Once upon a time, sometime in the late 1940s, a young American named Judith Bailey decided to take a road trip from Paris to Provence with a group of friends and a poodle named Nikki. Somewhere outside the town of Vienne, they saw a billboard advertising a restaurant called La Pyramide. It was late and they were getting hungry, so they decided to stop.
The restaurant was a bit fancier than they anticipated and the chef, Fernand Point, emerged just as Nikki was relieving herself. Judith and her friends were mortified, but Point greeted the poodle with a kiss on the brow and made sure she got her fair share of every course. Point was considered one of the best chefs in the world at the time, and it was a meal none of them ever forgot. For Judith, it was life-changing.
Many, many years later, Judith, now known as Judith Jones, would tell this story in a cookbook called Love Me, Feed Me: Sharing With Your Dog the Everyday Good Food You Cook and Enjoy. That dinner at La Pyramide had introduced her to fine French dining, but it also planted a seed for the philosophy behind the book: that it’s cruel for humans to feed dogs — our best friends! — dry kibble when there is so much better food in the world. She had put this into practice with her own dog, Mabon, a Havanese, and she was convinced that a diet of human food made him healthier and both of them happier.
A dog cookbook may have seemed like an improbable subject for Jones, who’d had a very long and distinguished career editing cookbooks for humans. Her form of editing went beyond the usual editorial deal-making, hand-holding, and red-penning. Her publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, was too cheap to pay for a recipe tester, according to her biographer Sara B. Franklin in her new book The Editor, so Jones performed this duty as well, sitting in the kitchen beside Edna Lewis or Madhur Jaffrey or Lidia Bastianich and noting measurements, timing, textures, techniques, and anything else that might be useful in explaining how a dish was prepared. Jones had first learned to cook as a little girl by — oddly enough — frying up meat for her pet dog (this was a common practice, she explains, before the commercial dog food industry exploded). In her Paris days, she had operated an illegal restaurant in her apartment, but this was truly a culinary education. Later, with her husband, Evan Jones, she would publish two books about bread baking (one for adults and one for children) and, after Evan’s death, one about cooking for a single person.
The life of Judith Jones was filled with incidents as improbable as accidentally dining at a three-Michelin-starred restaurant with a poodle. There was her long, drawn-out affair with the poet Theodore Roethke that began when she was 19 and he was 35 and her professor at Bennington (World War II was on and men were scarce, especially at a women’s college). There was her vacation to Paris that turned into an extended stay because her purse, which contained her passport and her ticket home, was stolen one afternoon while she was reading in the Luxembourg Gardens. There was her discovery of the French edition of The Diary of Anne Frank in the slush pile at Doubleday Paris, where Jones was working at the time.
There was also the way she transformed cookbook writing in America.
Jones didn’t intend to edit cookbooks. Her earliest authors were novelists and poets. She worked with John Updike and Anne Tyler. She acquired the American edition of Sylvia Plath’s first collection, The Colossus. The manuscript that would become Mastering the Art of French Cooking landed on her desk because her Knopf colleagues knew she had spent time in France and liked to cook. Since she and Evan had returned to New York, they had been attempting to recreate French cuisine with little success. None of the cookbooks she found were much help. Both American and French cookbooks at the time assumed their readers knew how to cook, and the recipes amounted to lists of ingredients and a few terse instructions, nothing about proper technique or how the food should look at various stages. And French and American ingredients were different: The cuts of meat had different names and good fresh vegetables were hard to find in American supermarkets.
Mastering the Art offered both instruction and translation. When Jones began paging through the enormous manuscript, she told Franklin, “I knew from the tone, from the writing, that I was going to learn things.”
The book, of course, became a best-seller and a legend. It also became the template for not only Jones’s subsequent cookbooks but American cookbooks in general. These new cookbooks instructed. They promised that anyone who read them and followed the recipes would be able to cook beef bourguignon or lamb korma or spareribs in garlic and black bean sauce successfully.
Love Me, Feed Me follows in these footsteps. When Mabon was a puppy, he was too small to eat commercially made kibble. Jones would break the pieces up for him by hand. Still, she could tell Mabon was hungry. On a visit to the vet, she asked if it would be all right if she cooked for Mabon instead of giving him dog food. “To my delight,” she writes, “she answered that I couldn’t do anything better for him.”
Though as an editor Jones helped produce cookbooks of dishes from all over the world, her own preferred cooking style, as laid out in her memoir, The Tenth Muse, and her earlier cookbook The Pleasures of Cooking for One, was quite plain and rooted in her thrifty New England sensibilities. (Though she had been born and raised in Manhattan, her family was from Vermont and she later retired there.) She liked fresh vegetables, simply cooked, and she kept the scraps to use in soups. She preferred farm-raised meat and ate it in moderation, recycling leftovers into hashes and stir-fries and croquettes. She still loved cream sauce. Her idea of luxury, borrowed from her time in France, was good bread, cheese, and wine. For dessert, she recommended things like baked apples. When I first discovered The Pleasures of Cooking for One about 15 years ago, I enjoyed using it, but it also made me feel virtuous.
The recipes in Love Me, Feed Me follow in this vein. Many of them are carryovers from Pleasures with a little less seasoning to accommodate Mabon’s canine palate, like the shirred egg with chicken liver or the pork stir-fry. Jones recommends that you serve the dog first and then add to your portion any garnishes that are harmful to them, like extra spice or ingredients like spinach or almonds. An ideal dog meal, according to Jones, consists of roughly equal quantities of meat, vegetables, and a starch.
Cooking for Mabon brought Jones a great deal of joy in her final years — she was 90 years old when the book was published — and it probably helped keep her sharp. As she writes in Love Me, Feed Me, it also inspired her to experiment with new-to-her ingredients like ground turkey and farro, though she was proud of Mabon when he rejected kale. She was too sensible and old-fashioned to write anything as corny as “Food as love”; instead, as she told an interviewer, “I know [dogs who eat just kibble] are missing part of the fun. That’s what I want to get across.” Cooking for Mabon was fun for her, too; it gave her a chance to rummage through the fridge and see what she could put together.
Well, far be it from me to deny my own dog, Joe, any kind of fun. I will spare you any gushing about how he is the most wonderful dog alive (although he is). I will say that he is my officemate and closest companion; together, we have probably logged hundreds of miles walking around the city. I have made him ice cream and cookies and, once, a birthday cake, but I’ve been wary of doing actual cooking for him because, in previous research into the subject, I’ve been told that feeding a dog human-grade food is an all-or-nothing proposition and requires a special nutritional supplement that would, as far as I can tell from the website, cost about $80 for ten days’ supply for a dog his size.
I was also wary of Jones’s recipes. She writes that garlic and leeks are fine for dogs; I’ve always heard the opposite. [Editor’s note: Leeks and garlic are not fine for dogs.] She also says that chocolate isn’t so bad, but an incident with my childhood dog, a visiting child, a piece of chocolate, and a white living room rug taught me otherwise. [Editor’s note: Chocolate is toxic to dogs and you should never feed it to them, period.]
Still, the premise of this column is that I cook at least one meal from each of these cookbooks, so that’s what I did. We had pork and leek au gratin, despite my trepidation about leeks, with some lovely potatoes Joe and I had picked up at the neighborhood farmers market (one of his favorite weekly excursions) and a lid of bread crumbs mixed with Parmesan cheese. I decided I would supplement Joe’s share with kibble because, at 90 pounds, he is seven-and-a-half times Mabon’s size and the portion size in the recipe was too small for him. Well, for us, because I wanted to have some, too.
Making our dinner took a lot longer than I thought it would, and I was still cooking at Joe’s regular meal time. To stave off the whining, I gave him a small portion of kibble. (It’s worth noting that Jones usually prepared Mabon’s meals the night before, so there was always something ready for him at 4 p.m.)
Jones was horrified by the notion that anyone would think she and Mabon shared candlelit dinners together. “We don’t sit down together,” she informed an interviewer. “I mean he doesn’t put on his bib and sit in my husband’s chair.”
I, however, am made of less stern stuff. So once the gratin came out of the oven, I put some in Joe’s bowl and some in my bowl (my portion had leeks; Joe’s did not) and sat down on the floor beside him. I should have arranged his bowl so it was facing me instead of the wall like it usually does, but it wasn’t like he would have interrupted his eating for a little conversation. When that snout goes into the bowl, it stays down. Except for when he got to his little piece of pork: That he picked up and carried off to the rug in our office, which is where he likes to eat special treats. I thought it was pretty good, too.
The next day, he refused to eat his kibble for breakfast. I wasn’t sure if he had been irrevocably spoiled or if the gratin had just been too rich for him. An attack of diarrhea later that morning settled that question. Once he recovered, it was back to his regular diet. But I might make the gratin again for myself, just because I enjoyed it, and maybe I’ll eat it sitting on the floor next to Joe and his bowl and we’ll pretend we’re at La Pyramide, and the chef will greet him with a kiss.
Aimee Levitt is a freelance writer in Chicago. Read more of her work at aimeelevitt.com.
