Judith Jones and “The Pleasures of Cooking for One”

If you saw Julie and Julia —and by now, who hasn’t?—you may remember a short but vivid scene between Julia Child and her cookbook editor. Choosing, discarding, and rearranging words on a bulletin board, the two of them painstakingly arrive at the title for Child’s magnum opus, Mastering the Art of French Cooking . Fast forward some 50 years. Judith Jones, the editor in question, hasn’t lost her knack for artful wording.

But this time the cookbook is her own, and its title reflects not only her love of good food but where life has taken her. It’s called The Pleasures of Cooking for One. “After my husband, Evan, died in 1996, I was not sure that I would ever enjoy preparing a meal for myself and eating it alone,” writes Jones in the book’s introduction.

But eventually she did, coming to view cooking a simple, well-made dinner as a way of nourishing herself in body and soul, savoring the life that she and her husband had shared. “When I sit down to a nicely laid table,” she noted in the December 2009 issue of Saveur , “I light the candles, pour myself a glass of wine, and feel that I am honoring the past as I enjoy a good dinner.”

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