Life was simpler before the Food Network. In America, the treatment of cooking and dining was the bastion of only "the best people" like the patrician Judith Jones, cookbook editor at Knopf since the late 1950s, and her friends, mostly New Yorkers.

In this small clubby society, Jones, along with her husband, writer Evan, was a dominant, yet unseen player for nearly 40 years. It was a myopic bunch focused on French recipes, uncomplicated American fare and Gourmet magazine, edited mostly by and for people who could afford kitchen help.

A convert to French food when she lived in Paris after Bennington College, Jones unwittingly sparked the country's obsession with kitchen theatrics when she agreed to publish a manuscript by the-then unknown Julia Child and her partner, Simone Beck.

(It's easy to forget that Julia was not solely responsible for her career.)

Jones tells the story behind the success of "Mastering the Art of French Cooking:" Marketing.

Child and Beck flacked the book coast to coast while Jones coaxed Craig Claiborne, another dominant figure in the food world, to review the book, which he did in words usually reserved for a literary genius. (She did him a favor.)

The fact is, though, that the book and its companion volume were superb, well-illustrated and geared to American cooks. Jones rightly deserves our thanks.

Jones made Julia and vice versa, but it was a TV show on a Boston public station that opened the floodgates. "The French Chef" soared on the amazing performances of the 6-foot-tall ex-housewife.

Her editor continues to work at Knopf, a pile of well-received cookbooks behind her by such luminaries as James Beard, Marion Cunningham, Edna Lewis, Marcella Hazan, Claudia Roden and Lidia Bastianich.

As this memoir shows, Jones is a better editor than writer, inhibited in expressing the tactile and emotional nature of cooking, passed on in pedestrian, at times banal, prose, the kind she would have drawn red marks through.

Present at the creation of the sophistication and expansion of America's culinary character, she wavers unsurely between her personal history and her experiences as the country's major cookbook editor.

The result is too much of the former and not enough of the latter.

Then unwilling, it seems, to publish a book without the kind of work she has being doing for 50 years, Jones includes a collection of old-fashioned and uninteresting recipes.

First Published: December 23, 2007, 10:00 a.m.