BOOKS READ 02: THE TENTH MUSE BY JUDITH JONES
How I got to reading The Tenth Muse by Judith Jones:
I had a mega hankering for a cookie. Something sweet but completing, something small that could make me content. Cookies sometimes fall a bit short due to their size. I knew I was being kind of contradictory, but I liked the difficultness of my craving, it felt like the end result would be more satisfying that way.
I looked through cookie recipes on one of the food blogs that I frequent, Orangette. She had a recipe for Schraft’s Butterscotch Cookies. She had gotten the recipe from Jones’ book. The story behind this recipe is that she had these cookies as a child from Schraft’s, which had closed during her adulthood and she longed for the tastes of those cookies again. She asked James Beard (big mega important chef) if he remembered them, and he did, and he called up the president of what remained of Schraft’s and got the recipe.
How nice!
I recognized Jones’ name as being the editor at Knopf who had taken a chance and chose to publish The Art of Mastering French Cooking by Julia Child at a time where people had never heard of Julia Child and much of the population of the United States was a bit skeptical of drawn out cooking, especially something kind of exotic like French cooking.
Jones went on to work with several other cookbook authors that are insanely famous today and defined many of the ethnic cuisines seen today in North America.
I was fascinated by this women and her ties to the food world, how she had a hand in many chefs’ careers and I knew she would have recipes in this book and that they were bound to be good.
And yes, the recipes are good, and her story is enjoyable as well.
