TTT Interviewee: Judith Jones Session #2 Interviewer: Judith Weinraub New York City, New York Date: May 7, 2009 Q: This is Judith Weinraub. It’s May 7, and I’m with Judith Jones in her apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan for our second interview. Good afternoon. Jones: Hello. Q: One of the things we didn’t talk about the other day was the Knopf Cooks American Series, and I’d love to know how and when that came about. I couldn’t tell whether all the books were signed at the same time or how that worked and then what happened. Jones: Okay. It’s a sad story. That was an ambitious project, and it really came about because my husband, Evan, had done a book on American Food: The Gastronomic Story, and it really was a book that was kind of ahead of its time. Nobody had looked at what makes American food so unique, because we are a country of so many different waves of immigration that influenced the way we eat and are always open to new things, that it’s a hard subject to get your hands around. And while there had been books about Pennsylvania Dutch cooking and Mormon cooking and so on, they were more little church social books and amateur efforts, and nobody had looked at the big picture. Q: When was this, ballpark? Jones: I can look up dates, but I think that his book was late sixties. Q: All right. I’ll check that date. [It was published in 1975.] And then about how much later did you start thinking about the series? Jones: Well, I started thinking about it as he was, doing the American book, because there was so much to write about, particularly [unclear] what was happening today, My idea was to publish a series of books, not just regionally oriented, but to take a subject as often as we could as the focus. One of the topics we took was sausages, for instance, written by Bruce Aidells, who was a wonderful sausage maker out in California. It’s a fascinating book. Q: Here they are. So they start here and then go there. [List of titles is shown to Jones] Q: Okay, go ahead. Oh, I see, it is in sequence. The American series as they’re put together here is in sequence. Jones: Yes. Q: Sorry about that. The electronic age. Jones: Yes, between this and my glasses. Q: And then the phone and then— [laughter] And then it goes over to the next page. Jones: Knopf Cooks American, yes. For instance, after sausages. We did the story of beer in this country, and then a different kind of take on, say, Italian food because of there wasn’t just one kind of Italian food. A group of Italian immigrants settled, they brought with them northern Italian or southern Italian, and so on. Nancy Verde Barr contributed a wonderful book called We Called it Macaroni. And Joan Nathan on Jewish cooking in America, two Minnesotans looking at the northern heartland altogether, and Ken Thom on the food he grew up on. Also a Chinese American book, Latin American book and so on. Q: Were these assigned all at once, at one go? Jones: No, no. I started with two authors and two books. And Knopf was a wonderful place to work, because they were open to—it was still a small house then—open to this kind of experiment. And it was an experiment, because what we really wanted to have happen was that bookstores would take the whole series, devote a shelf to them, adding the latest title as it came along, accompanied by a little shelf talker describing the series. Q: And about how big were they? Jones: They were quite good-sized, wonderfully illustrated with documentary illustrations. This was before everything had to be in full-color photographs, but they were very intriguingly designed. I mean, you’d pick them up and there was color, but just not color photographs. I think what happened really was that we couldn’t get the bookstores to support the idea because it’s a here today, gone tomorrow approach to selling books. I mean, that’s very much the thinking of the big chains today. Q: You mean in a bookstore. Jones: And I was still thinking— Q: They’re not thinking shelf life. Jones: So it didn’t happen that way we hoped—the books got good reviews, but unless you sell a certain number of copies a year, they weren’t kept in stock. Storage was much more expensive. There was tax on storage and so on and so forth. That’s one of the real frustrations. Q: There’s tax on storage? Oh, interesting. Jones: It’s considered an asset, but particularly for small publishers, that makes it hard to keep books in print. Whereas when I first went into publishing, the books that sustained places like Knopf were the backlist. You could count on them selling year after year after year. So our American series was an experiment, and I certainly found some extremely good authors, but we couldn’t go on with it. Q: About how long a period of time would those have been done? Jones: I probably should have looked up all these figures, but I think you have some dates here. It was about ten years, nine years. Q: This is partly what I was wondering. I should have looked this up myself, too, but I was trying to remember when the Time-Life, first of all, The Foods of the World series came out, and then they did do it geographically. [Series started in 1968.] Jones: Yes. Q: But, of course, that was marketed by mail, so it wasn’t bookstore competition, but it was, I think, out there around the same time. I’m not sure. So you were in some ways both thinking along the same lines. Jones: Yes. I think that the Time-Life did the European series. Q: Yes, that’s correct. Jones: Yes. And then— Q: Then the American. Jones: That series irritated me, because particularly when they did the European series, they wanted recipes from famous authors like Julia Child and James Beard and so on and so forth. Q: You mean free? Jones: Well, they paid a pittance, and why should you put all those authors together in one book when we’re selling them very well separately? It’s a dangerous game. So we resisted it, I resisted it, and I remember they were so furious. They called the president of Random House, saying, “Who is this woman who’s blocking our—?” And also, let’s face it, the recipes—and text—are written by committee even though the author is credited. I mean, they got somebody like M.F.K. Fisher to do the book on French cookery, and there wasn’t anything of her left in what came out. So I didn’t feel that series was really competition, but nevertheless, ours didn’t work. Q: But the Time-Life books were promoted heavily. That’s the one thing I was thinking about. Jones: Very heavily, yes. Q: So you presumably—you, Knopf—put a certain amount of money into the American series. Jones: And some sold for a long time. The Brooklyn Cookbook did very well. You know the Brooklyn people are such chauvinists. Q: Do you remember what was in The Brooklyn Cookbook? Jones: It was called The Brooklyn Cookbook. Q: Let me look at the list, too. Jones: And it was a particularly good book. There were good stories. Q: And the stories were attached to the recipes? Jones: They all have recipes, yes, and they told the story through the food, yes, and the way it evolved. There were some that were regional, titles such The Florida Cookbook. But I really liked the idea of following the story through a subtext. Q: And sausage. Did you stop assigning them or just give up trying to persuade bookstores to keep them, or how did it get put to rest, the series? Jones: Well, you just don’t reprint. Q: I see. Jones: And they die a slow death. Q: That is a sad story. [laughter] Jones: It is a sad story. That is one of the really good things, I think, about using the internet, because we can get books on demand now, and I think more and more, instead of books going out of print and the years of work that went into it just lost. Now you can go to a machine and put a few dollars in, and out comes the book. Q: It’s incredible. Jones: Yes. Q: At The New School panel recently, a couple months back, it was a James Beard panel, you said that you remembered Jim Beard saying, “We’re American and we can do as we please.” Jones: “Do as we please.” I love that. Q: So in the light of this, well, we’re talking about American books, could you play out what you think that meant to him and what that meant about him? Jones: Yes. Well, one is that it was his nature not to be rigid, and he was just so encouraging and loving, and appreciative that it didn’t matter if you failed. That was his whole stance as a teacher. He was wonderful that way. But he also felt that American food was this huge conglomerate of different cuisines, and you might do it one way in Louisiana and another way in Milwaukee, which was very much the theme that I was playing with here. That approach makes cookery enriching whereas rigidities tend to make you not experiment, to just be rooted in the past, and that was not his way. He always had a new way of doing something. Q: What do you mean? Jones: Well, I mean he was always open to whatever was the latest equipment. So was Julia, too, but Jim particularly. For instance, I remember when we did the bread book with him, and I went down sometimes to his house in Greenwich Village to help him, watch him, and take notes. Once he had the broiler on instead of the oven on, and he put the beautiful loaf he had just shaped under the broiler. And when we went to check it, it was mighty brown on top. But he said, “Hey, we’re going to have broiled bread,” and he turned the oven down so that the bottom caught up with the top, maybe put a little foil over the top, and, sure enough, we had a recipe for broiled bread. Q: That is very inventive. Talking about the bread book, a number of people have said to me that they felt that you made him as an author; in other words that you, I guess—well, I’m curious to know what you think, but the idea was that the books that he did with you were rather different from the books that preceded. Jones: Yes, and I definitely encouraged him. We started by doing a bread book because it was during that counterrevolution of the sixties when all the yuppies were— Q: Making bread. Jones: No, the hippies. The yuppies came later. Excuse me. Q: Yes. Jones: …were making their own bread and even making their own yeast out of grape skins, and that kind of things, and yet there really wasn’t a good teaching book on bread. So I called Jim Beard and—did I tell you this about how we had lunch? Q: Yes, that we did talk about, yes. Jones: So we have the three or four lunches together, and finally he said, “I’m the man to do the bread book.” I was delighted. This book made him analyze why he did something, how he did it, and to express it. And, to me, that is the most important thing in a cookbook, the voice, the authority that can sort of deconstruct and then make you able to do it all alone in your own kitchen for the first time with nobody there except the voice of the author. And he liked that. Jim, he started out as an actor, and though he was never good on television because he was always self-consciously acting, he had that acting ability in him. So I think that that started him writing much more openly and not just submitting to the terrible little short formula that was— Q: Did you encourage him to do an outline or to think of it as a teaching book? Jones: I think that’s why I spent a lot of time with him. I ask lots of questions, and then I’d say, “Get that in, get that in. Why did my loaf rise so that the top sprung away from the bottom, and why had someone else’s hardly rose at all?” There are so many variables. That’s something that anybody who loves cooking begins to understands, and work with, making the act of cooking it, a positive rather than something to be scared of. Q: Did he give you an outline before he actually started writing, or you created one together? Jones: We worked out an outline, yes, and he always had a writer, because he did more than was humanly possible for one man to do. So José Wilson was his collaborator that I worked with mostly, and I was there as the devil’s advocate to get them to really explain. Q: By this time, you had, of course, considerable experience with, as it were, teaching cookbooks. Jones: Yes. Q: So I suppose what I’m asking you is, did you see it that way as well, that you felt there was the need for something that explained how to do things? Jones: I realized the importance, that you couldn’t just simply write formulas, but you had to explain, and that that made all the difference in the world. I think Julia Child revolutionized the way cookbooks could be written. I’m afraid they’re not always written that way today. Q: Well, it takes a lot of space, so that’s part of it, too. At The New School [panel], too, you also said you thought that book opened him up a little bit. Jones: Yes. Q: Could you explain how? Jones: Well, I think he liked the concept, and it’s certainly what he did instinctively as a teacher, so he was able to translate that to the page, and it empowered him to really connect with that lone person in the kitchen. Q: Did you go to any of his classes? Jones: Yes. Q: So you had an experience of him in a different way than just personally? Jones: Yes. Yes, that helped a lot. Q: Were the classes very organized, or how did that work? Jones: No, not particularly. [laughter] Jim was not the most organized person, and, to me, it was also interesting to watch people. I could almost tell which ones really were going to get it. I could pick out the ones who really enjoyed eating as against the sort that Julia used to call the Nervous Nellies, who always needed one more rule to follow. The tough thing about cookbooks is that you’re writing for the rank beginner and the experienced, even the chef, and how you put it all together to figure it out for each author is challenging. You don’t want them all to have the same voice. Q: Was he a good teacher, from that point of view? Jones: A wonderful teacher, yes, because he was very empowering and very encouraging, and people had fun. Q: Yes, that’s very important. Jones: I mean, as compared to somebody like Marcella Hazan, who practically rapped you over the knuckles if you asked a word and if you dared touch the dough. Each one is a very different personality. Q: What about the pasta book? Did that precede— Jones: That came out after the bread. Q: Yes, I haven’t seen it. I wasn’t able to get a copy of that, so I didn’t get a look at it. Was it in the same form as the bread book or how was it organized? Jones: Exactly the same form. It was a companion to it, and it was based on the same theory, that all of a sudden the world of Italian cooking had opened up, and Marcella [Hazan] is much responsible for that, that Italian food wasn’t just southern Italian food, tomato sauce and garlic, but all kinds of regional nuances, and everybody was making pasta. There were pasta shops all over New York. It was quite amazing. So I thought there should be a good book on pasta from an American authority who could borrow from anywhere. Q: So the recipes were from all over the place? Jones: Yes. But pasta is pasta. I mean he didn’t get into dumplings and things like that, but certainly regional differences improvising out of American ingredients. I remember once I was at his house working with him, and he was so excited because he’d had such a good pasta the night before at some little Italian place, and it was made with swordfish and black olives. I make it quite often, just to remember Jim. You see, that, to me, is another thing that delights me about food, is that it isn’t just a dish and eating and enjoying it. That’s fine. But it’s so filled with memory and associations, so that you have a dish like that and you suddenly are with that person. And I don’t know that Americans quite open themselves up to that as readily as some cultures. Q: Open themselves up to? Jones: To that delight in food and those associations. Spending time with food and all sitting at the table together and drinking wine and— Q: It gets harder. Jones: We’re more rigid. Q: Yes. Jones: Some Americans. Also, in looking at the American story, it was interesting how the Puritan influence prevailed for so long, except in the South. And then the whole development of the food industry with their prepared foods had a tremendous influence, because they played on women’s image of themselves, saying, “You don’t want to get your hands all smelly with garlic, little woman,” and it’s sort of demeaning to cook. That’s for— Q: Yet at the same time—well, maybe it wasn’t the same time, I guess it was the sixties into the seventies, people were buying these new cookbooks and these teaching cookbooks. Jones: Well, that’s after the explosion, after Julia. Q: Yes, I see. I see. So we’re talking about the fifties. Jones: And I think there was a tremendous change after the war. Julia often said to me, [imitating Child’s voice], “Judith, you and I were there at the right time.” [laughter] Q: She was right. Jones: She certainly was at the right time. But America was ready for her, because we were traveling, and not just the elite traveling, but every little secretary went to Europe for the first time, and the G.I.’s came home from Europe and the Far East, and so it was a very yeasty time. Q: I guess by the late—well, by the sixties, when I was first aware of it, Bloomingdale’s, Macy’s, they had the equipment that it would have been really hard to get at other times. Jones: Yes. Q: Whether they were specific sizes of soufflé dishes or tamis or whatever. Jones: Yes. Q: So that is interesting. Okay, now, talking about teaching cookbooks. This, however, brings us to this, which indeed I did— Jones: What is that? Q: —get from the internet. I mean, I was able to get hold of that. This is James Beard’s Theory & Practice of Good Cooking, and you did say the other day that you took an active role in this. So tell me about that. Tell me about its genesis, whether you babysat it the whole time. How did that work? I just thought maybe looking at it might— Jones: Well, by then Jim was writing also a syndicated column, and he was writing for one of the southern airlines, so he was turning out a lot of material, and it seemed to me that the thinking in these pieces represented what I feel about food, that you really have to understand the theory, not just of what braising is, but all that’s connected with it, how you do it properly, why. And, you know, once you understand that, you hardly need recipes. The rest is just themes and variations. Q: But you do need good explanations. Jones: You need wonderful explanations. That’s what I thought Jim was very good at. Q: So that he talks first about tools, with illustrations. Let’s see what we have here. And basics like chicken stock, veal stock, even, and methods, which is interesting. Now, how did the two of you work together to develop the order of this book? Jones: I don’t remember the details. It just sort of evolved out of talking and pressing him with questions. Q: I was going to say, again, you must have asked him questions. Jones: Yes. And then because he was writing these regular columns, he played a lot with the material in this book and tried it on people. Q: I mean, there are things here that it probably would be hard to find. Thickeners and liaisons, not a lot of cookbooks include a section on that now. Jones: No, they don’t. Q: Or chilling and freezing. We do need guidance, so some of that must have been you. Jones: I certainly was there pushing and asking questions, yes. Q: Then the concordance of terms and ingredients. Jones: Yes. Terms are important, or the way you use language. This is something I feel so strongly about, that you don’t just say “in a bowl combine the first mixture with the second mixture,”—and that’s what recipe have become in magazines—because, one, it’s bad English. You don’t “in a bowl” do something, but no one cares about that. Q: There you are standing in a bowl, yes. [laughter] Jones: But what does combine mean? Somebody who’s really telling you about theory and practice would tell you why you’re folding at this point, or why you shouldn’t whisk the eggs too much when you’re making an omelet, what that will do to the eggs. So you don’t use a word like “combine.” You use “whisk” or “mix with your hands” or “scrunch through.” Julia’s language is so visceral, and I think that that is really part of theory and practice, understanding terms. Instead of talking about a mixture, you talk about the batter once it’s become a batter, so the person reading this book learns to understand culinary terms. And that’s just gone out the window, and I don’t understand why. I think it was to shorten recipes used in newspapers and magazines. Q: Yes, that’s what I was thinking, to save space. How long did it take to write this? Was it a long time aborning? Jones: Well, Jim always needed prodding, but he worked very hard. I would say that was— Q: This is a lot of work. Jones: —probably three years. Q: And did Knopf promote it? Jones: Yes, yes. Q: So, how well did it do? Jones: It didn’t do exactly what I hoped it would do, because I think maybe it seemed a little esoteric to people. But it was a backlist item for years and years. We no longer have it in print now, but it was a good solid backlist book over the years. I would guess that book did about—and it’s a guess—80,000 copies, 75,000 copies. But it was never big, big. Q: But it seems like it must have been the only thing around at that time that went into this. I don’t know when Jacques Pépin— Jones: Techniques and—his first books were really just a little bit too esoteric for Americans. Q: I was going to say they were really for professionals, essentially. Jones: They were for professionals, yes, and then he started to work more with home cooking. It was wonderful to see Julia and Jacques working together—did we talk about that? Q: No. No, I actually, at the time of the book, I talked to you for the newspaper about that. Jones: Yes. But it was just great to see them, because here they were, both schooled in French technique, and that is the backbone of western cooking—no two ways about it— and yet their approach was different. Julia was the one that was far more rigid, and Jacques was this kind of anything goes and trying everything. He’d become so American except for his accent. He’d still say, “But that’s not the point [French pronunciation]. That’s not the point, Julia.” [laughter] But it also told you that nothing is written in stone, that you have two really great artists and they do things slightly differently, and it’s part of their trademark on that particular dish. Q: It’s a wonderful book, and not only because of the recipes, but because it shows a little of their relationship. Jones: It does. Q: And it shows the point you’ve just made, and it’s fun. It’s a lovely book. Now, you know that part of the reason for this project is to gather some information from people who knew James Beard, but it is also talking to people who we believe really have changed the way people think about food. And because of these books that you’ve edited, you obviously are one of these people. And when we talked the last time, you said that your standard for whether or not to accept a book or to go ahead with it was whether or not it made a contribution. Jones: Yes. Q: I wondered if you could in context say what that meant. Jones: Well, I think that there are an awful lot of books that are churned out in any field, and when this explosion of interest in cooking in America took place, everybody was on the bandwagon. My example is the zucchini cookbook. Who the hell needs a zucchini cookbook? And it seemed to me that more and more the important thing to look for was that teacher, that guide who really led you into new territory and enabled you to take on the mantle yourself and learn to love it, experiment, and create your own style (or not real style of cooking, but your own way of cooking). And so I guess that’s my criterion. Q: I reason I made this timeline—where did it go?—was to see how those books progressed. The references I have are more or less the first time you worked with somebody. But as you know, in the beginning it’s not, but then it does kind of go through different sorts of cuisines, and I’m curious to know whether that was conscious. Jones: That was very conscious. I felt that if Julia could do this for French cooking, I must find somebody who could do it for Middle Eastern cooking. That was just beginning to open up. And Chinese cooking. Not that there’s one Chinese cuisine, but the basics of Chinese cooking. And I also felt that what we wanted there was somebody who was the voice for that, a voice that’s full of memory, and this very often came from somebody, particularly women, who’d left their past. Food was a way of reconnecting. Q: Their geographical past? Jones: Their geographical past. Claudia Roden and her Jewish family had to leave Egypt, Irene Kuo, who did the Chinese book, had had to leave, and she grew up, as did Claudia, in a household where there were servants. So they enjoyed the food and they had all those memories, but they didn’t necessarily know how to cook. So in teaching themselves, they were teaching others, they’re teaching you. Madhur Jaffrey is a wonderful example of that, too. So there was a conscious effort on my part to look for really good books of this kind. Q: Madhur Jaffrey also did not grow up cooking. Jones: Yes. Q: I believe she also had to check in with her family or the family cook to see how things were done. Jones: Yes. And then that kind of person is more sympathetic sometimes than a chef to the little fledgling home cook all alone in the kitchen saying, “Help,” because that person was once there, too. Q: So are they more likely to think through the steps that a newcomer would need to know? Jones: Yes, and to explain, not take for granted that you know all these culinary words. Q: Now, these books in some way or other mirror the explosion of interest in these different subjects, but some of them, to me, seemed almost a little ahead of their time or perhaps they were the first big books to be able to explain these cuisines. I don’t know whether you felt you were leading the way, whether you felt these were necessary, whether you were riding a wave. Jones: You know, I don’t think you ever really feel you’re leading the way. I really had to listen to my own instinct. That’s certainly what I did with Julia Child. It wasn’t anything more than if this book means so much to me, there must be others like me. If I feel the need of a book that will really tell me about Middle Eastern cooking and all the nuances, there must be others like me, and there were. It’s just they had been repressed, and once we were releasing them, they sprouted up all over the country. Q: Now, meanwhile, you were trying out recipes from each of these. So you and Evan, your own dinners must have changed in many ways or at least had more of a variety of cooking than you started out, yes? Jones: Yes. Q: Was he enthusiastic about that? Jones: Oh, he was, and he was also—I think men are more apt to be this way. He was much more of an experimenter, unafraid. He’d look at two or three recipes and put them aside and the make it his way. He’d learn from each. If I was out of coconut, for instance, he’d say, “So I’ll try something that has a little sweetness,” and he would improvise. Q: Now, presumably, also your kitchen grew in spices, ingredients, even elements of the foreign cuisine, you would need different things to make some of these. Jones: Yes. I think that’s one of the hardest things to organize. I mean, you really should have in your kitchen a little Indian section and a Chinese section, and there isn’t room for it. Also you have to buy too much, and spices go stale. It’s hard to throw things out, isn’t it? Q: It is, but you have to force yourself. It is very hard to do it. Certainly you would have needed certain different spicing for Middle Eastern cooking. Italian cooking, I mean, nobody had those little paddles for making gnocchi or— Jones: Oh, no. Q: So you must have been introducing yourself to the various things that are required. I don’t know what it would have been in Latin America. Jones: Well, just the food processor, for instance, what you’re able to do is amazing. You can make pasta dough, you can make bread dough, you can make gnocchi, you can do those French things like quenelles that you used to have to put through a sieve. Q: I’m trying to remember when the food processors—it started being marketed in the late sixties? Jones: The food processor? Q: The Cuisinart. Jones: The Cuisinart, yes. It was a little later. Late sixties, I think. Q: As we just spoke before, meanwhile, you were still also doing literature and poetry and other things at this same time. Why In the Kitchen with Rosie? Jones: Well, that’s a story unto itself. Q: How much of that can you share? Jones: Since this isn’t going to be published material, I think that I can tell you that I was selected to go to Chicago. Oprah [Winfrey] had been doing a memoir of her life, and a lot had gone into it; she then withdrew it for reasons of— Q: The memoir? Jones: Yes. And I think she’s a very decent person. I think she felt bad about it. Q: Was she doing it with you, with Knopf? Jones: Yes. Not with me personally, no, no. With Knopf. Q: Yes, “you” plural, yes. Jones: Yes. So when she had this idea that she would put her cook, Rosie, on the show, she thought, “We’ll do a quick little book and Knopf can publish it.” This is my interpretation of it, that she was trying to make up for having really let us down. So I was summoned by our CEO and asked to go out to Chicago and find somebody who could work with Rosie and go out to Oprah’s ranch and make the book happen in two weeks. [Next few comments deleted by Jones] Shortly after we arrived, Oprah blew in. She’d been running, and she had that running high, all sweaty and smiley. And she listened to what I was saying about the book and how it should be, and then she looked at me and she said, “Do you think we’re doing this too fast?” And I had been told, “Don’t say no to anything.” [laughs] So I answered, “Well, we can do anything, but, yes, it won’t be as good a book.” She quickly responded that then she would postpone having Rosie on the show. So we were given something like three months’ grace to write the book I mean, Rosie’d never written a book before. So I really admired her immediately. [Next few comments deleted by Jones] Jones: The rest is history. That book [In the Kitchen With Rosie] sold more than any cookbook ever. It was a huge success. Q: But then later on, you did— Jones: Then we did one with— Q: With Andy Weil. Jones: Rosie and Andy Weil. Well, Andy Weil was a Knopf author. Q: I see. Jones: So that’s how that happened. Q: I see. It wasn’t a natural marriage. I remember interviewing both of them at the time. Jones: You got that. He was so condescending to her, it made me furious. And I had to drink his green powdered tea. Q: Green stuff. [laughs] Jones: Lukewarm. I think if anything could make you nauseated, that does. Q: So that’s how it prevented you from eating very much. Jones: But Rosie, she was just a gem to work with. She’s so nice, and she got it. Q: I don’t remember the title of that, but when you did the book with Andy Weil, presumably, but you tell me, there was a desire stirring for healthful recipes? Jones: Oh yes. It was very much the new vogue. I’d never wanted to do a diet book, but I did succumb to the one by Ed Giobbi, because I knew he was a wonderful Italian cook, and I was sort of fascinated by how you could take Italian cooking and make it so healthful. This was when the safflower was the cure-all for everything. Q: So this is in 1998, Eat Right, Eat Well, the Italian Way, that’s what your— Jones: Yes. And I remember Julia said, “Safflower oil?” She said, “I had these kooks in my kitchen one time, they were staying in the house, and they used safflower oil, and it was in everything. You couldn’t get it out of the—it clogged up the stove. If it does that with a stove, what does it do to your arteries?” She was so damned right, you know, of all the idiot things. So that book was not a wild success, but it was the beginning of a wonderful relationship with Ed Giobbi, so I don’t regret it. Q: Then The Healthy Kitchen, the one with Rosie Daley and Andy Weil was 2003, so presumably the desire for guidance to healthful but good eating had grown at that point? Jones: Yes. Oh, you know that whole wave of the fear of fat that was— Q: Yes. Jones: —incredible. Q: Weil’s books, I guess, do so well in general. I don’t know whether this combo did. Jones: He does a newsletter that I often look at, and he’s got, again, a very good tone, a very sensible tone to the whole approach to healthier food. Q: And certainly that book, it wasn’t presented as offbeat. Jones: No. Q: It was user-friendly. Jones: Yes. Yes. But I’d never cook any of that stuff. I mean, what’s the point? Q: You know, I don’t know how you react to this, but one conversation that I find I have with so many people who, if I invite them to dinner, come over and they say, “Well, you don’t use olive oil, do you? Olive oil is fattening.” So I go into my little lecture about good fats and bad fats and how olive oil is the perfect food, and, obviously, restraint in the amount that you’re eating has much more to do with it than the ingredients. But do people ever accuse you of promoting recipes that are not healthful because they are traditional and used— Jones: You mean in the books of the people I work with? Q: Yes. Jones: Yes, there’s always someone won’t buy a certain book, but that isn’t who we’re publishing for. That’s specialty publishing, as far as I’m concerned. Q: When confronted with that question of how things are fattening, do you talk about appropriate amounts or what? Jones: I always quote Julia, and that is, try to eat a little bit of everything in small portions, not huge portions, and don’t eat between meals. She doesn’t say and don’t eat junk food and don’t drink junk soda, but I wouldn’t dream of eating junk food and junk soda. I mean, I’ve psyched myself so that they’re almost sickening to me. When I have young people around and they drink all this pop, I won’t buy it for them. They have to go out and get it. Q: Well, they don’t—I mean, nobody needs it, but— Jones: And I think you find your own level—every body has its own balance of input and outtake, and I know what I can eat. If I’ve eaten an enormous meal the night before, I just don’t want that much the next day. I’m sure there’s an inner discipline going on there. [Passage deleted by Jones] Q: This list of books, of course, does go on to include more American books. Jones: Yes. Q: Actually, the first one, I suppose, being Craig Claiborne’s Kitchen Primer, which I always liked. Jones: It’s a nice little book. Q: I thought that was a neat little book. Jones: It didn’t go as far as I would have liked him to go in that, in terms of teaching the basics. Q: But it did, as I recall anyway, give you confidence about some basic things like meatloaf or—I can’t remember. Jones: Yes, and you learned the terms. You learned what it was all about. Yes. Q: I couldn’t tell whether that was 1969 or ’72 or whether ’72 was a reprint or reissue, rather. Jones: I think it probably was ’72, yes. Q: Then, of course, there was The New Orleans Cookbook by Rima and Richard Collin and then Edna Lewis’s The Taste of Country Cooking. Did you work only on the thirtieth anniversary edition in 2006? [Passage edited for clarity.] Jones: Oh, The Taste of Country Cooking. Oh yes. I worked with that. Yes, that was an interesting story, because Bob Bernstein, who was the president of Random House, asked me to see Edna Lewis and her collaborator, who were having a book published. I think it was by Dodd Mead. I said, “Well, I’ll see them, but if she’s having the book published” He said, “Well, talk to her.” He knew the co-author who was doing the writing. Q: So this was the later book that Scott Peacock— Jones: No, this is the first one. [We did do a 30th anniversary edition of The Taste of Country Cooking, and I wrote an introduction to that.] Q: The first one. Aha. Jones: They came in to see me, and I was immediately struck by Edna. She was so beautiful and animated and talked about food in such a lovely way. She described where she grew up, living on a farm in a town called Freetown, which her grandfather had established made up of several communal farms. It was as though food were the reward for everything in life. You worked hard, but as long as you had this pleasure, it wasn’t work. The book they were doing, which was The Edna Lewis Cookbook, that already was in galleys, so there wasn’t any hope or question of our taking it over. Anyway, I looked at it, and it didn’t reflect what I had seen in her, so I said, “Well, the book I’d love is one about your childhood and growing up in Virginia in a farm community. Go home and put down some of the things you’ve just told me.” Well, she went home with the collaborator, and they tried writing what she’d told me. But it wasn’t the same, and I said, “It’s not you.” Whereupon this woman, the collaborator, was a friend of Bernstein, got up and said, “You know, I think I should leave,” and she didn’t say it defensively but with great dignity and grace. Q: That was very graceful. Jones: She said, “I think you two should be working together.” So I got Edna to write by coming once a week for over a year to my office on her day off. She was working at the Natural History Museum on tours with children. And she’d bring me notes and recipes and we’d talk all afternoon. Then I’d say, “Go home and write it all down.” It was just amazing. She had that gift of telling a story. She needed a little punctuation and sometimes the subject didn’t agree with the verb, but it was lovely. Once, I asked her, “You know, Edna, we’ve got all these holidays. We haven’t got Thanksgiving.” And she was silent for a moment, and then said, “Well, we didn’t celebrate Thanksgiving. We celebrated Emancipation Day.” So I got her to tell me about that, and we did a menu of an Emancipation Day dinner. And that’s how that all happened. To me it was one of the most beautiful experiences I had in publishing. That’s how books should happen. It’s there inside the right person. Q: So it sounds like that has been part of your technique, talking to people. I mean, we’ve said many times that you ask questions, but is it almost like interviewing them or getting to know them, or what is it that helps you intuit how to help them tell their story? Jones: I don’t know. I suppose it’s really different for each, and sometimes it doesn’t particularly work. But when it starts to happen and somebody has so much to say, as she did about her kind of southern cooking, which was very refined. (I mean, she wasn’t for chittlins). And then later she did the book with Scott Peacock. Or she did one other book and then one with Scott. Q: What about Marion Cunningham and The Fannie Farmer Cookbook? She had never done something like this before, is that right? Jones: No. Q: So how did you work with her? That was 1996. Jones: Well, about the first revision of The Fannie Farmer that we did: I knew that the Fannie Farmer people were looking for a new publisher, and I was not interested, because I thought it had become a bad book. It was a book I grew up on, but— Q: Who is the “they” that were looking for— Jones: Well, it was the Fannie Farmer Corporation, and what really had happened is that nobody in the family was really a cook-teacher who could take over, and in subsequent editions they just hired somebody to do the recipes. They were mostly what I call boxtop recipes, of no consequence. So I didn’t want to do the book. I think because I didn’t, Frank Benson, president of the Fannie Farmer Company wanted to see me to know why. Of course, I liked him and we got to talking, and I told him it had become a bad book, and I wouldn’t touch it unless we could get somebody to revamp the whole thing and become the voice of Fannie Farmer in the twentieth century. So he said, “Who would do it?” Well, I hadn’t the faintest idea, and particularly to do it just for a fee, because they weren’t quite willing to give up— Q: The rights. Jones: —the rights, the full rights in it. That was when I turned to Jim Beard because you could call him about anything and he’d find an answer. He showed me some of his correspondence with Marion Cunningham and, told me about how she worked with him in his classes in Oregon in the summer. Just reading those letters and knowing what went on between them, I felt— Q: So you knew she wasn’t a professional cook, but you had a sense of her from the letters? Jones: A sense of her from the letters, her taste, her instinct about what was genuine American, what had happened to some of the good old-fashioned cakes, how we’d made them in the past and how we’d ruined them through processed food. Things like that. So she came East and she met in my office with Frank Benson. We talked a long time and there was something so radiant about her. And he said, “Well, I want to take you ladies out to lunch,” in a lovely old-fashioned New England way. We went to a little bistro down the street, and he asked, “Now, would you ladies like a cocktail?” And Marion smiled this beatific smile, and she said, “Oh no, I’m an alcoholic.” Did you know that story? [laughter] Q: Yes. It’s a great story. Jones: So wonderful. And later he told me that that sold him, totally. I mean, that’s a very courageous thing to do, isn’t it? Q: Oh, enormously. But how much did you have to help her as she worked her way through the book? Jones: Oh, I had to get more people. I realized I’d taken on an impossible task, and we got somebody to do the preserving, and whittle that chapter down, because nobody really does that kind of preserving. Q: You mean the recipes for— Jones: Yes. And we got somebody to do the desserts. No, Marion did the desserts. Nobody would do the jellied salads, and there must have been sixty. [laughter] Q: Of course. Jones: So I offered to take on that and, of course, I threw out all the ones that were just Jello salads. Q: Ghastly. Jones: I think the section was reduced to about six recipes. So we really all pitched in, and that was fun. Q: But you can’t do an American cookbook like that without jellied salads. Jones: You have to have some. Q: You have to. When you look at this list and the progression, could you reflect back and tell me what you see about what’s happened to cooking in America during this period of time that you’ve been editing these books? Jones: Well, as always, there’s the good and there’s the bad or the sad. While I think that we opened up as Americans and learned so much, I’m saddened that a lot of it was exploited into what I think the Food Network is doing today. Their motto is “We’re not just about food; we’re about entertainment.” Well, it doesn’t have to be entertainment and then often such sloppy cooking. I turned on something I seldom watch and there were four youngish women, each doing a dish she would make. I wouldn’t have wanted to make one of those dishes. One of them had cubes of chicken and I counted how long they were in the pot of water that was boiling, boiling, boiling. Something like forty-five minutes. Q: [laughs] They were stones. Jones: I just think, oh, all the work I’ve done over the years to try to awaken us to that instinct, that sense of what makes really fine cooking, and subtle cooking, delicious cooking, and then you see someone just throwing things together and boiling them. I don’t know. I feel I don’t know how to fight it anymore. Q: I don’t know whether people really cook from those programs. Jones: I don’t think they do, but they buy the books. Q: They do buy the books. Jones: As old Alfred [Knopf] used to say, “Every penny that goes to somebody else’s book doesn’t go to your book.” [laughs] But on the other hand, on the good side, I think of really how worthwhile books have made a place for themselves, become good backlist items and made a genuine contribution. Q: Made a place for themselves in the development of cooking in America, or what? Jones: Yes. And in enlightening people. Q: We have more knowledge. Jones: Oh yes. And certainly our tastes are more discriminating—although there are still people I just don’t think have any cooking genes, and you can try forever. You’re not going to make—what is it?—a silk purse out of a sow’s ear? [laughter] Q: I’m going to ask you to think back also a little bit about Jim Beard and tell me, if you can, when you think about him now, who is it that you see? Jones: Who is it I see? Q: Yes. In terms of not the physical person, but in terms of his contribution. Jones: Well, I think he did several things. One, he made the man in the kitchen an attractive, forceful, convincing kind of person, promoting barbecuing outside and relishing all the good western cooking. So that was important. I think he released men in that sense, and he just was so knowledgeable about what American food was and everything that went into it and so generous in terms of helping others in that same direction. To me, he exemplified what cooking should be, which is fun and creative and something you enjoy, not something that you think of as a chore. He enjoyed it so much. I can remember when we would be working together, he’d start getting hungry around twelve o’clock, and he could just go down to the kitchen and pull open the refrigerator door and stand there, this huge man, and kind of swing on it and pick out this and pick out that and a little of something else and suddenly make a pasta out of nothing or an egg dish or you name it, improvising was all part of the pleasure. And that’s what we need. We still haven’t gotten over this love/hate relationship as Americans. Q: With food. Jones: I don’t think any country is as screwed up as we are about food. Q: Talk about that a little bit. Jones: Well, I think it goes partly back to the Puritan heritage and, as I said, what the food industry did. You can’t generalize too much, because there’s no one nature to Americans. We’re a big mix. But there just seems to be a resistance to understanding that food is a part of life. It’s one of the great gifts, so let’s enjoy it, instead of this other side saying, “Yes, but that’s not very good for you.” It’s crazy. Q: Do you think there’s a place for somebody like Jim Beard now, who expresses that enthusiasm and that permission to explore? Jones: I think it would be hard. I don’t think that if Jim had been coming of age today, he would be the icon that he became. They’d say he’s too fat. Well, you know, there are fat and thin. There’s blonde hair, dark hair. And I’m not talking about the obese thing, but Jim got pretty heavy and struggled with health as a result, but what shone forth in him was this sheer joy. He was that way about the opera. About books-- I’d send him a book, and the next morning he’d call me and have read it. Just an exuberance about life, and I feel that goes with food. I find that in Lidia Bastianich. Q: Yes. Jones: She’s got it. Q: And those television segments are among the few I can watch. Jones: Yes. And I find that people feel that way all over the country, wherever I’ve gone and talked to people. They respond like that, so that’s a good sign. Q: You mentioned that your next book is on Cooking for One? Jones: Yes. Q: When will that come out? Jones: It’s coming out the end of September, and I really wrote it because I found that so many people asked me if there is really a good book on the subject. They complain that it’s so hard not to waste and you spend too much money. How do you make it all work? And it’s for people who want to make good food. It’s not for those who just want to slap together prepared foods, but for the sheer pleasure of saying, “What am I going to make tonight?” A lot depends on your mood, whether you’ve had a big lunch, what you may have in the fridge. It’s extremely creative to me and very settling, very mindful. It’s good for people getting old too. You have to pay attention. [laughter] But it’s also good for young people. Q: But it does bring back at least the pleasure principle— Jones: Absolutely, yes. Q: —as something that we need to think of when we think of eating. Jones: Yes. It’s one of the great pleasures of life. As Brillat-Savarin said, “They last the longest to console us when we outlive the rest.” Q: I think that’s a perfect way to finish this conversation. [End of interview] Jones – 2 - PAGE 1