The editor who discovered Julia Child

Judith Jones was working as a junior editor at the Alfred A. Knopf publishing house in New York in 1959 when an 800-page manuscript landed on her desk. A collection of French recipes aimed at Americans, the book had been rejected by several other publishers. But Jones, who had fallen in love with French cuisine while living in Paris, was enthralled. It was, she said, “the cookbook I had been dreaming of.” Under Jones’ stewardship, Mastering the Art of French Cooking became a staple of kitchen bookshelves—and propelled its lead author, Julia Child, toward culinary stardom. “If the book was so right for me,” said Jones, “there were bound to be thousands like me who really wanted to learn the whys and wherefores of good French cooking.” Born in New York City to a prosperous but frugal family, Jones “was raised on Depression-era and wartime cooking,” said The Washington Post. Her mother “forbade the discussion of food at the table,” so she learned how to cook from the family’s Barbadian chef. After college, Jones moved to France and took an editorial assistant’s job at Doubleday’s Paris office. When her boss asked her to sort through the rejects pile, she happened to pick up a French version of The Diary of Anne Frank, which hadn’t yet been translated into English. “I read all afternoon with tears streaming down my face,” she said. “When my boss returned, I told him, ‘We have to publish this.’” That “canny move” earned Jones a job at Knopf in New York, said NPR.org. There, along with Child, she “championed various cookbook authors who went on to become icons,” including James Beard, Marcella Hazan, and Claudia Roden. Her forté was finding foreign-born writers who could make their native cuisines accessible to a U.S. audience. “Ordinary Americans, not just the privileged, were traveling to Europe,” she explained. “Their taste buds had been awakened.” During her 50-year career at Knopf, Jones also “edited some of America’s best novelists and nonfiction writers,” including John Updike and Anne Tyler, said The New York Times. She wrote three cookery books with her husband, Evan Jones, an American food writer she had met in Paris, and two more after his death in 1996. Her advice to writers was simple. “Find your voice,” she said. “Find who you are and don’t be afraid to show it.”