430: Jess Damuck & Sara B. Franklin

26:30Yeah. And I just love, I love them, especially just like the like nut butter filled chocolate covered dates. I just keep them in the freezer all the time and they really taste exactly like Snickers bars. Oh, yeah. But way better. I mean, good nut butter. Absolutely. And how are you buying dates just at the farmer's market? Also, Rancho Meliduca is a wonderful brand that sells nationwide. Julie's are another California based brand. And I think if you just take a little extra effort, they are, of course, like a little pricier. But once you taste one of these super soft, delicious dates, I don't know, they're kind of mind-blowing.

27:14Let's talk about what's next for you. You mentioned Benny, and that's Benny Blanco. He has a book out with you, co-authoring it with him. But what's new? What's next? You know, I do hope I can take a little pause, but I think the key word there is little. You know, I was really the second Salad Freak came out. I started working on the book with Benny. Yeah. And I really didn't get really a minute to like wrap my head around what I had just done or celebrated or even like be proud of this accomplishment before I moved on to the next thing. And then, you know, when I knew I was sort of wrapping up with that, I signed another book deal for myself.

27:58And that's Help Nut. So it's been really nonstop. And there was something great about that because I think your second book or sophomore project of any kind is always like, okay, maybe there were no expectations with the first book. But now you've you've set yourself up for something and people are looking at you now and they're waiting for something. And what are you going to do? And I think if I had had too much time to sit in that space, that's not good for me. I have if I'm going to work off instinct, I have to have a tight deadline. I agree. I'm the same way. It's really well said. You have to definitely like just do the work.

28:40Yeah. I can't think about too much. And like I said, this was originally supposed to be a vegetable book called Veggie Freak. And I started writing it and I was like, no, like I'm sitting on my porch, like watching the sunset every night and eating grain bowls after I come home from developing Benny's like fried chicken recipes. And this is the food that feels really good to me right now. And it's what I crave. and I don't see a lot of health food books on the shelves. You know, I went up to Omnivore Books in San Francisco, which is an amazing little cookbook. I love that book. She's going to do an event there.

29:18It's so great. Yeah. And, you know, she said, look at like the shelf. There's like a million vegetable books, but there's no health food books. And that's in San Francisco. Yeah. Like, you know, LA's got its moments with the source, but man, we're talking about San Francisco proper. ground zero for health nut. And then she sort of like shifted me over and she's like, but check out the vintage cookbook section. She's like, look at all these books. And my vintage cookbook collection expanded by, you know, I have this amazing collection from the 70s now. And what they were doing back then was so groundbreaking.

29:56And it was, I mean, looking at some of these books where it's like you have to order, mail order your tofu because it wasn't available in stores. Now we have access to incredible ingredients pretty much everywhere. And that was important to me as well. You know, there's so many really precious books about produce. And I would even consider Salad Freak to be that a little bit. But, you know, I really wanted this to feel accessible. And there are a couple ingredients in there. Like I'm obsessed with this smoked soy sauce, which you can buy on Amazon, but it's a little bit of a fussy ingredient. I forget, which is bad.

30:38But it's this cute little bottle. But that's also something you can use regular soy sauce and sprinkle some smoked paprika in it. And I say that in the book. And I really try to make everything like if you're going to a grocery store anyway, anywhere, and you try to get to the organic section, if that's accessible for you or if not, like hopefully you can still put this together. You know, like I really love Rancho Gordo beans, but I can't get it together to soak them like three quarters of the time. Yeah. So I always have canned beans. A lot of debate about to soak or not soak Rancho Gordo. And sometimes I just can't like, I don't think of what I want to eat until a half hour before I'm starving.

31:18So, you know, I always keep canned beans on hand. You know, there's packaged greens in my fridge very often. And I'm not a hater. You know, I think whatever we can do to feed ourselves well, if you're making that effort, it goes a really long way. On This Is Taste, we asked guests about the discerning taste. So to close this interview, here's a little rapid fire, fast and furious taste check. Jess, are you ready? I think so, yeah. The best fruit? Oro Blanco grapefruit. Oh, okay. Let's dig into that. What does that mean? I don't know those words. I know grapefruit. Oro Blancos are white grapefruits.

31:53Oh, okay. To me, there's no better taste than that. Maybe in the world. It's my favorite flavor. I love it. This question is so fascinating because we get so many variety of answers. We've never had a white grapefruit answered. I love it. I love it. And so we're going to do the flip. What's the worst vegetable? I like how sunchokes taste, but I'm not sure the human body is meant to process sunchokes. And I actually took a sunchoke recipe out of the book because I was like, why am I forcing people to eat these? I don't think it's – I've never met anybody who has an easy time after eating a bunch of sunchokes.

32:28Yeah, bro. Yeah. You got to cook them to death if you're going to avoid that after effect. The best dessert. Best dessert. I can't go through a day without eating dark chocolate. So I don't know if that's the best thing, but it's the thing I can't live without. I also love strawberry, rhubarb, and ginger as a combination in any way possible. It's amazing. Favorite American fast food chain? In-N-Out. You're West Coast for life now, aren't you? Yeah. We didn't talk about road trips. That van looks pretty cool, 1990. The van is amazing, and part of every road trip is going to In-N-Out. Was that the van in high maintenance?

33:06Was that the actual van? No, he got another one when he moved to LA and it's so fun. It's the best thing. It's got a great little cameo in the book. I like the way you write the book with the vignettes because you have a fun little way with the essay writing. Thank you. Very cool. All right. I want to talk about New York City restaurants. Do you have a couple favorites that you just come to when you come back to town when you're doing events or just visiting? Yes. Four Horsemen has been my favorite for a long time. And I don't know, I feel like this isn't throwing shade to anyone, but I feel like almost every new restaurant I've tried seems like they've gotten a lot of inspiration from Four Horsemen.

33:45So in the wine bar category, of course. But the food also seems to be really inspired by what they've been doing for a few years. So I really try to go to the original. It's a great, Nick Crotola is an amazing chef. He really, really is. Super great chef. What a couple more. Give me a few more New York spots that you come back to. I like to hear New Yorkers who leave and then come back. Where are you going to first, like on this tour when you came to town? Romans was my neighborhood spot. And it has the best feeling. And it's something I really miss when I'm in L.A., that feeling of walking in off the sidewalk and being warm and cozy and knowing, you know, almost everybody there somehow.

34:24And being treated like a regular is always really nice. Not as well, not as common in L.A. It's a different experience because you have to drive there. And I think that changes a lot of it. Getting people to get on board to make a reservation and actually arrive there when you want them to is also much harder in L.A. There's no sort of like, hey, what's up tonight? And strolling into a place. I love Hearts, also an old neighborhood spot. I'm going to be going to Dimes tonight, another one of my favorites. And they're making a few dishes from the book, which is really exciting. Yeah. And I don't know.

35:08I've been less and less into restaurants. I think it's just because I've been trapped at home developing restaurants. So in L.A., the flip, the next question is like the L.A. answer. When you're not working, what are some of the go-tos? Found Oyster is the best spot to hang. I think they've done such a good job there. I love Bevel and Safi's and there's, you know, Vias Tacos is in my neighborhood, an amazing taco spot. And the truth is I eat a lot of Erewhon. Yeah. I really do. You don't have to lower your voice. I feel like I had to mumble it. I miss it while I'm here in New York. It's a fun place to just hang out.

35:55I mean, not the one in Beverly Hills, which I found myself in recently just because of a work thing. And I will not go there again. But the one, I think the one in Calabasas, the one in Silver Lake. Do you have a favorite location? There's a new one in Pasadena, which is the closest to where I live. I've heard it's nice. It's nice. There's good people watching. You'd be surprised who lives in Pasadena. Yeah. I mean, not surprised. I mean, up north of Pasadena, there's a lot of people. It's really, it's fun. I don't know. I like sitting outside. and eating there. Venice has a vibe too if you're like hanging out outside the Venice location.

36:31The Studio City one also is a great one for people watching. I have not been to that one. If you want to do some celeb sightings, that's the place to go. Yeah, Studio City is where it's at. Good call. Good tips. Erewhon cookbook. I hear they're working on it. They are. I love it. Yeah. I mean, it's great. Their stuff is great. It's great. They have great taste. They have great, and they really do support independent producers and makers and I know not just from the buying of stuff but just the signal boosting of these young brands and just being in Erwan is a moment and it's cool. Really cool.

37:06They've really made health food really cool, you know? Yeah, totally. Your favorite cookbook of all time? Martha Stewart Entertaining. Iconic cover. It's the best book ever. I think Anna Heasel, the former co-host of the show, will agree with you on that one fully, I believe. And with the Martha books, I mean, the art in them is amazing. Like the art meaning the photography. Like it is really something. That book was really one of the first books to have full color photography for almost everything. Yeah. Yeah. It's a classic. Breakout hit for her. A few more. Favorite recent cookbook discovery?

37:48While I was cooking this book, developing these cookbooks, Molly Baz's new book has been a great one for just like, hey, I know this recipe is going to work. I'm going to have it done in probably 30 minutes. And Ben has even cooked from it, which is really, really nice. I like to say like when the B team can cook from a book, it's great. it's really good the b team yeah smart yeah it's definitely like when it's the b team of your household the b cook does he cook for you at all he's very very good at breakfast um best but dinner can be sort of overwhelming and there was definitely a point in working on these books where i was like if you ask me what's for dinner like you better watch out like what i just made like 16 versions of risotto and fucking that's what we're having yeah my guy we're having risotto a few more uh cuisine you would like to learn more about actually i i'm very interested in korean food yeah um one of my best friends and my studio mate uh is was born in korea and he's there right now for his first time ever oh my god well not first time ever but first time since being adopted.

39:03And watching his journey has been really exciting. And I think there's just so many flavors that are so interesting. And it's just a whole new world for me. So yeah, I'm excited to check out your book. Right on. Yeah. And last one, your favorite sandwich. I think it's a veggie sandwich with sprouts. Yeah. Yeah. It's on brand. California sandwich. So what's the condiment? We didn't get into that part. I did like a lemony sort of dressing, creamy dressing on mine. I think the Dijonese is also really good. It needs to have a brightness or a bite to it. Yeah, not just straight like Hellmann's. No, I don't think so.

39:44You need to have a little something going on there. Yeah, because there isn't a lot. I mean, it's like vegetables. Yeah, and there needs to be a protective barrier against the bread or it's going to get soggy, which is unfortunate. Jess Damik, thank you so much for joining This Is Taste. Thank you.

40:10Sarah Franklin, welcome to This Is Taste. How are you? I'm well today. Thanks so much for having me, Matt. Let's talk about Judith Jones. I want to start by asking you simply, you know, Judith Jones wasn't just a legend in our industry in food writing, but really was somebody who, quote unquote, shaped culture in America, which is the subtitle of your book. Let's set up the Judith Jones shaping culture in America. Yes, you're talking about a woman who was born in 1924 here in Manhattan and a white woman of a great deal of privilege. So important to position her that way. But was not particularly excited about the idea that womanhood laid out for her in that generation.

40:49From an early age, she was interested in stories and food. Her dad was sort of a bon vivant, went to sneak her out to little French restaurants in the neighborhood and then get wrist slapped by his wife, who was very sort of buttoned up, waspy New Englander. And she was really interested in exploring stories and pleasure. And she went off to college in the late 1930s, early 40s, right into World War II. And because a lot of men were off at war in the 40s, she was offered an internship at Doubleday when she was in college at Bennington. That's how she got her foot in the door in publishing. And she really began to understand that the way that stories get told and that stories shape culture is by editors doing what they do is by both anticipating and reflecting shifts in culture.

41:34Yeah. I mean, an editor's job is absolutely to reflect the change, the delta happening in real time. It's not about what happened six years ago. It's what's happening six minutes ago. So that's right. And then you're talking before television and the Internet. And so books had different kinds of power in terms of how they shifted culture. So in the 1940s, 50s and 60s, which is when she really started in earnest as an editor, she's shaping culture in addition to publishing books that are reflecting what's going on in the larger culture. She was Sylvia Plath's first American editor. She published The Colossus, which was her first collection of poetry.

42:09She actually passed on the bell jar. There's a whole story there. But she was working with, at the time, greats like John Hersey, Elizabeth Bowen, her lover, and then someone she edited was the poet Theodore Rethke. Really, really big names in the literary world. She went on to be John Updike's editor for his entire career and Tyler's editor for her entire career, poetry throughout her career. So food was one of several things that she did. But it was also really reflective of she wanted to see women position themselves differently in American culture and also to celebrate what went on at home on a daily basis, which she thought was worth talking and writing and reading.

42:49It's amazing when you set it up as having this like dual kind of mindset with publishing, publishing fiction, publishing nonfiction, publishing lifestyle, publishing heavy nonfiction, including the diary of Anne Frank. And we'll get into her, the mythology around that. And you have new reporting about the discovery of that manuscript, which she did. But I just want to get a sense, Sarah, you have dedicated a lot of time to writing about Judith Jones. Why pick her out of everybody you could have spent this time as an academic reporting on and learning about? Yeah, I was in my first semester of graduate school, and I was just about ready to drop out.

43:27I was bored to tears, frankly. I don't like writing that way. Neither do I. And it's just the worst. It's the worst. It's dry. It's so bad. It's not what I wanted to do, but I needed a job, and it felt like a pathway to... I love teaching. Anyway, that's sort of another thing. But I was taking a class up at the Columbia Center for Oral History, and they regularly get calls from all kinds of people who are like, how do we do an oral history of person X, right? They're kind of a clearinghouse for that kind of knowledge. And my professor, I was always the food person in a non-food room because if you're a food person in academia, everyone's like, you study what?

44:00I'm sorry, that's not serious stuff. Wait, still today? Oh, my God. You would not believe the condescension. That's hilarious. Oh, I mean, it's just pervasive. It's everywhere. Tsk, tsk, academics. That's right. So I'm up at Columbia and, you know, everything is very it's the anthropologist and the political scientist and I'm the food person. My professor who ran the program at the time looks up at me. She had just gotten an email. We were on break and she said, oh, you're a food person. You might be really interested in this. And I peek over her shoulder at her laptop. And it's an email that's come in from the Julia Child Foundation saying Judith Jones has just retired from Knopf.

44:33We recognize the time is of the essence. She's 88 years old at this point. We want to know how to do an oral history of her. Can you help us? And I literally memorized the email address, fired off an email to them after class, said, I'll do anything to be involved with this project. I had read her memoir, which came out in 2007, The Tenth Muse, My Life and Food. I knew nothing about her before encountering that memoir. I picked it up off a bookstore table when I was in college still and quickly realized she had edited everyone that mattered to me in the world of food. I mean, she was at the center of all of it.

45:05So I just wanted to be near her in any capacity. They ended up handing me the reins to the project as long as we met and got along. So I went to her apartment in January of 2013. Where was she living at the time? Upper East Side in the same building where she was born. Right. One of those kinds of New York families had moved away and then came back. What's the kitchen like when you walk in? Oh, my God. In my mind, just a perfect kitchen, like a perfect square, bright yellow walls, totally unfussy, big industrial stove that like hardly fits in the room, right? All the cookwares hung on pegboard a la Julia Child.

45:37on the walls, really like beaten up cutting boards, just practicals. She's got her spices in old peanut butter jars lined up along the wall just so she can get at everything. And we see hints of this in the show, the HBO Max show that was on. We see a little bit of her apartment in there, don't we? Sometimes a little bit. You know, that's actually, I don't know if we do, and it's definitely not accurate. I can tell you that there is not a fancy appliance in that room. And she was also a little bit of a, of a, like a Luddite doing things the hard way. So you didn't see gadgetry in her kitchen at all.

46:09Couple of sharp knives, good cutting boards, big industrial stove, done. Wow. So you meet with her in 2013. 2013. What's that meeting like? She offers, well, her dog rips a hole in my sweater as I walk in. I had been so nervous. My palms, it was a freezing cold January day. My palms are sweating. I'm shaking. So, you know, my hero, right? She's tiny, though. She's like five feet and maybe 100 pounds soaking wet. Her dog rips a hole in my sweater and she erupts into laughter. And I'm like, oh, you're funny and you're mischievous. Like I was completely disarmed instantly. That's good. She takes me into this beautiful kitchen and she makes a pot of tea.

46:45She pulls a tin of homemade cookies out of this old linen closet she had long since repurposed as her pantry because it's a New York apartment. And we go sit in her living room and we talked about leftovers and traveling. And she asked what I wanted to do with my life. Classic editor, right? She's drawing me out from the jump. And at the end of the hour, she said, OK, I'll work with you. I love it. She said right on the way, right, that she wanted to work with you and tell you more. Yeah. And so how does this relationship evolve with Judith Jones? So that spring and summer, this is all 2013. We meet in her apartment in New York.

47:17Every time we meet, she insists we cook lunch first. So we had this sort of courtship in a way together. That recorder isn't running at that point. That's just us hanging out. Never, you know, this is the queen of cookbooks. We never pulled a cookbook off her shelf. Everything is being done by feel. We're sort of learning how to dance together and figuring each other out. It felt like foreplay in a way, honestly. And then we'd sit down and eat. We'd have coffee. And then we'd go do our interviews. So we had all this time together to get to know one another before we ever hit record. Which is probably a little bit of a flip because she probably did that a lot with her authors.

47:48Because I would imagine at that time, you know, part of the relation between an author and an editor is getting to know you in a spiritual way. I mean, now it's less common because there's more books and less time. But back then, likely, she's like wanting to hang out with Madhya Joffrey, right? Absolutely. And she, you know, by the time I met her and when we started working together, she had just turned 89 years old in March of 2013. It just would have been her 100th birthday this month, actually, which is really amazing, March 10th. By this point, she's 89 years old, but she's a consummate student.

48:20She's like the epitome of a lifelong learner. She wants to learn from her authors. That's part of the reason she stayed engaged in the business for so long. She actually wants that input from the outside world, that kind of cosmopolitanism that a true editor, we think of like a true editor having. So we hang out all spring in New York, and then she goes to the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont every summer. She and her late husband, Evan, who's Dick Jones in the book, that's what she called him, so that's the name we have there. They bought a place there in 1980, this tiny little house on the side of a mountain, really remote.

48:50At 89 years old, she's still going by herself for the entire summer, just her and her dog. And she says, well, we're not done working together. Why don't you come up? So we spent a few days together up in Vermont that summer as well. And again, cooking, we're taking walks, we're swimming in our pond. And only some of that time is on record, but we're developing this rich relationship. And when the project's over, it goes off to the archive, I delivered my work and we remain friends. So we would meet every month or two, we'd have lunch together, we'd go for walks. She was often asking me to help her try to figure out email, which drove her completely crazy.

49:23Was she asking you advice? Because I feel a good editor wants to know you're of a very different generation and she's wanting to know what the kids are thinking in a way. She wasn't asking me for advice so much as she wanted to kind of get a read on. I was in my mid 20s at the time. She really wanted to know what I was thinking about as a food person, as a woman, as a, you know, in terms of politics. Right. We're talking about a very different era in American politics or right before we go over this tipping point where we find ourselves now. But she really wanted to understand a youthful perspective.

49:53But at that point in her life, she was very sure of who she was. She didn't need any advice. That's really so this friendship happens and you write the oral history, which is an academic work. The story doesn't end there because I know you you worked on a couple projects that led to the editor, which is the book you just released. Tell me what how did your scholarship around Judith Jones continue? Yeah, so I ended up writing my doctoral dissertation about her. Please, no one ever read it. It is bone dry and totally uninteresting, and you can't find it anywhere. I move upstate in the fall of 2016.

50:28Our relationship thins out a little bit. I'm much farther away. I was also pregnant with my twins, who are seven and a half now at the time. So I'm going through this big transition, and she's also developed Alzheimer's. And I know this at this point. So we're seeing a little bit less of each other. I see her for the last time in the spring of 2017. I get to share pictures of my kids with her at the time, which is really special. She and I had bonded over both struggling with infertility, which is one of our deeply personal bonds. She dies in August of 2017, and I get an email from her stepdaughter, who I'd met a couple of times over the course of our relationship, saying, would you like to come to the friends and family moral service in Vermont?

51:04I said, of course, I'd be honored. So I go up and when the service ends, she, Bronwyn, Judith's stepdaughter, pulls me aside and says, you know, Sarah, there are two rooms full of her, Judith's and my father's papers in the apartment. I know you've written a little bit about her. I'd written a couple articles at the time. Would you like to come take a look and maybe, you know, help me think about what we might do with this? And I said, yeah, of course, you can't turn away from something like that. And so November of 2017, we got together and I walk into this portion of the apartment that I had never been in before.

51:39And there are literally two rooms, bookshelves, boxes, file cabinets stacked on top of a bathtub with plywood laid across it, full of manuscripts, letters, galleys, everything dating back to the 1930s. Wow. And this is, yeah, pre-G drive. So this is the way the editors worked. I can't imagine as an editor having to deal with paper the way she did. But clearly, there's an archive there. And let me ask you, let's step back a bit. You said a bit really well about your relationship with Judith and your access to the papers. But let's go back to the Diary of Anne Frank, because I feel that's the mythology of Judith Jones is that she pulled it off a pile.

52:20Now, let's set the record for our listeners. What happened with her discovery of this manuscript? And then, of course, after the publication of it, it was one of the most read diaries, I would say, probably ever. I mean, it's still it is still considering considered a publishing phenomenon. I mean, truly, The Diary of Anne Frank is one of those books that's been published in pretty much every language and is still, you know, in print all over the world. It's an incredible, incredible story. So Judith Jones had been working at Doubleday after she graduated from Bennington College in the late 1940s.

52:56And she was wrapped up in a really complicated love affair with this poet, Theodore Redke, who had been her professor at Bennington. They fell in love. He was struggling with manic depression. He also became her author at Doubleday, and she kind of needed out. She was getting really burned on the misogyny of publishing in the late 1940s. All the soldiers had come back, and she had gone from being an editor in her own right to kind of being a secretary, in effect, and she wanted to do more. Judith was born hungry. She was curious. She was ambitious. So she asks for a leave of absence, and she goes with her cousin who was going on her honeymoon to Paris.

53:32It was supposed to be a three-week trip. She takes a friend with her, too. She ends up staying for three years. She meets the man who became her husband. And she was in between jobs. Several things had sort of fizzled out for her. It's the post-war years. Everything's chaotic and tumultuous, but it's also this time of artistic flourishing in post-war Europe. and Doubleday decides to set up a Parisian outpost. And so the editor-in-chief, Ken McCormick, comes over to Paris with his second in command, this guy, Frank McCormick, who had just come out of the army. Frank is gonna be appointed, the sort of point person there, but he needs a secretary.

54:06And so Ken McCormick, who had been Judith's boss in New York, says, well, we already know this woman, Judith, and she knows the business, she knows the company. I sort of, I'm gonna set up this arranged marriage. Frank, Judith, Judith, Frank, please work together. So she gets hired at this new office of Doubleday in 1950 in Paris. Frank Price is a character. He's flitting off. He's mostly sort of handling the social calendar of American authors that are passing through Europe. And he's doing a little bit of acquiring European talent as well for Doubleday, which at the time was the biggest publishing house in the world.

54:36Big, big, big deal. Judith, meanwhile, sets up her own literary agency on Doubleday's dime. So every time her boss goes out for lunch, she's conducting her own business. That's incredible. What a great little nugget about her ingenuity and just drive. Totally reflective of her moxie and chutzpah. I mean, this is Judith through and through. So whenever he's out, she sort of code switches, goes over to doing her own business. She's trying to sell some work. Around the world of publishing, but she's not selling to Doubleday because she's going to be self-selling, but she's taking it outside of the company.

55:06That's right. She's got her own masthead. I mean, it's just like she prints up her own stationery. It's really incredible. But she's using their paper, their typewriters, their ink, their phone lines, all of it. So she's totally double dipping here. And one of the things that her boss, Frank Price, did say to her on this one wintry afternoon. He's got this big reject pile. He's already passed on these manuscripts. And he said, you know, one of the things I need you to do today is write the rejection letters and send them out, please. And Judith is going through the pile and just sort of going through the motions.

55:36What's here? She's a curious person by nature. And she's totally captivated by the photograph of Anne Frank, the one we have all seen that's on the cover of her diary. She sees this photo of this girl, And she takes it over, sits by the fire. It's in this big old rambling apartment in Paris. Her boss is out for a couple of hours and sits down to read. The book had already been published in French. And so she reads it in French. It's a galley copy. And she can't put it down. So just to be clear, when she receives the galley, it was already out in the public market. But in France, a very small market in the global scale, and certainly not English, which was the dominant.

56:15About to come out in French. Oh, about to come out. And I believe this is right on the eve of coming out in German, too, which was a big deal, right? Obviously dealing with the subject here. So Doubleday has already officially passed on this manuscript, but no letter has been sent out. Judith reads it in one sitting. To her account, she is moved to tears and also is like, this is incredible. This young woman has this singular voice. And also this is a testimony from a part of history that at the time hadn't been historicized. Five years since the liberation of the camp. That's right. You're still talking about major Holocaust denial, right?

56:51So this is a testimony from a young girl, really unique perspective. And when her boss gets back to the office that afternoon, Judas stands up and says, we've got to publish this book. And he sort of looks at her like, what, that book by that kid? This is Judas telling it. You know, she was a teenager when the diary was written. And Judas says, yeah. He sort of grumbles and laughs a little bit. But he promises he'll take another look. and he does indeed and he in fact ends up sending it back to New York and saying you know what on second thought I think maybe we should publish this thing. Judith never gets any credit for this so in fact Doubleday does publish the diary of Anne Frank 1952 it comes out it is a phenomenon it is there's a rave written in the New York Times it goes into second and third printing almost immediately.

57:38When Judith returns to the United States in the early 50s right on the heels the publication. She needs a job. And she goes to Doubleday in New York and says, you know, hey, how about a job? I was a big part of this incredible book. They won't hire her again. And so she turns her back on Doubleday forever. And five years later, she gets herself a job at Knopf and the rest is history. The rest is history. And she ended up working in the building recording this in at 1745 Broadway. Her last office was here at Knopf. And really, this conversation could go in so many directions. But I think we need to land the plane in the food world.

58:11Because I think that that is our greatest legacy. But the Anne Frank story is remarkable. And there's plenty of other you'd set it up, John Hershey, for one. I mean, all the different authors she published. But when does she realize that food and cookbooks is a category or a section that she wants to really work in? So she had learned how to cook during her time in Paris. She learned from her first lover there who was a Frenchman and in this tiny little Parisian closet of a kitchen. That's actually how she learned. So it's not from cookbooks. When she comes back to the state, she's married. She and her husband are both interested in food, but they find that they can't replicate what they had eaten in Paris here for two reasons.

58:47One is the quality of food in supermarkets at the time. This is the era of kind of mass supermarkets. Things getting packaged are really beginning. She's used to shopping in the markets. The mid to late 50s was truly the worst time in American foodways. Right. I mean, you could say maybe now it was pretty bad, but back then it was pretty bad. Yeah. How to process food, sort of semi-homemade package. She's just devastated, right? They've just come from Paris. They both love to eat and cook, and they just can't do what they were doing in Paris. And so Judith starts looking for a French cookbook that can help guide her to continue her journey of learning how to prepare French food and to do it in the American context.

59:25There's nothing of the sort. So she starts at Knopf in 1957. 1959, one of the top brass at Knopf at the time, William Koshlin, drops this huge manuscript on her desk. And it's written by these three unknown authors, Julia Child, Louisette Bertoll, and Simcha Beck-Simon Beck, excuse me, is her full name. And, you know, says, will you take a look? I know you lived in Paris. I know you like to cook. Can you just sort of flip through this? Flip through it, ha. Yeah, exactly. So Judith sort of lights up and she takes it home in pieces and she starts cooking from it with her husband. They start making dinner from it.

59:59And famously, the first the first dish that she made was the boeuf bourguignon. And she is blown away. The detail of the recipes, the thoroughness of the descriptions, and also the fact that it allowed for her to use ingredients that she could find in the U.S., right? That it's not written for someone living in France in English. It's written for someone living in the U.S. in English. It was such an unlock there for Julia Child's legacy and her co-collaborators for that first book was the actual accessibility. I'm glad you brought that up because it isn't like a tome to French cooking. It's American cooking with a French vocabulary vernacular.

1:00:33Yeah, absolutely. So Judith quickly decides she really wants to work on this book, but she's only two years in at Knopf. She's technically an assistant to Blanche Knopf still, who is one of the two founders of Knopf. and no one at Knopf wants to publish cookbooks. It's beneath them. They're the most esteemed literary publishing house in New York. And so Judith knows she's gonna have to get really creative if she wants to be able to work on this book. And so she sort of sidles up to this guy, Angus Cameron, who is a big deal in publishing at the time, an editor at Knopf. And he is a real bon vivant.

1:01:07He's a gourmand. He loves to cook. He's an outdoorsman. He hunts. And they had become really good friends. And so she says to him, you know, will you look at this? I think it's amazing, but I need to know if you think that I'm right. And he takes a look. He cooks a couple of recipes from it, too. And he comes back to her and he says, you're absolutely right. I've never seen anything like this. She's not even allowed to pitch it in an editorial meeting. And so Angus Cameron goes and pitches it on her behalf. Second time. This is like just like such a refrain about the way Judas is being treated in this industry.

1:01:37That's right. She wasn't even allowed in the door of the meeting. She was too young and she was too female. So she's got a guy do it on her behalf. And lo and behold, the Knopf's Alfred and Blanche Knopf are sort of famously at odds with one another. And Blanche Knopf, who Judith is working for at the time, is like, I'm not giving my assistant up to some cookbook. And Alfred Knopf, who loves to stick it to his wife, sort of says, well, you know what? Let's give Mrs. Jones her chance. This is the line, as Judith tells it. And she's waiting nervously outside the meeting. And Angus Cameron comes out and says, you know, we got it.

1:02:07They're going to let you do it. And so she signs the cookbook and they spend a year and a half revising the book from, you know, they strip it back to the studs, basically. And Judith and Julia are writing letters across the Atlantic. Julia Child becomes the kind of point person for this three-person writing team. And Judith is testing the recipes in the U.S. So Julia Child, as she revises the recipe, says, well, Judith, will you go see if they have this kind of mushroom in your supermarket? And if the answer is no, Julia Child revises the recipe again so that it includes an ingredient that you can find if you're living in New York or Des Moines, Iowa or wherever.

1:02:41This is how Mastering the Art of French Cooking really gets made in the iteration that we all know and love, which is that it's one of the most workable, accessible French cookbooks in the English language. And then television enters the fray for Julia. 1963, she goes on TV. She goes on TV and it changes everything. She becomes the first celebrity chef. Her books become bestsellers instantly. Judith's career changes dramatically with this bestseller in the building. How does she kind of leverage the success from Julia and become the Judith Jones that we know her in the cookbook industry as acquiring some of the legends in the game?

1:03:18I'd like to go over as many names as possible. There's so many. And I think it'd be great to just give us a sense of who she edited and really becoming this force in the industry for decades. It's important to note too that But as she grew, the industry of cookbooks grew as well. And it became a real opportunity for publishers to publish cookbooks with the television and media really pushing these books and the cooking show becoming a part of our Sunday afternoons and then later on to cable. Judith's there along the way. And it's a remarkable story you tell. So after Mastering the Art of French Cooking comes out in 1961.

1:03:56Julia Child goes on TV in 1963 and really becomes a household name after that. But Judith is still trying to build a career for herself here at Knopf, right? She's still trying to prove herself to her colleagues who are intent on diminishing her importance to the House and really, you know, what she can bring as an editor. So she's really building her literary career on the side. That's what gets her credibility in the House. Come late 60s, early 70s, things are starting to change. She's been at Knopf for a decade. She has more credibility. Blanche Knopf has died. So she's sort of been liberated to be an editor in her own right.

1:04:28And that's when you see her start to go after other cookbook projects that are some of the household names that we know now. So from the late 60s to the early 70s, we're talking about Claudia Rodin, Mauder Jaffrey, Anna Thomas. We get into the mid-70s and we have Anna Lewis, who's very, very close and dear to my own heart. Later we get into Lydia Bastianich. We are talking about James Beard. I can't believe I forgot James Beard. What a jump cut. The cinematic version of this, and there will be one, I'm sure, the jump cuts here of all these authors you're naming is pretty remarkable. It's wild.

1:05:03It's the who's who. It's the Hall of Fame, basically. It's the Hall of Fame of many. But, okay, what about, I'd love to hear, like, some of the smaller names that maybe we don't know. Yeah, you know, it's interesting. I think it depends what kind of circles you're running in. Sure, of course. Not to diminish anybody, but, you know, James Beard is one name, and then there's other names. So in some ways, I think Anna Thomas has been forgotten a little bit. So The Vegetarian Epicure comes out in 1972. It's a big deal of a book. So vegetarian cooking in the kind of counterculture has taken hold by this point, but it's not in the mainstream.

1:05:34And it's thought of as kind of like dusty co-op stuff that doesn't taste very good, like wheat berry loaf. We're talking about that era of vegetarian cooking. The Vegetarian Epicure, judging by its title, right, is a book about pleasure. It's a book about enjoying your food. And the idea that vegetarianism is not asceticism. It's not about being good. It's about eating well. And Anna Thomas is a really interesting figure because she was a film student at UCLA at the time. She's totally steeped in protest politics. So that book is really reflective of a kind of changing a very youthful side of American food culture that you begin to see reflected around that time in the New York Times food column.

1:06:14Craig Claiborne at the helm at the time, very, very close friend of Judith Jones. So I think Anna Thomas is really important. And until a few years ago, Anna Lewis would have been a name that a lot of people didn't know. Thank goodness that's really begun to change because she deserves all the credit she gets and then some really important figure in American cooking. But The Taste of Country Cooking, which was the first book she did with Judith Jones, came out in 1976, America's Bicentennial Year. Really, it's a corrective of black history. It's also one of the first examples we have of a woman who grew up in that sort of cross-section of American culture in rural Virginia, which is about the legacy of enslavement, also about indigenous culture, and also about the sort of Jeffersonian ideals and French cooking.

1:06:57She's talking about a vernacular American cuisine that really paves the pathway for the popularity of Southern cuisine that we saw in the early 2000s, right? But we didn't see that kind of credit being given to her until just a few years. is what we were talking about. That's right. Which is a very problematic history. Maybe let's not. No, let's not put that name in there. But I think to your point, that is a corrective. And I love that you use that word when talking about Edna Lewis, because I feel it still needs to be set how important that work is. And Judith, as the editor, is shepherding the project.

1:07:28How was that received within the building? I mean, a black chef at that era, you think about that's a pioneering moment for obviously Edna, but also for the publishing house and the publishing industry. How did she get it made? Judith? Yeah. So Edna Lewis had been working with a co-writer on her first cookbook. Edna Lewis was working primarily as a caterer at the time. That was how she was making a living for herself, cooking for really wealthy white people here in Manhattan, all of whom thought her food was amazing. I mean, she was a celebrated chef, but she was barely scraping by. Judith came to know her because when that first book was on its way to the printer, it was called the Edna Lewis Cookbook.

1:08:07The co-writer, Evangeline Peterson, knew someone at Knopf and said, can you help us maybe figure out how to publicize this book? We're dealing with an unknown author here. And so that person said, well, you should talk to Judith Jones. She was always the cookbook person in the room, right? Judith invited them in to meet and she said, well, there's nothing I can do for you. It's not my book and your book's on the way to its printer. It's not like I can help you edit the thing. But as they began talking and she got to hear a little bit about Anna Lewis and her upbringing, again, consummate editor.

1:08:33She's always drawing people out. But she sort of said, you know, I think there's something here. And Evangeline Peterson, the co-writer, said, well, in fact, we're already thinking towards a second book, which is much more about Anna Lewis's childhood, the place she grew up, Freetown, Virginia, which was a town that had been settled by formerly enslaved people, including Anna Lewis's grandparents. And Judith signed the book almost immediately. She was totally entranced by the storytelling. It was a book about communal living. It was a very anti-capitalist book in a lot of ways. It was a book about sustainable agriculture, about history, about an abundance of food and pleasure in Black culture.

1:09:10It was about a kind of Southern cooking that really hadn't been talked about or written about much. And after a couple of years, this was a different time in publishing. Book deals often played out over a longer period of time. Judith and the co-writer decided that the co-writer was kind of getting in the way of Edna Lewis's very, very unique voice. And so Judith ended up working much more as collaborator on that book, almost co-writer, much more than editor. And they too, Anna Lewis and Judith Jones, worked back and forth in person and also in letters, gathering material. Anna Lewis went home to Virginia several times over that period of a couple of years, gathering historical research, cooking with her siblings, going out into the woods and the farm fields and sort of writing back to Judith saying, this is what I'm seeing, feeling, tasting, remembering.

1:09:54And all of that gets worked into the DNA. I mean, I love that you mentioned when an editor and a writer become co-conspirators, co-collaborators. It does happen now. I think there are some editors, some in this building, some in other buildings that take that approach, more of a hands-on approach. There's many editors who do not. And she didn't get credit for it, though. I mean, this is Edna Lewis's book. And a good editor doesn't need the credit. Yes, that's right. Yeah, they're shaping from the wings, right? And their job is really to help an author hone their voice, find their voice and hone their voice.

1:10:25Let's talk about money a little bit because, you know, as an acquiring editor, you know, you offer the advance and then you obviously want to sell more copies to cover that advance. Was she a hitmaker? Was Judith Jones somebody who had a taste that kind of translated to commercial success? And also, I just have to ask your research. I mean, every editor has bombs. Did Judith have any like remarkable bombs? And this is obviously respect to everyone involved, but, you know, not everything commercially works. Yeah. In terms of hits in the culinary realm, really, Julia Child was the one. She was a huge cash cow for Knopf, and she continued to publish with Knopf until the end of her life.

1:11:06This day is making money for Knopf. Yeah, that's right. That's right. So we're talking about decades. And by the time Julia Child was in her old age, the advances were over a million dollars. So we're talking big money, right? But also huge sales, huge sales. a global celebrity Julia Child by the 1970s and then she continues to go on to publish until her death in terms of other hits no is the answer not in terms of sales so what you see is a woman who was working really slowly and steadily at a different time and with a different sense of time she was hell-bent on integrity she did not fall fall for or follow trends she was not working with chefs.

1:11:46She really had an aversion to chef cookbooks because she felt like they didn't work for or apply to home cooks. She had tried a couple and they frustrated her. So she decided not to do them anymore. She did end up publishing Oprah and Rosie Daly's cookbook, which was a huge, huge mega bestseller. Can I just say it was in the kitchen with Rosie? That's right. And I remember it was like 1996 or 1995. There's a recipe for a vegetarian chopped liver from that book that we would make as a family no way i and i vividly remember you are the only person i've ever talked to knows anything about that book oh it's a that book sold i would say millions millions five million copies maybe millions of copies so you know along the way she'd find a way to to sort of throw knoff a bone and make them a bunch of money remember she is editing john opdyke and ann tyler throttled yes so some of the best-selling fiction authors in america right so she's making them plenty of money, but the cookbooks on the side are kind of her play money.

1:12:46She's not being given the resources to make cookbooks. She is regularly not allocated any budget for recipe testing, and so she famously did a lot of it with her cookbook authors. She acted as tester with them, which is incredible. Think about as an editor the knowledge you gain, having that kind of intimate knowledge of your author's process, actually being in the kitchen with them while they cook, taking notes, asking questions, which is part of the reason why some of her authors that stayed with her book after book loved her. She was so embedded in the process. She was so invested. It reminds us about Maria Gonachelli's process as well, who also had that very hands-on approach.

1:13:23I would say today it's a much different business. I mean, acquisitions are more frequent and editors don't have that kind of time. But that hands-on approach is remarkable. And I must say This idea of an editor working with fiction and then crossing over and doing cookbooks. There's only one editor I know at Random House who does it. And Cleo, she's amazing. And it's really she's a young editor. And when I talked to her about this process, I just don't understand how you can do both. I think it really enriched her process. And poetry too, right? So poetry was a great love of Judith's and she edited poetry all throughout her career.

1:14:02I actually think poetry and cookbooks have a ton in common because it's about distilling, right? It's about getting clear. It's about cutting out all the extra language so you get to the heart of the thing. And it's also about sensuality, right? So if you think about poetry as really to evoke feeling, that's the same thing you're trying to do with a cookbook, right? You're trying to get someone who may have never seen or tasted a dish to be able to replicate it based on sensory language and cues in the recipe. So actually the recipe and poems have a huge amount in common. and she's taking the lesson she's learning from each genre and applying them to the others.

1:14:35Oh, I absolutely agree with that. And I think with head notes in particular too, you know, there is a level of poetry in a good head note expressing real deep instructive information, but also having a real art to it if you want them to be readable. It's got to be evocative, right? You want someone to want to cook that recipe. Sell the recipe in the head note. It's always like the number one note in any cookbook manuscript. You never answer my question about the bombs. Is there like a bomb? I mean, there's got to be some bombs. Yeah, the one that comes to mind. So Judith, in the late 90s, started working on a series called Knopf Cooks American, which is very little known and really paved the pathway for kind of the regional American cooking that we see all over the both the restaurant world and the cookbook world now.

1:15:15And she thought there was a really interesting story to be told about American vernacular cooking, about the influence of all kinds of immigrant cultures, indigenous cultures. And she wanted to do it as a series. It was a hugely ambitious project. By and large, it flopped. So I think it's an example we have of both Judith trying to move a little too fast, a little too quickly with a really ambitious project, almost 20 books in that series that come out in the span of a couple of years. Was it like these Knopf Cooks America? Were these just packaging for single topic books? Or how does that work?

1:15:46These are original cookbooks. So most of how it went, Judith Jones's husband had been reporting for Gourmet at the time doing a column on American cooking, and they would travel together. And he was an amazing reporter. She'd go with him sometimes. And he would, you know, talk to everyone as a reporter does. He's going to church cookouts. He's going to barbecues. He's going to pancake dinners at the local firehouses so he can meet folks. And occasionally Judith will find someone in that milieu that she feels like can really nail a cookbook. And she starts working with them. So she's commissioning these books one by one to talk about regional American food, the difference in ingredients, the difference in climates, the kind of cooking techniques and restaurant cultures that have evolved around the country.

1:16:31Are they good books? I mean, it sounds like, I mean, they might have not worked commercially, but are they like good books? I will say I think they're excellent. I have the whole collection. I really love them. They in some ways, I think they work better as works of anthropology. But like all of Judith's books, the recipes work. The recipes work, but anthropology, as we know today, anthropology and cultural anthropology is as much important as actual recipe. Yeah, absolutely. Let's go to late career Judith Jones and let's talk about her final five years cooking and working in the industry. I know she wrote a book about her dog.

1:17:02I have it in my office. My former colleague Anna Heasel ordered it once. I think we did write a story about it at one point in taste. But, I mean, that's cool and that's unique. week let's go back that one didn't sell real well i'm gonna go ahead and i think i looked at the numbers once i was like really honest i was kind of like this is what jude jones gets this is like one of the gimmies yeah yeah so for her dog about that in 2007 her memoir the 10th muse comes out and it puts her on the map for a lot of people that hadn't known who she was at the time then the movie julia and julia comes out and that is what really brings her into public knowledge especially among food people right people go see the movie she is totally caricatured in that movie We can talk about that in a minute if you'd like.

1:17:45But it's her book, The Pleasures of Cooking for One, that comes out right around the time of her retirement that is actually an incredible cookbook. So she is 85 years old when this book comes out. She is still working full time at Knopf. And it's this really remarkable book about sort of asserting your vitality and vivacity in old age, but also this like, don't give up. You have a life still to live and you deserve to enjoy it. she was really making a case for pleasure as a pursuit in its own right, which is a kind of countercultural messages in America in particular, especially for older women who we tend not to hear much from.

1:18:23And it's a really good cookbook. Sarah, I think we wrote about that book. It's so good. That's the one we wrote about. It's really useful whether you're cooking for yourself or as I do for a family, because really it's about working cooking into the rhythm of your days so that you don't become overwhelmed by big projects, but rather you're doing it bit by bit. So maybe you have some bones onto somewhere on the back of the stove. Maybe you're repurposing parts of a roast chicken to make chicken salad, to make enchiladas, whatever. But she's sort of saying you can do this in ways that fit your life.

1:18:52And I actually feel like it laid the groundwork for a lot of the kind of food columns that we see now. Yeah. I mean, she was definitely writing in an internet style before the web was part of food writing. And was there a final book that she edits that before her retirement? Is there like a last she worked with lydia bastionich right up until the end and that uh that was a remarkable friendship they really loved each other and lydia lydia bastionich has said in many places this is not news to anyone but that judith taught her how to write um and was very uh beholden to her as our editor but that that was really the the cookbook and the cookbook author that she was working with up until the very end she did start to taper a little towards her final years here at knopf And when she hung up her hat in 2011, it was really, I think, because she felt like she had done all that she could do.

1:19:41Let's actually let's talk about Judith in pop culture. You've mentioned Julie and Julia. You've mentioned we've mentioned the HBO show. Can the editor of your book be adapted? Because I feel like the real story of Judith Jones, what you write about so brilliantly, needs to be told in either a documentary form, but also in a scripted form. There's hoping, Matt. I mean, let's let's will this to let's will listen to. Have you been shopping it, as they say? We are shopping it. Yeah. I think there's a tremendous story to be told. And it's about Judith, but it's also about women getting their foot into publishing.

1:20:15It's about the ways in which women in food have constantly and are still persistently pushed to the side in terms of being taken seriously in literary spaces. But also it's this cast of characters, literary and culinary, that she's at the center of. Right. She is a main character, but she's surrounded by interesting people who were carving out interesting, unconventional lives for themselves. Judith was really caricatured in Julie and Julia. And she went publicly on the record on her first book tour for The 10th Muse, basically saying to anyone who would listen, that is not me. And I did not agree to anything about that.

1:20:51So the famous scene is that she didn't show up to dinner at Julie Powell's apartment because of rain. Anyone who knew Judith Jones knows that rain did not stop that woman, nor did anything else. And Tyler actually went on record and said, you've got to be kidding me with this portrayal. A little bit of a low blow there. But, you know, that's just Hollywood and scripts get doctored. So you have some meetings. Who plays Judith Jones? Oh, God. Let's just do it. Let's do the casting. I know. So pop culture, not my strong suit, Matt, but I just finished watching Lessons in Chemistry and I've got to say she would play an amazing Judith.

1:21:24I know. You need someone who's got like the stature that makes you think it's got to be a Trojan horse, right? Who looks sort of diminutive, looks delicate, but is kind of this outsized personality and has the ability to play it. I think that's hard. I think maybe though it's Michelle Williams. Oh, I love that. They look very, very, very, very similar. It has a great striking resemblance. Producers, if you're listening, that's my vote. Michelle Williams, Judith Jones. The actor who played her in Julia was good. I thought that was a pretty good, you're like absolutely not agreeing with me. I mean, it's not Judith.

1:21:56The acting is good, but it's not Judith. She never had that haircut. She didn't talk like that. She had this low, throaty, almost like Lauren Bacall style voice. Oh, bad. So you're, I mean, sorry. This is a bad take by me. A weak ass take. Yeah, I mean, the HBO Max series really portrays her as a sidekick and she was never the sidekick. I recall, I admittedly did not watch that much of that show, but I do recall a standoff in an amazing scene at Knopf that Judith faces down her editor. I thought that was pretty liberating in a way. It just didn't happen that way. You know, yeah, good acting, good writing, but it's not true to form.

1:22:33There's, you know, this is one of those cases where the true story is more interesting than the fictional story. I love that, Sarah. That is exactly when you go to LA to your waterball meetings, you gotta, that's what you say. And, you know, as a fan of your work and of your book, I mean, let's make this happen. It's gotta happen. Yeah. Sarah Franklin, this has been great. Thank you so much for joining This Is Taste. Thanks, Matt.

1:22:56This is Taste is hosted by Eliza Abarbanel and me, Matt Rodbar. The show is produced by Shalia Harris and Pat Stango and edited by Clayton Gumbert. Theme music by Steve Rydell. Visit Taste online at tastecooking.com and make sure to subscribe to our newsletter for updates on all cool things that are happening.