The Tenth Muse: My Life in Food

By Judith Jones,” Knopf, 2007, 282 pages, includes recipes
Reviewed by Angela Allen, July 1, 2020

I had the good fortune of meeting the neat-as-a pin East Coast-bred Judith Jones in the ’90s when I interviewed her about her husband’s, Evan Jones’, bread book, which she edited. Of the couple, she was the real star — I saw that right away. She was a gifted hands-on editor at Knopf who “discovered” and championed Julia Child, Marion Cunningham, Madhur Jaffrey, Edna Lewis, Janie Hibler, Marcella Hazan (though that didn’t work out so well). These women were mid- and late-20th-century cooks whose works went on to become classics. (She also edited Anne Tyler and John Updike.)

Her daily food discoveries post-World War II and her travels to Paris turned her into a curious and relentless foodie and spurred her on to help to expand the bland American anti-cooking TV-dinner palate. Credit Jones to a great extent with bringing to us a new way of eating, cooking, and appreciating food.

She’s a delightful and modest storyteller (she must have kept diaries her entire life), letting such people as the inimitable Child speak for herself. There’s a bonus. The book contains pages of recipes that Jones mentions with spicy anecdotes throughout her entertaining and informative narrative.

By the way, the “tenth muse,” according to the 18th-century French gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, is Gasterea, who “presides over all the pleasures of taste.”