The Tenth Muse: My Life in Food - Softcover

Jones, Judith

 
9780307277442: The Tenth Muse: My Life in Food
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0307277445 ISBN 13: 9780307277442
Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2008

Inhaltsangabe

A memoir by the legendary cookbook editor who was present at the creation of the American food revolution and played a pivotal role in shaping it •  “Engrossing. . . . The Tenth Muse lets you pull up a chair at the table where American gastronomic history took place.”—O, The Oprah Magazine

Living in Paris after World War II, Jones broke free of bland American food and reveled in everyday French culinary delights. On returning to the States she published Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking. The rest is publishing and gastronomic history. A new world now opened up to Jones as she discovered, with her husband Evan, the delights of American food, publishing some of the premier culinary luminaries of the twentieth century: from Julia Child, James Beard, and M.F.K. Fisher to Claudia Roden, Edna Lewis, and Lidia Bastianich.

Also included are fifty of Jones's favorite recipes collected over a lifetime of cooking-each with its own story and special tips. 

“Lovely. . . . A rare glimpse into the roots of the modern culinary world.”—Chicago Tribune

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Judith Jones is Senior Editor and Vice President at Alfred A. Knopf. She joined the company in 1957 as an editor working primarily on translations of French writers such as Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre. She had worked before that for Doubleday, first in New York and then in Paris, where she was responsible for reading and recommending The Diary of Anne Frank. In addition to her literary authors, she has been particularly interested in developing a list of first-rate cookbook writers; her authors have included Julia Child (Judith published Julia's first book and was her editor ever after), Lidia Bastianich, James Beard, Marion Cunningham, Rosie Daley, Marcella Hazan, Madhur Jaffrey, Edna Lewis, Scott Peacock, Joan Nathan, Jacques Pépin, Claudia Roden, and Nina Simonds. She is the coauthor with Evan Jones (her late husband) of two books: The Book of Bread: Knead It, Punch It, Bake It! (for children); and The Book of New New England Cookery. She also collaborated with Angus Cameron on The L.L. Bean Game and Fish Cookbook. Recently, she has contributed to Vogue, Saveur, and Gourmet magazines. In 2006, she was awarded the James Beard Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award.

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Bread Pudding
SERVES: 4 to 6

At a country inn in Wales, I had one of those taste-memory moments that made me realize how a simple pudding of eggs, bread, and milk could in a flash call up a flood of memory so acute that for an instant I was right back in childhood. The baked dish was brought in, wrapped in a white linen napkin, the way Edie would have served it, and as it was spooned onto the plate I had my first whiff. Then, when I took a taste, the hot raisins bursting in my mouth, the sensation was so powerful that the tears rolled down my cheeks (adding a little salty flavor).

NOTE: I discovered from Edna Lewis how much better crushed sugar cubes are than plain granulated sugar as a topping. They're particularly good if you've stored them in a jar with a vanilla bean. Bread pudding is best warm, but it can be very good cold, too. I've even had it for breakfast straight from the fridge.

Ingredients
2 1/2 cups milk
2 tablespoons butter, plus a little for buttering the dish
3 slices homemade-type bread, crusts removed, crumbled to make 1 ½ cups
1/2 cup raisins
Grated rind of ½ lemon
1/2 teaspoon lemon juice
3 large eggs
3 tablespoons sugar
About 4 gratings of nutmeg (about 1/8 teaspoon)

For topping:
Crushed sugar cubes, to make about 2 tablespoons

For serving:
Heavy cream


   1. Heat the milk with the butter, stirring until melted.

   2. Remove from the heat, stir in the crumbled bread, the raisins, grated lemon rind, and lemon juice, and let cool to lukewarm.

   3. Separate the eggs, and beat the yolks into the milk and butter along with the sugar.

   4. Beat the whites in a clean bowl until they form soft peaks, and fold them into the pudding mixture.

   5. Season the mixture with nutmeg, and turn into a lightly buttered shallow baking dish. Sprinkle the crushed sugar cubes on top.

   6. Set the dish in a pan of simmering water, and bake in a preheated 325-degree oven for 1 hour. Serve warm with a pitcher of heavy cream.




Chapter One: Growing Up

 

When my mother was well into her nineties, she announced that she had an important question for me and wanted an honest answer. I steeled myself for something weighty, perhaps about whether I believed in heaven and hell.

 

Then she looked at me and asked: “Tell me, Judith, do you really like garlic?” I couldn’t lie. Yes, I admitted, I adored garlic. She looked so crestfallen at that moment that I was sure she felt a sense of finality about the wayward path her younger daughter had taken.

 

To her, garlic represented everything alien and vulgar. It smelled bad, and people who handled it or ate it smelled bad. Moreover, it covered up the natural flavor of honest food—and that was suspect. Those French chefs, for instance, why did they have to put a sauce on everything, anyway? No doubt to disguise the taste because what was underneath wasn’t very fresh to begin with.

 

In my mother’s house we were always being told to get rid of the smells, to make sure that the kitchen door was shut, that the windows were open. Not only was garlic banned, onions were permitted only when a lamb stew was being prepared, for which two or three well-boiled small white onions per person were deemed appropriate. That’s all that were purchased; Mother didn’t want our cook, Edie Price, sneaking a little chopped onion into her meatloaf. And heaven forbid that indigestible, raw pieces might find their way into a tuna-fish sandwich.

 

Still, I have to admit that the unadulterated English-style food I grew up on had its merits. I always loved our Sunday dinner prime rib roast with Yorkshire pudding, which my British grandfather, whenever he was present, would carve at the table, deftly cutting thin—too thin, I always thought—rosy slices. My father, Charles Bailey, who was called Monty because he grew up in Montpelier, Vermont, somehow never lost the mischievous charm of a small-town boy after he had to settle in New York City. When he married into the Hedley family, he made a point of carving clumsy, thick slices, and so was banished as the family carver. My mother took over. I can still see her standing at the head of the table honing her knife on a sharpening steel, and I would always try to sneak a nibble from the platter when she wasn’t looking. The knuckle-bone meat on a lamb roast was irresistible.

 

I am grateful, too, that those organ meats that people spurn today often graced our table: liver and bacon, beefsteak and kidney pie, breaded sweetbreads—I lapped them up and still find all forms of innards an earthy delight. Frugality was considered a virtue. One never let things go to waste, so our cook, Edie, learned to turn leftovers into wonderful dishes: crispy croquettes with creamy lamb, ham, or chicken inside; shepherd’s pie of ground-up leftover lamb with a mashed-potato topping; minced meats in cream on toast; stuffed vegetables. We also had a meatless night once a week, either for the sake of economy or because it was good for us to forgo the pleasure of flesh, I’m not sure. For quite a few years after I graduated from the nursery table to the grown-up dinner table, I thought when we were served breaded and fried eggplant or broiled mushrooms that they were a form of meat. Of course, I didn’t dare ask, because one wasn’t supposed to talk about food at the table (it was considered crude, like talking about sex). And if we indulged in appreciative sounds like “yum-yum,” we just might be sent from the table.

 

Nor could we make disparaging remarks if something displeased us. I remember how endlessly long the winter seemed when all that Mr. Volpe, our Italian fruit-and-vegetable vendor on the corner, could produce was overgrown root vegetables, sprouts and cabbage, and tired potatoes. Then what greens we could get were cooked so long that an unappetizing cabbagy smell permeated the air, and it was hard to get down our due portion. But we weren’t allowed to say a word. It did take me some time, though, to appreciate parsnips and broccoli. When, finally, spring broke through and we tasted our first asparagus, even though slightly overcooked, it was a treat worth waiting for. And we were allowed to pick up the spears with our fingers.

 

But I don’t remember ever going shopping with my mother in the city to pick out the first vegetables and fruits of the season. Food shopping was invariably done by phone, as though to keep a distance from the things of the earth. In the summer, though, a truck with fresh farm produce would do a tour of the lake in Vermont where we had our summer cottage, and it was fun to go out and greet the local farmer and get a look at what he had just pulled from the soil. Every week the butcher’s truck would stop by, and I once persuaded him to let me ride with him as he made his rounds. I was impressed with the way he wielded his knife and would lop off a slab of meat which, when he put it on the scales, would always come within an ounce of what the customer had ordered. The back of the truck was chilled only by a block of ice, and as the warmth of the summer day penetrated, the smell of raw meat became tantalizingly strong.

 

Meat was such an important part of everyone’s diet that when we were plunged into World War II and were suddenly confronted with rationing, there was a sense of deprivation. I was away at...

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Verlag
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2008
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0307277445
ISBN 13 
9780307277442
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
304
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
gpsr@libri.de
gpsr@libri.de

Europaallee 1
Bad Hersfeld
36244
Deutschland

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ISBN 10:  0307264955 ISBN 13:  9780307264954
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Hardcover