Jones – 2 - 1
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Interviewee: Judith Jones Session #2
Interviewer: Judith WeinraubNew 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 onJewish 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 suchThe 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 bookwith 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—