The Tenth Muse by Judith Jones

You've seen Julie and Julia, you've read Julia Child's memoirs, and your kitchen reeks of Boeuf bourguignon. If you're wondering what to do next, we have just the answer. Judith Jones, the woman at Knopf Publishers who saw the magic in Mastering the Art of French Cooking, has written a book.

Judith Jones is a sort of Zelig or Forest Gump of the American food scene. No momentous event happened in cooking during the last half the Twentieth century without her being there. Unlike Zelig and Forest, though, Ms Jones wasn't merely there, she played a significant role.
She saw the possibility in Julia Child's weighty manuscript when no one else did. She took some of the pages home to her tiny Manhattan kitchen and whipped up Boeuf Bourguignon. She wasn't sure if there would be an audience in America for a cookbook that didn't call for cream of mushroom soup, but figured that if she, herself, would want such a book there must be others out there who would feel the same.

The Tenth Muse was named for Gasterea whom Brillat-Savarin called the muse of the pleasures of taste. Ms Jones certainly acted as muse for many chefs we consider the pioneers of their style of food. She discovered cookbooks that other publishers had passed on, but she did more than sit and wait for creative cooks with a lively, engaging manner to send manuscripts in. She encouraged, prodded, and often sat in the kitchen with a notepad to take down the measurements for chefs she thought had something to share. She worked with Lidia Bastianich, James Beard, Marcella Hazan, and Madhur Jaffrey, Jacques Pepin and many others.

Although her book is so filled with descriptions of scrumptious meals that you'll find yourself reaching for a snack as you read, Ms Jones edited more than cookbooks. In 1950 when she was a very junior assistant to Doubleday Books' Paris editor, she found the French edition of Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl in a pile of books he wanted rejected. She read the book and persuaded her boss to highly recommend it's publication in English. She also edited the work of brilliant authors, including Anne Tyler, John Hersey, Elizabeth Bowen, and John Updike.

A delicious read with its exploration of food culture in America and the intimate portraits of the people who changed the way we view food in this country, it's a fine way to finish up the year of Julia Child.