The Tenth Muse

1. I recently read the memoir The Tenth Muse: My Life in Food, by Judith Jones, the Knopf editor who discovered Julia Child, among others. It was a good read, and gave an inside picture of what it was like to put together a cookbook in the days before the modern food revolution.

Having worked on several cookbooks, I was amazed at how different the process is today, in an age of email attachments and celebrity chefs. Jones would visit her authors regularly and even cook with them in an effort to capture and put their techniques onto the written page. The editors I've worked with have always been supportive, useful and friendly, but we've never collaborated with the kind of intensity Jones describes.

But that was a very different time. Jones was passionate about food herself, and avidly sought cooks who could help her stir a similar enthusiasm in an audience that was just awakening to the world of culinary possibilities. I'm glad I came of age during a time when the food world had so much to offer, but this book made me a bit sad that I missed out on this time when each new innovation merited such a high quality of individual attention.