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Julia Child’s seminal cookbook changed the way North Americans approached food … and life.

If you learn to cook, can it change your life?

That's the fundamental question behind the upcoming movie Julie & Julia.

The short answer is "Yes!"

There is one person who had a profound effect on the way North Americans cooked, and she became the first real TV celebrity chef. Though renowned as "The French Chef," Julia Child did not study cooking until she was into her late 30s. It changed her life completely.

Julie Powell was stuck at a desk, not going anywhere fast, when she started the Julie/Julia Project. The goal? Cook every recipe from Child's book Mastering the Art of French Cooking in one year, and blog about it. That blog became the critically acclaimed memoir Julie & Julia, and the experience changed her life completely.

These two stories are intertwined in the movie Julie & Julia.

The art of editing Mastering the Art of French Cooking:

Although Julia Child's story in the movie is based on her memoirs My Life In France (with Alex Prud'homme), a big part of the story hinges on getting a cookbook published.

That's where Judith Jones comes in.

Judith Jones is senior editor and vice-president at Alfred A. Knopf. She joined the company in 1957 as an editor working primarily on translations of French writers such as Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre. In 1961, the seminal cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child, Simone Beck, and Louisette Bertholle, was published. Although she had "seen through" to publishing a couple of cookbooks, Jones hadn't yet edited one herself. This would be her first. She edited all of Child's work after that. She's been talking to folks about the book and the movie, and she was at home in Vermont this month wondering if she was going to run out of things to talk about.

"I look at the schedule and I think -- my Lord, am I going to have enough to say?" she says.

"I find that there is such an interest on the part of people who have seen this film, and the questions are very interesting and it's a way to connect, too."

Jones was among the first to see the potential in Child's cookbook.

"Well, it was interesting because it had been turned down by a Boston publisher, and the gentleman of the company called Julia Child in and said, 'Mrs. Child, no American woman is going to want to know this much about French cooking.'

"It just so happened I did want to know that much about French cooking.

A scout who had been nursing the project along had the good sense to send it to Alfred Knopf after it was rejected in Boston.

"They knew at Knopf that I'd lived for three-and-a-half years in France, and that I loved French cooking. So I was asked to read it... I thought, 'This is the book I've been looking for all my life!'

"I got so excited, because there had never been a book like this, that really deconstructs all the techniques of French cooking -- that makes you understand that there are master recipes, and that you learn those. And they're imprinted in your cooking brain, and then you can do all the variations you want on your own -- just one thing leading to the other -- and so I felt if I was this excited about it, there must be others.

"The time was right, because so many young people were going backpacking to France and Europe for the first time, and eating in a real French bistros where their palates were opened up. Soldiers were returning from Europe and the Far East with new ideas. Jackie (Kennedy) had a French chef in the White House."

A food lover, Jones was already a pretty good cook herself, but learned more while in Paris by asking the butcher and the baker for tips.

"I'd never been to cooking school or anything -- I think my parents would have fainted at the idea of cooking school.

"I have some letters from the years when I was in Paris, that I wrote home, and it started out: 'I know you didn't send me to an expensive college to become a cook, but you have to understand that in France, cooking is an art.' I hoped to win them over, but I didn't win them," she says. "Do parents have the same attitude in Winnipeg?"

Once Jones had read through the cookbook, she realized there was very little work needed.

"What was so remarkable is how brilliantly it was thought through and presented. So my role was very much to act as kind of a scout for Julia, in terms of finding out what you could get and what you couldn't get, so that if she called for shallots there would be a substitute for shallots, because nobody had ever heard of shallots in those days."

As hard as it was to get some ingredients back in the late SSRq50s and early SSRq60s, Jones thinks it can be as tricky now.

"Today, I think as people who write cookbooks compete to have that absolutely pure flavour; you'll find yourself having to go out and buy three packets of fresh herbs -- they cost more than the meat by the time you're through and then they're so dank by the time you're done! That's what puts people off cooking today."

But the lessons of French cooking have stayed with Jones over the years; she says it's not so much the recipes as the techniques that became imprinted on her mind. Learning how to braise meat, getting the meat's juices and how to deglaze a pan, for instance, have informed her cooking more than any particular recipe.

The relationship between Jones and Child was more than editor and writer, and she has fond memories of Julia.

"I love to tell the story of the time my husband and I went over to Provence, because Julia and (her husband) Paul had got a little house there, for Christmas. I helped her with the goose, because I had never cooked a goose before, and I wanted to see how she did it, and she said, 'Well the important thing is to get the tendons out of the legs, because the tendons make the legs tough and they're delicious without them.'

"Whereupon she cut a little slit on the bottom of each foot and she threw the whole bird down on the floor, and she put her finger around the tendon and pulled and pulled and pulled and finally it came out and she said, 'Just like uncorking a bottle of wine!'

"It demonstrates not only the earthiness and the fun she had with cooking, but the little detail that it's worth doing, and there's always a way to do it.

"She so genuinely loved it. And her energy, I do think energy has so much to do with it. She was spontaneous. She became sort of a friend in the kitchen; you could hear her voice."

Judith Jones has high hopes for the movie and the sentiments she shares with the characters portrayed.

"I hope this movie does touch people in the way that we've been talking about, so they'll really get in there and start enjoying cooking again. We need it."

Judith Jones is the co-author with Evan Jones (her late husband) of three books: The Book of Bread; Knead It, Punch It, Bake It! (for children); and The Book of New New England Cookery. She has written for Vogue, Saveur and Gourmet magazines, and in fall 2007, Knopf published her memoir, The Tenth Muse: My Life in Food.

The movie Julie and Julia opens in theatres on Aug. 7.

So just who is Judith Jones?

EDITORS seldom get their due, but Jones' accomplishments stand on their own. In addition to being the person who was responsible for reading and recommending The Diary of Anne Frank (for Doubleday), she has edited many stellar writers.

Here are just a few: Elizabeth Bowen, John Hersey, Langston Hughes, William Maxwell, Sharon Olds, J.F. Powers, Arthur Rubinstein, Peter Taylor, Anne Tyler, and, for more than 40 years and more than 50 books, John Updike.

Her cookbook writers include: Nancy Verde Barr, Lidia Bastianich, James Beard, Marion Cunningham, Rosie Daley, Marcella Hazan, Ken Hom, Madhur Jaffrey, Irene Kuo, Edna Lewis, Scott Peacock, Joan Nathan, Jacques Pépin, Claudia Roden, Nina Simonds, Anna Thomas and others.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition July 29, 2009 D1