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Michael Ruhlman Interviews Judith Jones

Posted by Ed Levine, November 4, 2007 at 5:15 PM

There's a fine Judith Jones interview well worth reading on Michael Ruhlman's blog.

Ms. Jones is dismayed by the state of cookbook publishing today. Ruhlman asked her for her list of pros and cons on the subject:

I’m afraid I’ll give you mostly cons. I think [publishers] are afraid to touch a book unless the author is someone you can promote. You have to be a celebrity. And I’ve seen many really lovely cookbooks die aborning. So the people who have the television programs are known quantities—I mean this is true of everything in our culture. But it makes it much harder work to put across a lovely book like Katy Sparks’s Sparks in the Kitchen. She’s a chef who really brought home the ideas that she learned in a professional kitchen and how she did them at home. And to me that’s an important contribution because there’s such a huge gulf between what goes on in a chef’s kitchen and what goes on at home.

But she kind of likes food blogs except for those darned F-bombs.

I must say, I think there’s something very good about them (blogs), in that, you’re awfully alone in the kitchen and I think that’s one thing people resist about cooking, but if you share with others, you know, what went wrong with your soufflé, and people can cheer you on and tell of their disaster or success, sharing little secrets, it’s stimulating.

The thing I do have against some of them is that they’re so carelessly done and the language is so terrible. Four letter words—we won’t name names—they don’t go very well with food!

My wife just finished the Judith Jones book and absolutely adored it. She found it completely engaging and captivating.

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Tags: Judith Jones, Michael Ruhlman