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My lunches with the queen of cookbooks

Lessons learned at the kitchen counter with the editor of Julia Child, Edna Lewis, M. F. K. Fisher, Madhur Jaffrey, and James Beard.

Judith, who has recently retired as senior editor and vice president of Alfred A. Knopf after 57 years, is best known for rescuing Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl from the so-called “slush pile” of unpublished manuscripts in the early 1950s, and for “discovering” and publishing Julia Child. My involvement in the project was borne of a moment of kismet; in my first semester of a doctoral program in food studies in New York, I happened to be at my professor’s elbow when she received an email from the foundation, asking if she could assist them in getting the collection of Judith’s oral histories off the ground. Another time, it was leftover rice paired with a gleaming fillet of fish roasted fast in a hot oven, drizzled with a quick pan sauce of thinly sliced garlic barely browned in a mix of butter and olive oil, and finished with white wine and lemon juice.

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