Judith Jones

The rest is history.

Her next big discovery came a decade later when she was living in New York and working as an editor at the publishing house Albert A Knopf. It was a tome of French recipes written by an unheard-of cook — Julia Child.

“From the moment I started turning the pages, I was bouleversée, as the French say — knocked out,” she said. “This was the book I’d been searching for.”

It had the uninspired title French Recipes for American Cooks and had already been rejected by innumerable publishers. With her purposeful pageboy bob and indomitable spirit (and appetite), Jones rolled up her sleeves and cooked alongside Child to perfect her cassoulets and coq au vins. She fluted mushrooms, scoured New York for unusual French ingredients and even got her secretary to test recipes. Once, while making puff pastry, the towering 6ft 2in Child handed Jones a rolling pin and barked: “Just try it out, dearie.”

After she suggested a new title to Child — Mastering the Art of French Cooking — Knopf told her: “Well, I’ll eat my hat if that title sells.” It did — turning Child into a TV star and culinary treasure, and leading to an explosion of French home-cooking and fancy goods. The author was to become a household name, and her book went on to sell millions around the world.

Wielding her green editor’s pen as ruthlessly as a kitchen knife, Jones once turned up on the doorstep of an unruly writer who had missed a deadline. Armed with shopping bags of ingredients, she didn’t leave until they were filled again with notebooks of recipes. She could be so intimidating she was dubbed “the Julia Child of cookbook editors”.

Jones, however, scorned the label, not least because her interests were literary as well as culinary. Her other authors, indeed, included Anne Tyler and John Updike. She often recalled with glee that when Rabbit, Run was published in 1960 Kopf warned her about “sexually explicit passages” that had been cut and said: “I don’t think you should attend the meeting; the language may be a little raw.” She had already read every word and helped to publish an uncut later edition.

Spry from daily yoga and outdoor swims, as well as a Campari before dinner — “it just cleanses me somehow” — she was still working as a senior editor and vice-president of Knopf aged 85. By then she had embraced Japanese cuisine, saying she had finally learnt how to sharpen a knife.

Judith Bailey was born into a comfortable household in New York in 1924. Her father, Charles, was a lawyer and her mother, Phyllis, a housewife, who banned such outlandish ingredients as garlic. The family favoured stodgy puddings, boiled vegetables and roast meat, all of which was cooked by the nanny.

Occasionally her father took her to a French restaurant in Manhattan where she tasted onion soup. She said it “stirred her gastronomic juices”. After she became too plump as a child she put herself on a diet of carrots and milk, and — swearing by a French lifestyle — from then on remained slim.

She studied English at Bennington College in Vermont and got a job as a junior editor at Doubleday in New York. In 1948 she decided to move to Paris. There she found cheap lodgings in a hotel with a shared bathtub and then a room in a painter’s apartment. “In the evening one sits around in cafés, eats in small and always good little restaurants, then dances perhaps,” she wrote in a letter home. There were plenty of French bachelors — “gay and attractive”.

She learnt to enjoy dining by herself with half a bottle of wine in local bistros — because she could afford only one meal a day she had to choose carefully. She tasted mussels and cider in Brittany and homemade pâté in the Loire.

In Paris, she also fell in love with Evan Jones, an American food writer. He was writing a book called How to Live in Paris on Practically Nothing and she knocked on his door looking for a job. They married in Vienna in 1951 and returned to New York, where Jones was swiftly recruited by Knopf in 1957 to read translations, such as Albert Camus.

She despaired at the lack of good wine and baguettes. “No shallots, no leeks, no fresh herbs,” she said. However, American tourists were travelling to France in droves and — after reading Child’s recipes — she was convinced that thousands who wanted to learn about good French cooking would like the book.

She began exchanging airmail letters with Child, who was then in Paris. “We chewed over everything, including the need for more beef recipes . . . and the size of portions,” she later wrote.

Buoyed by their success, she practically lived at Child’s house in Cambridge to prepare for a second volume, huddling over the manuscript on the kitchen table. To celebrate its publication in 1970 they went to Provence for Christmas where Jones learnt to stuff a goose as Child straddled it. When Child became a bestseller again in 2009 thanks to the Hollywood film, Julie and Julia, Jones’s character, of course, had a part.

In 1973 Jones published Madhur Jaffrey, then an actress who had compiled the Indian recipes she inherited from her mother. When the book struggled to sell, Jones suggested that Jaffrey hold cookery classes and persuaded Knopf staff to enlist until word spread. She often dined in Jaffrey’s apartment. “We would just follow our noses down the long hall,” she said.

A seasoned globetrotter, Jones hunted for cheese in the mountains near Naples and studied herbs in Singapore. She continued yearly pilgrimages to Paris and always had a croissant and café au lait for breakfast.

In their New York flat and a country house in New England, she cooked daily with her husband, Evan, improvising from the fridge (including beaver meat) and hosting Updike. She once sniffed that despite being daring in print, he “eats very plain”. They wrote three books on bread and New England cooking. Jaffrey often came to stay and would bring spices.

Evan had two daughters from a first marriage: Bronwyn, now a food writer, and Pamela. They also adopted two teenage children, Chris, who took photographs for some of Jones’s books, and Audrey Vandercook.

After her husband died in 1996 she wrote a book, The Pleasures of Cooking for One, in 2009. She insisted on lighting candles and pouring wine each night — “I’m a good wine drinker,” she admitted. She detailed with relish how a leftover boeuf bourguignon could make a beef-and-kidney pie or a pasta sauce.

At 90 she continued to make supper and eat at her neatly laid table. “It’s sort of indecent,” she said, “because sometimes, I begin to think around 4 o’clock, ‘Hmm, is it almost time to start cooking?’ She returned most often to Child’s books with the thought: “Well, what did Julia say about that?”

Judith Jones, publisher and writer, was born on March 10, 1924. She died of complications from Alzheimer’s disease on August 2, 2017, aged 93