Lunch with Judith Jones

Being the CEO of The International Culinary Center does have its perks! A few weeks ago I got one. I had lunch with the legendary Judith Jones, editor extraordinaire. She was everything I expected and more.

Actually, I first met Judith twenty years ago when Julia Child invited me to have lunch with the two of them. What I vaguely recollect is that the restaurant was somewhere near Bloomingdales on the Upper East Side and quite an unimpressive choice for such grande dames. I don’t recall what we ate. What I do remember clearly was the conversation.

These two were old friends and colleagues (already working together more than twenty years ). It was a Saturday lunch so it had a bit of a ‘day off’ feel. We sipped champagne and THEY gossiped. They were trading stories on bold face names as well as exotic people I never heard of. They were having fun. But the stories gave me pause. What I was listening to sounded so cut throat in places. Judith asked me at the lunch, “Do you find the New York food scene hard to break into, I mean, tough?’ Like a wide eyed deer in headlights I had to honestly answer no. What we realized is that I lived in the food world of chefs. Julia piped in immediately, “she’s lucky she works with the chefs….” And it is true, 99% of chefs are the most generous and supportive souls I have encountered in my life.

Now back to Judith Jones. The lunch was sparked by meeting her at Madrid Fusion a couple of years ago and she shared that she didn’t much care for all this new technology cooking. I shared my views which were more supportive. So, before we had lunch I thought I should take her on a tour of the school and I asked Chef Nils to have a little demonstration ready. He did and she was fascinated. Chef explained that the pursuit of technology was really to bring out the best flavors of food, to make techniques easier or more food friendly. He then put on a superb demonstration of cooking an egg in its shell by temperature, not timing. If one could keep an egg at one temperature the consistency would stay the same and thus could always be controlled. He demonstrated the technique on seven different eggs. It was simple but fascinating. From a technology point of view, if one could have a temperature controlled water bath you could make hundreds of poached eggs in advance and have them served quickly and perfectly every time. Hats off to this technology and Judith agreed.

After walking around our 76,000 square foot school, I finally let her have lunch. We shared a nice glass of wine and started to talk. I had recently read her memoir, The Tenth Muse:My Life in Food. (Brillat-Savarin, the famous gastronome (Larousse Gastronomique), called gasterea “the tenth muse”, following the other nine: poetry, history, music, dance, love poetry, tragedy, comedy, geometry, and astronomy.) I was fascinated when straight out of college, she went to Paris and carried letters of introduction to Sartre and Camus. She met Balthus. She had colorful employers who almost got her to spend some quality time in a French prison. She fell in love and had an extraordinary romance with the man who would become her husband, the equally famous, Evan Jones. There was so much life in her!

When I think that she edited the legendary giants in our field (Julia Child, Marcella Hazan, Madhur Jaffrey), lived such an exciting life, I was humbled to be sharing our meal at L’Ecole. Although she has been working for more than fifty years in editing, she spoke with great excitement about the new chefs around town. She shared with me what joy she takes in cooking for herself every night. This is a born and bred New Yorker who has lived in her apartment for decades and is not seduced by easy take outs or the siren song of the latest and greatest restaurants. I learned a lot from Judith in that luncheon, but most of all I learned to respect and enjoy a simple meal….preferably one cooked at home…with your favorite cookbook!