Judith Jones, Marcella Hazan dish ... about each other

By | The New Mexican

12/30/2008

When Marcella Hazan was unhappy with the publisher of her first cookbook, Julia Child suggested she contact editor Judith Jones, who had helped her break into the American cookbook market. Jones and Hazan worked together on two cookbooks, then parted on less than friendly terms.

In The Tenth Muse: My Life in Food, Jones writes, "(Marcella Hazan and her husband Victor) were singularly attuned, sharing the same rigidities and condescension toward the average American's knowledge of, and taste in, food. It was a perfect mating, and I felt my self to be an intruder — with good reason, as it turned out ...

"(W)hen we started working on the second volume, More Classic Italian Cooking, I, as usual, flung myself into the whole process, trying out many of the wonderful recipes, and for a while the Joneses' kitchen was happily full of Marcella. But there was one dish that I felt was too saturated in fat and looked a bit unappetizing, with pool of fat circling the plate ... for Americans, particularly when the fear-of-fat mania was beginning to spread, it seemed like too much of a good thing. So I spoke up the next time we were working together in the apartment. There was silence, and Marcella turned to Victor and cried indignantly, 'Vut did she say?' I got up quietly, and as I was putting on my coat, I tried to explain that the cookbooks I had worked on had been the result of a healthy collaboration between author and editor, that my role was to play the devil's advocate and ask questions. Clearly that was not what Marcella wanted ..."

Marcella Hazan's Amarcord: Marcella Remembers contains the following, "It was a fortunate day for my career when Julia Child brought Judith Jones and me together. It's what I thought then and what I think now. ... I can't say exactly when the warm feelings we had once enjoyed began to cool. ...

"More Classic Italian Cooking, my second cookbook, was the first book that Judith edited. Inexplicably to me, it didn't go smoothly. I felt I was matched against an antagonist rather than paired with an editor. ...

"The antagonisms from More Classic Italian Cooking carried over to Marcella's Italian Kitchen, my third cookbook."