Book Notes: The Tenth Muse: My Life in Food

[John Talbott]

Book Notes: The Tenth Muse: My Life in Food by Judith Jones, Knopf, $24.95 (amazon.com - US): A nifty read

I was so charmed by this that I read it in one sitting. It has great stories about the author’s life in France and her dealings with Julia Child. She’s best known to us as the editor who published Julia Child when no one else would, but also James Beard, Jacques Pepin, Marcella Hazan, Madhur Jaffrey, Ed Giobbi and John Updike. Since so many of us learned French cooking from Julia Child and one of our member’s mothers (French) even learned French cooking from her, it’s especially interesting for us. But it can be enjoyed by all Francophiles. Briefly, she came to Paris, helped write a book “How to live in Paris on practically nothing,” married, traveled and writes about the rest of France and still makes dinner for herself at 83 (she gives many recipes for one person) with some very familiar ingredients. All in all: charming, instructive and most of all, fun.