Aside from
two fully employed adults, our home houses several thousand books. Because we don’t
practice the “one in, one out” philosophy in acquiring them, the books overfill
the shelves and are stacked on flat surfaces around our home. Yet, I often
can’t resist picking up another book I haven’t read from the 25 cent table at
my favorite book store or a pile at a library sale.
Thus this
series, “Off My Shelf,” where I take a book from a shelf or a pile, read (or reread
it) and decide whether it stays or goes.
The piles
of books on my shelves are like strata of earth. Each layer says something about the time and
place I acquired them. I bought Judith Jones’ The Tenth Muse: My Life inFood at a bookstore in Dallas last year.
Now that I’ve excavated it from its resting place and read it, I regret
taking so long to get to it.
Judith
Jones was a major figure at the center of the culinary world in the mid-20th
century. After editing the groundbreaking
Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Jones found her niche, midwifing a
series of books written by people to whom food mattered. Her stories of finding just the right person
for each book are engrossing. As an
editor, she was always looking for people who had strong connections with the
food of their culture from an early age. Madhur Jaffrey, Claudia Roden, and
Irene Kuo came from disparate cultures: Indian, Middle Eastern, and Chinese,
but they all, in Jones’ words, had “…grown up in a household where food was
honored and…felt compelled to recover those food memories.” These women wrote
seminal works on each of the cuisines from which they came.
Besides
introducing Americans to international cuisines, Jones also helped document
American food. James Beard, the
gargantuan figure of mid-century American cuisine, helped and advised Jones and
she returned the favor when she introduced him to the Californian Marion
Cunningham. Cunnigham not only became
Beard’s right hand, but also edited the revised the classic Fannie Farmer
Cookbook, reinstituting it as a key text in American cooking. Still, Jones reminiscences about her
inability to find good, traditional Southern food in restaurants and the
difficulty of locating someone who could document such food.
And then
she met Edna Lewis.
Edna Lewis cooked
the food that acolytes such as Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams remembered
from their childhood and still craved and she served it at a restaurant under
New York’s Queensboro Bridge. The book
that Jones helped Lewis write, The Taste of Country Cooking, is a book
of days filled with the food Lewis grew up eating in the American South. It’s
revealing that when Jones asked Lewis why there was not Thanksgiving menu in
the quintessentially American book, Lewis told her that her family had
celebrated Emancipation Day instead.
“Just as in
real life we come to know someone through his or her connection to food, so in
fiction a telling aspect of a character’ s personality surfaces in his or her
feelings about eating,” Jones writes.
She makes a good case for how authors use details about what their
characters eat…or cook…to reveal what is fundamental about them, invoking
authors such as John Updike and Ann Tyler to illustrate her point.
I
bookmarked so many passages to copy in my commonplace book and read the recipes
at the end of the book hungrily. This
memoir deserves a space on my kitchen shelves with other culinary essays, and
more than that, it inspired a reading list of books because
it’s clear from this one that her passion as an editor, just as her skill as a
writer, was to channel an author’s wisdom and enthusiasm into print.
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