called it "Sparks in the Kitchen."
And I know she just wasn't on the Food Network, and she didn't have
[ unintelligible ]
or something like that, but it's very tough today,
and it's all the promotion and publicity.
And I think we're going to get sick of the Food Network, don't you?
[ laughter ]
I mean, the fact that they say, "We're more than about food."
Why do you want to be more than about food?
Be about food!   Sort of sounds like my mother.
[ laughter ]
So. Yes? Female Speaker: Two questions, really.
First one is, will you   [ inaudible ]
and translate it into French?
And the second one is, do you either in your book,
or do you have any comments about the real revolution
with French opinion about American food?
Judith Jones: French opinion about American food?
Female Speaker: Right.   I mean,
[ inaudible ]   a long time.
They say, for instance, there was no food and now
[ inaudible ]
. Judith Jones: Well, the first question,
I am sure it won't be translated into French.
Even "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" has never been translated
into French!
I don't think the French would trust an American --
[ laughter ]
-- to tell them what to do in the kitchen
[ laughs ]
. And I really don't think that attitude has changed.
I find that there's still a sort of condescension.
It's all right.   They have a right to it.
Female Speaker: But they were the ones who invited Alice Waters
to the Louvre, after all, when they opened --
Judith Jones: Well that's true.   Yeah, yeah.
Well, I think that they do believe very heartily,
and that their food has always reflected this, and the seasons,
the freshness of the produce,
the province it comes from, not making food travel.
I think it's just been ingrained in them
so they understand Alice Waters, but Julia telling them how
to make a bourguignon, no.   [ laughter ]
So, do we have some more?
Yes? Female Speaker: What are your favorite foods?
Judith Jones: I don't know.
You know, there are certain foods from my childhood
that are comfort foods, and I have a few of these recipes in here.
And those are things I'm out to do again
and again, even just for myself.
The other night I had a little cooked chicken breast
and I had a few mushrooms in the fridge.
And I always make extra bchamel or white sauce
so it's there in the freezer.
And I'd gotten home late, but I just wanted a nice dinner.
And the telephone rang, and it was my son who lives in Hawaii,
so with my talking on the telephone and chopping with only one hand,
I put together what we used to have sometimes
as children called "chicken divan."
It has a little layer of thin spaghetti, the cream sauce,
the mushrooms and the chicken on top,
and a little grated cheese pops in the oven.
It's all warm, so it just needs a little crusting.
And I sat down 35 minutes later.
And I get very stimulated when I'm working with a particular book,
and I see a recipe and want to play with it.
So I don't get stuck in doing the same thing.
I try not to.   There's a question right there.
Female Speaker: Judith, you taught me to bake bread.
This is Christina Shillinger Wyatt   [ spelled phonetically ]
. You taught me to bake bread, and invited me and my sister
into your home and we got so much joy from that.
And I now bake bread with my three- and four-year-old children
and I always think of you.   Judith Jones: Oh, thank you.
Female Speaker: Really, every other Sunday we'll bake bread,
and I always, always think of you with much love, so thank you.
Judith Jones: Well, that's great.   Thank you.
I tell you, I'm becoming an evangelist.
[ laughter ]
Female Speaker: You've enriched our lives.
You said something about -- which I do have a question,
which is you talked about listening to music as you cook, and I wondered
if you try to marry a particular genre of music
with a particular type of food.   Judith Jones: I do, yes.
I will. If I've made an Italian meal,
I might want something sort of Italian
[ laughs ]   to go with it.
[ laughter ]   Yeah, I think it's important.
And I think it's important to -- how do I say this --
treat yourself with respect, maybe that's it,
and put on a nice little doily or nice -- I always use real napkins.
I light the candles, and I like my plate to look pretty.
I mean, it's worth chopping a little parsley just to have it --
and that is all, to me, very satisfying so, keeping cooking.
Yes? Female Speaker: I was wondering
if you still recommend Julia's cookbook as the place to start
for those who want to start treating themselves better
[ inaudible ]
? Judith Jones: I feel that, if not "Mastering ...
," certainly "From Julia Child's Kitchen" or "The Way to Cook"
because she always has that attention to detail.
And I think you learn the fundamentals,
and then you can take off.   It's like any art.
I mean, if you're a dancer, you have to learn certain basics
and then take off, but if you don't, it's not really an art.
So. Yes? Female Speaker: You've edited many cookbooks.
I'm wondering in terms
of what you're looking for when you're editing?
Judith Jones: Well, I'm looking for that singular voice, and I'm looking
for a kind of precision in explaining
so that it isn't just a formula.
And I hate what I call this formula writing that's
in magazines and most cookbooks.
Just for an example, "In a bowl, combine the first mixture
with the second mixture."   What does that mean?
[ laughter ]   In the first place, it's illiterate.
You don't say, "In a bowl, will you combine this?"
What does combine mean?
I mean, there, you fold or you mix or you mix lightly,
but combine is not a meaningful word.
And then the first mixture, you go looking around.
What could that first mixture be?
And then you realize it's the milk that you heated
with a teaspoon of sugar.   So, it becomes a mixture?
[ laughter ]   Why can't you say the heated milk?
Then it says, after you've done all this, "Set aside."
And I want to say, what do you think I'm going to do, throw it out?
[ laughter ]   I don't get it.
I really don't.
So, I try to get people to write with real,
real precision and fresh words.   I have to tell you one story.
I love words like Julia plopping and tossing and so on.
But there was this elderly man, Marion Cunningham
[ spelled phonetically ]
-- the Fannie Farmer woman was teaching older people
who never cooked how to cook,
and this elderly man took the class with her.
And he said, "The trouble is
that I don't understand the language of cookbooks.
Somebody said, "Toss the beans into a pot of water."
So he said, "I put the pot of water
at the opposite end of the kitchen --
[ laughter ]   -- and I started tossing the beans."
[ laughter ]
And he said, "I just thought maybe they were supposed to be aerated."
[ laughter ]
And I told Julia that story and she said,
So, you can't win them all.
You just have to stick to what you believe in.
Yes? Female Speaker: What do you think about
[ inaudible ]
blogs and websites dedicated to food that update their site
[ inaudible ]   and
[ inaudible ]
? Judith Jones: I didn't get the first...what do I think of what?
Female Speaker: Food blogs.   Judith Jones: Oh, blogs, blogs.
Female Speaker: Yes, and the young woman, Julie, who followed all
of Julia Child's recipes and wrote her blog and then a book.
Judith Jones: Well, as with most things there's good and bad in it.
I think the good thing is that the blog --
you're awfully alone in the kitchen.
I think that's really one reason people don't cook more.
If they haven't experienced, you know, their mother's knee,
and most of us today haven't.
And so you feel very alone with what may go wrong and your mistakes,
and there's a kind of companionship
of having people write in and say, "Go to it!
Yeah! I did this
with my cauliflower," or something like that.
And that part I do understand, but I think so much of it is
so badly written, and I think of this, "Julie and Julia," you know?
This young woman of 29 who was having a midlife crisis,
so she wanted to cook her way through "Mastering the Art."
I'm sure you've heard of this.
And so she and her husband fixed her up on a blog,
and little by little she got a flock who were all saying,
"Go to it, Julie," and so on.
And she called me to see if I wanted to come out and watch her cook.
And I was going to go until I looked at the blog.
And I won't repeat the language, but they're all four-letter words.
And I really don't think that those words have much to do with cooking.
And I felt it was kind of almost an exploitation of Julia,
and Julia felt it too, so I didn't go out.
But I think that answers your question.
I just wish they'd take more care.
There's a wonderful one that I follow called "The City Cook."
And she goes with the seasons and talks
about what's in the farmer's markets.
But I think you have to probably select
Constance Carter: Okay, folks, there's
[ inaudible ]   . Oh,
[ unintelligible ]   , we'll let you do the last.
Judith Jones: Okay.
Male Speaker: The idea of having, you know,
if you really know the principles or whatever,
the equipment doesn't matter that much or you should be able to adapt.
But do you have a favorite range you've ever cooked on,
or a favorite pot or anything like that?
Judith Jones: Oh, yes I do.
I have a cast iron pot, the frying pan's about that big,
so it's perfect for, you know, one serving.
And one of the techniques that I love today is cooking something fast
in it, like a little skirt steak or a little piece of fish --
quick searing, and then putting the whole thing in a warm oven
for about 10 minutes to rest, and it's just beautiful.
And I think I use that pot,
that little frying pan about five times a week.
So, yes, I think you do get to have favorites.
Constance Carter: Well, we want to thank Judith
[ inaudible ]   .
[ applause ]   [ music clip ]
[ end of transcript ]   ?? ?? ?? ??