Southern Fork Sustenance: Talking Cookbooks and Editor Judith Jones with Author Sara Franklin

The Southern Fork

Over more than half a century as an editor at Knopf, Judith Jones became a legend, nurturing future literary icons such as Sylvia Plath, Anne Tyler, and John Updike. But although I was an English major, I first learned of Judith Jones years later, when I realized that Edna Lewis, M.F.K. Fisher, Claudia Roden, Madhur Jaffrey, James Beard, and, most famously, Julia Child, all had the same editor -- her. Judith celebrated the art and pleasures of cooking and culinary diversity, and in the process changed the way Americans think about food. Sara Franklin’s new book, The Editor, is a highly anticipated biography of Judith that details her astonishing career, and it is my suggestion for a perfect summer read. Sara is a writer and editor in her own right with bylines including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Nation. In this conversation, we delve into the nature of serious cookbooks, the art and craft of recipe writing, and the cultural significance of writing about food. Sara writes and teaches at New York University's Gallatin School for Individualized Study, so this conversation with me was via zoom from her home in Kingston, NY.

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