Lessons learned at the kitchen counter with the editor of Julia Child, Edna Lewis, M. F. K. Fisher, and James Beard.
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It is April of 2013, and I am in the kitchen with Judith Jones. She is chopping hard-boiled eggs and parsley. On the counter, there is a jar of cornichons and another of capers. Nearby, a stem of cherry tomatoes, a bunch of arugula, and half a baguette. Judith tells me she is making sauce gribiche; we could have it with some roast beef leftover from earlier in the week, served cold with the day-old bread, sliced and toasted into its second life. Judith, who is 88 years old to my 26, moves with the ease of a practiced cook. She rocks her knife blade cleanly across the scarred wooden cutting board. She trusts her hands.
Judith, who has recently retired as senior editor and vice president of Alfred A. Knopf after 57 years, is best known for rescuing Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl from the so-called “slush pile” of unpublished manuscripts in the early 1950s, and for “discovering” and publishing Julia Child. But she also edited the poetry of Sylvia Plath, as well as that of Langston Hughes and Sharon Olds. She was Anne Tyler’s and John Updike’s longtime editor, too.
