2 of 3
Judith plunged into a lifelong affair with the pleasures of the table—a vocation that put her at odds with her mother, who found excitement about food unseemly. Jones recalls: "We were always being told to get rid of the smells, to make sure that the kitchen door was shut, that the windows were open." Shopping was done by phone, not in person. "One wasn't supposed to talk about food at the table (it was considered crude, like talking about sex). And if we indulged in appreciative sounds like 'yum-yum,' we just might be sent from the table." Cooking was something servants did. It was certainly not something for a well-bred college graduate to get excited about, much less base a career on.
As a girl, Judith had glimpsed an entirely different approach to food when her father occasionally took her to lunch at a French restaurant, or when she and a girlfriend relished "course after course" at an Italian restaurant. Once liberated from her mother's restraints, she and a few friends opened an unlicensed cafe in a borrowed Parisian apartment.
If Judith's parents did not understand or approve of her growing interest, Evan Jones, editor of Weekend magazine, did: "We quickly discovered that we shared the same passion for food." The two of them met when Judith was job-hunting (the borrowed apartment's owner, having learned of the cafe, had evicted her). Evan immediately hired her, then gave her a place to live, and eventually married her. The pair loved "making an ambitious, elegant dinner for friends that would last well into the night, with the wine flowing," and they "thought nothing of cooking for the better part of a Saturday or Sunday to prepare for it."
Returning to New York in the mid-1950s, the Joneses were appalled at the limited range of choices on grocery store shelves. Change was in the air, however: James Beard was opening a cooking school, Craig Claiborne would soon be food editor at the New York Times, and on the West Coast, Chuck Williams was already selling French cookware. "Then, one day in the summer of 1959," she writes, "a huge manuscript on French cooking by Mesdames Julia Child, Simone Beck, and Louisette Bertholle landed on my desk … . I started taking home recipes and trying them, and my faith was vindicated."
Jones admired not only Child's recipes but also "her earthiness, her unabashed love of food." Years later, with Child in France, Jones would revel in a New Year's supper with "ample French women, who, … unlike the puritans [she]'d grown up with, clucked with delight, licking their fingers and reaching for another bite." Food is about pleasure, a word she frequently uses: "Cooking is a way of sharing, even expressing love." Rich food memories have a power "to evoke a time, a place, and an identity." Soon Jones was developing a whole line of books on cooking, and the American food revolution was under way.
C.S. Lewis may have craved mutton chops and a bit of bacon—or perhaps he was just poking fun at people who would settle for a peek at such mundane fare. In the early '50s, while Britons were still enduring postwar food rationing, Lewis was describing lavish Bacchanalian feasts in Prince Caspian (soon to be a major motion picture). Surely he would have agreed with Jones' almost liturgical words about the symbolic meaning of food:
Other creatures receive food simply as fodder. But we take the raw materials of the earth and work with them—touch them, manipulate them, taste them, glory in their heady smells and colors, and then, through a bit of alchemy, transform them into delicious creations. Cooking demands attention, patience, and, above all, respect. It is a way of worship, a way of giving thanks.
share this page
RSS Feed
