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Sara B. Franklin.  The Editor: How Publishing Legend Judith Jones Shaped Culture in America.  Atria Books, 2024.  316 pages.

I badly wanted to read this book.  Sara Franklin got her doctorate in Food Studies in my NYU department and I met Judith Jones several times in the 1990s and 2000s (she died in 2017).

Judith Jones is famous in food circles for rescuing Julia Child’s manuscript for Mastering the Art of French Cooking and getting Knopf to publish it.

But the best way to understand her impact is to take a look at the jaw-dropping list of authors she edited; it takes up two and a half double-columned pages, and includes poets (WH Auden, Sylvia Plath, Sharon Olds) and writers (Andre Gide, John Hersey, Langton Hughes), as well as a breathtaking list of food writers: MFK Fisher, Marion Cunningham, Elizabeth David, Scott Peakock, Elisabeth Rosin, Jeffrey Steingarten, and on and on.  And, oh yes, Anne Frank.

The story here is of a woman who began her editing career in 1949 when the best women could aspire to was secretarial work.  She worked her way up through the system, but did not fight it and was always treated as someone who didn’t matter much, despite that incredible list of authors, many of them deeply devoted to Judith for what she did for them.

As an author, I can tell you that a good editor is a treasure and she was a terrific one.  She got her authors to clarify, explain, focus, and make their books readable, understandable, and enjoyable for wide audiences.  This takes insight and the ability to inspire authors to do their best work—genuine talent.  It also requires stepping back and letting the authors shine.  This book details Judith’s way of staying in the background, not always to her advantage.

Sara Franklin got to know Judith Jones, was given access to her papers, and conducted loads of interviews as the basis for this book.  She tells the story of one woman’s career, but sets it against the background of changes in society and in the food world since the 1950s and in the lives of the authors she edited—the era that I too have lived through and these are people I know, explaining why I so enjoyed reading this.

I especially like the way Sara weaves herself into the book but mostly lets Judith speak for herself.  An excerpt:

“Dick [Judith’s husband] didn’t take criticism well,” Judith told me, “And I thought it awkward to play the two roles,” editor and wife at once, “so I just shut up.  I would have liked more back and forth, but people have their hang-ups”…Judith had been caught off guard by how overwhelmed she’d become by family life, and the perpetual juggle of working motherhood.  Keeping up with the demands of her career while remaining attentive and available to Dick and the children, Judith found, was an almost impossible balancing act, with “so much,” she remarked, “dumped on the woman.”  With no models to look to, Judith was flying blind. “I hadn’t really thought about it,” she told me.  “It just seemed natural.”

As I said, a classic woman’s story of the era.

Much of the book describes Judith’s acquisition of important books and the ways she worked with their authors.  I wish I had had the chance to work with her.  I know I’m not alone in thinking that would have been an honor and a privilege.

Sara’s book is terrific.  And we are so proud of her.

The book was reviewed in the New York Times: She Was More Than the Woman Who Made Julia Child Famous: In “The Editor,” Sara B. Franklin argues that Judith Jones was a “publishing legend,” transcending industry sexism to champion cookbooks — and Anne Frank.

Somehow, I had missed this, but the New York Times’ Kim Severson to the rescue:  When It Comes to Food and Politics, Kamala Harris Is Riffing on the Recipe: From giving turkey-roasting advice to making dosa with Mindy Kaling, Ms. Harris has leaned into cooking in a way no other candidate has.

Ms. Harris has turned cooking videos into campaign assets and has taken a particular interest in food issues like hunger and farm labor. But she also turns to cooking as a meditation…“Everything else can be crazy, I can be on six planes in one week, and what makes me feel normal is making Sunday-night family dinner,” she told The Cut in 2018, when she was a senator. “If I’m cooking, I feel like I’m in control of my life”…In a 90-second video from 2019 that recently resurfaced on social media, she tells a reporter how to prep a Thanksgiving turkey as she’s getting a sound check before a spot on MSNBC.

She had her own cooking show!

She’s cooked with José Andres on Instagram Live.

She collects cookbooks.  KosherSoul’s Michael W. Twitty) was thrilled to find his book displayed in her kitchen.

Esquire did an analysis: An Entirely Serious Investigation into Kamala Harris’s Cookbooks,

Look, let’s levelset a little bit. That we’re even presented with a stack of cookbooks to decode from a presidential candidate feels like a win. It’s good news. Like, finally, we have a real human being—a real cooking human being—who might be the President.

The press is onto this.

The L.A. Times says:  Kamala Harris is a cook — and she knows her L.A. restaurants. Will it help her win?

Eater says Let Her Cook.

Social media users, as well as the San Francisco Chronicle, have resurfaced Cooking With Kamala, a short-lived cooking series that was published to Vice President and now-prospective Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris’s YouTube channel in 2019. In one episode, Harris visits Iowa, where she cooks her mother’s recipe for bacon-fried apples. In another, she bakes candy-filled “monster cookies.”

In the most popular episode, with 6 million views as of this writing, Harris makes masala dosa with the actress Mindy Kaling and the two bond over their shared South Indian heritage.

What fun!  A breath of fresh air!

Just think about what White House state dinners could be like.

Tinight at 6:00, I’m moderating a conversation with Michelle King about her new book, at:

Archestratus Books, 164 Huron, Greenpoint, Brooklyn.  Information here.

Michelle T. King.  Chop Fry Watch Learn: Fu Pei-Mei and the Making of Modern Chinese Food.  WW Norton, 2024.

I had never heard of Fu Pei-mei when this book was sent to me so I was curious to find out who she was and what she had done to deserve such a close look from a food studies scholar.

My ignorance.

Fu (1931-2004) is most easily understood as the Julia Child of Taiwan, whose televised cooking shows charmed and enlightened cooks for decades after World War II.

Fu left mainland China for Taiwan in 1949 as a war refugee, and soon married.  She did not know how to cook, but housewives were expected to and her husband complained.  She was forced to learn, and hired restaurant cooks to teach her.  Once she did learn, she began teaching others and eventually landed on TV just when it was starting.  This, in turn, led to a remarkable career as a TV personality, cook, cookbook author, and world traveler.

But this book is much more than a biography.  It is also a cultural history.  As King puts it,

The circumstances of her birth and the timing of her culinary career gave Fu a front row seat to every major political and social event affecting modern Taiwan’s history for more than seventy years.  Through the pages of Fu’s cookbooks and the story of her life, we come to understand not only the twists and turns of Taiwan’s modern political history, but also the dynamic shift in women’s roles during the postwar economic boom, when women begn to leave kitchens and cooking behind for jobs in offices and factories.

Fu was mainland Chinese and her work got caught up in the politics of mainland vs. Taiwan; she represented Taiwan although her food represented—and highlighted—regional mainland Chinese cooking with Taiwanese cuisine only added later.

Reading this book raised a personal question for me: how did Fu do it?  Her husband did not want his wife working outside the home and it’s hard to imagine his approving her travel and fame.  Somehow, she managed.  King suggests that perhaps by not challenging her husband’s control of the family or its finances, she was able to be free to conduct her career.  Fu must have been one formidible woman.

Along with the biography and history, King includes “kitchen conversations,”excerpts from interviews with Chinese-Americans who have cooked from Fu’s books.

All of this made me want to find one of Fu’s bilingual cookbooks and see if I can produce some of my favorite Chinese dishes.  By all reports, the English translations of her recipes were clear, and they worked.

And so does Chop Fry Watch Learn.  

Can’t wait to find out more about it.  Join me tonight!

Raeanne Sarazen.  The Complete Recipe Writing Guide: Mastering Recipe Development, Writing, Testing, Nutrition Analysis, and Food Styling.  Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, 2023.

You might think that writing a recipe is a simple matter of a handful of this and a pinch of that, but you would be oh so wrong.

This doorstop of a book—an absolute treasure—takes more than 400 pages to tell you how to do it right.

If only everyone who writes recipes would follow Sarazen’s advice, their recipes might actually work!

I can’t even begin to say how impressive this book is.  Sarazen brings in an astonishing amount of information about food, nutrition, and diets into her discussions of how to think about recipes in general, but especially those for dishes aimed at improving health or dealing with health problems.

Sarazen is a critical thinker who deals with tough issues about recipes—cultural appropriation, intellectual property, nutritional unknowns—and  works through them, one at a time.

If you have problems with gluten, fish, or FODMOPS (fermentable oligosaccharides, disaccharides, monosaccharides, and polyols), here’s what you need to know to deal with them.

This book is an encyclopedia of information about food, nutrition, and health, full of useful charts, explanations, and references.  It’s a how-to manual for anyone who wants food to be delicious as well as healthy.

It’s really impressive and, as I said, a treasure.

Want it?  Information about it and how to get it is here.

If you still have fruitcake left over from Christmas, you are undoubtedly wondering why it is still around and whether it is still edible.

Fortunately, we have Scientific American to thank for shedding light on this pressing issue.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, these seemingly indestructible pastries typically stay fresh for six months in the pantry and up to a year when refrigerated. But anecdotally we know that they can last for decades; some of the oldest have been preserved for more than a century. In 2017 a then 106-year-old fruitcake left behind by members of a 1910 Antarctic expedition was unearthed from one of the continent’s first buildings. And in 2019 the Detroit News reported that a Michigan family treasured a then 141-year-old fruitcake as an heirloom. And you could theoretically still eat these century-old cakes without harm—if you can get past the nauseating, rancid smell.

The reasons for fruitcake’s indestructability are because it is made with:

• Alcohol,
• Dried fruit
• Sugar
• Not much liquid

Bacteria are killed by alcohol and do not reproduce well under conditions of high sugar, low water, and low oxygen (high cake density)—dryness, in a word.

So if yours is still around, you can eat it as long as it smells OK.  If it starts smelling  bad, it’s because the fats are getting rnncid.

Aren’t you glad I asked?

Fuchsia Dunlop.  Invitation to a Banquet.  The Story of Chinese Food.  Norton, 2023.  420 pages.

Fuchsia Dunlop, who has lived in China, went to cooking school there, and writes Chinese cookbooks, does something different here.  She writes about the history of Chinese Food using traditional dishes (stir-fried broccoli with ginger, Shandong guofu tofu, etc)  as starting points for exploring the how and why of each of them.

Chinese food is an inescapable cultural presence all over the world…As a brand, ‘Chinese food’ has global recognition.  Yet, from another perspective, Chinese food has also been the victim of its own success.  The resounding popularity of a simplified, adapted, even bastardized form of Cantonese cuisine, first developed in North America and then scattered like confetti all over with the world, with its childish predictability and limited range, its birght colours, sweet-sour and salty flavours, deep-fried snacks and stir-fried noodles, has clouded appreciation of the diversity and sophistication of Chinese gastronomic culture. (p.5)

The book makes up for these deficits.  Dunlop relates what she found on her travels throughout China about the origins of this cuisine (cuisines, really), the basic ingredients (animal and vegetable), the techniques (chopping, steaming, stir-frying), ending with a short dissertation on Chop Suey and scholarly apparatus: chronology, notes, bibliography.

Another quotation:

When it comes to Chinese food, I see myself increasingly as a small insect scaling a great mountain of human ingenuity.  It’s paradoxical, because in many ways modern China can seem sameish.  All over the country, the same identikit modern buildings, the same brands, the same clothes…Even after the destruction of the Cultural Revolution, Chinese food bounced back in a glittering kaleidoscope of colours.  All over the country, in nondescript little restaurants in concrete buildings, with nice calligraphy in a frames, people are tucking into remarkably delicious and locally distinctive foods.  At some profound level, this is how China expresses itself, from ancient times until now, from now until eternity (p.331).

As you should be able to tell from these brief excerpts, the book is an easy read.   I particularly enjoyed reading about Dunlop’s food adventures throughout China.  She now lives in the UK but used the pandemic to share them with us.

USDA’s Economic Research Service reports on trends in food consumption, with enlightening charts.  I thought this one was worth a close look.

The chart shows the proportion of income spent for total food—roughly 11% in 2022, a level last reached in 1991.  Food costs are going up—a lot.

The proportions spent inside and outside the home are roughly the same.

• At home: 5.6% of their income on food at supermarkets, convenience stores, warehouse club stores, supercenters, and other retailers.
• Away from home: 5.6% of their income on food at restaurants, fast-food establishments, schools, and other such places.

The drop in away-from-home eating in 2020 and 2021 was due to pandemic, restrictions of course, but is now recovering.

The decline in at-home eating is a long-term trend, reflecting major changes in American society.

The rise in away-from-home eating has health implications.

Away-from-home meals:

• Are served in larger portions than at-home meals
• Have more calories than at-home meals
• Encourage greater calorie consumption than at-home meals

Bring back home economics?

Gleissner P, Kashdan HE, eds.  Resilient Kitchens: American Immigrant Cooking in a Time of Crisis.  Rutgers University Press, 2023.   

I enjoyed reading this book and did a blurb for it:

Resilient Kitchens collects the deeply personal accounts of immigrant chefs, writers, and scholars of how their experience as “other” informed their use of food and cooking to stay centered during the COVID-19 pandemic.  Their stories are vastly different but all bear on why food matters to much to personal identity.

Rutgers University Press describes it this way:

Resilient Kitchens: American Immigrant Cooking in a Time of Crisis is a stimulating collection of essays about the lives of immigrants in the United States before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, told through the lens of food. It includes a vibrant mix of perspectives from professional food writers, restaurateurs, scholars, and activists, whose stories range from emotional reflections on hardship, loss, and resilience to journalistic investigations of racism in the American food system. Each contribution is accompanied by a recipe of special importance to the author, giving readers a taste of cuisines from around the world. Every essay is accompanied by gorgeous food photography, the authors’ snapshots of pandemic life, and hand-drawn illustrations by Filipino American artist Angelo Dolojan.

Contributions by Reem Kassis, Stephanie Jolly, Krishnendu Ray, Tien Nguyen, Bonnie Frumkin Morales, Mayukh Sen, Geetika Agrawal, Fernay McPherson, Antonio Tahhan, Sangeeta Lakhani, Keenan Dava, Tim Flores, Angelo Dolojan, Guillermina Gina Núñez-Mchiri, Harry Eli Kashdan, Philip Gleissner