Author’s Note: I’m delighted to introduce my old friend Jason Epstein, the author of the brand-new book Eating: A Memoir. Most people know him as a publisher; in fact, his last book was called Book Business. But for those who don’t, he is a genius and groundbreaking editor who invented the quality paperback; co-founded the Library of America and the New York Review of Books; and edited Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal and Vladimir Nabokov, among many other literary stars. When I first met him, he was editorial director of Random House — but I’ve always known him as a cook, as well.

JULIA REED: In your new book, you make the case that the two loves of your life – writing and editing and cooking and eating – are not all that different. Your first chapter, in fact, is called "Cooking Is Storytelling." Where did that title come from?

JASON EPSTEIN: Well, first of all, most publishing work takes place at lunch; occasionally at dinner; very seldom in the office. That’s where all the negotiation and stuff that you have to do to be a publisher occurs. You come into the office at about ten o’clock in the morning, you look at your mail, you read the Wall Street Journal and the Times and then you make a lunch date. 

JULIA: This sounds like a dream job. Are you entirely sure this is still the way it’s going?

JASON: And then you find things to do, or not to do, until 12:30, and off you go; and you come back at 2:30 and it’s time to think about what you’re going to do for the evening. So in that sense, eating and publishing are inseparable. In another sense, a larger sense, cooking and writing are rather alike in that you conceive an end point in both cases. If you want to write a short story or a novel, you think it through to the end, and see how you’re going to get there; and the same thing with a recipe. The other night I made some scallops, and you have to think of how you want to serve those things. I was going to make them with some chopped-up chorizo, a Mexican sausage and some chanterelles, and I wanted to get the dish ready in the afternoon so I could just serve it in the evening. I knew that if I cooked the chanterelles and the chorizo early, they’d be dried up by the time dinner came. So I had to think of a solution for that, and I had to think what I was going to do with scallops themselves. The easiest thing is just to heat them up until they are cooked through. And I didn’t want to have to do that while the guests were there, so I made some adjustments and worked it out. It was rather like doing a story; you’ve got to think of how to get from A to Z.

JULIA: The great thing about the book is that your recipes are not really recipes in the form that most people are used to seeing in a cookbook. You talk people through them, like you just did with me. If you had finished telling me what you’d done to the scallops, that’s almost exactly how it goes in the book. It’s an ingenious way to tell people how to cook because it’s not intimidating. Anybody who’s ever been baffled by some arcane instruction will love you for this, and it’s sort of new approach.

JASON: I like to do it that way. I like to tell people how this event happens. You know, I can’t stop talking once they start asking. 

JULIA: But your recipes are reassuring in a way, because you say, "Well if this doesn’t work, try this," or "If you are afraid of such-and-such, don’t be. It’s what it’s supposed to look like." I mean, we all want that friend looking over our shoulder, and that’s what these instructions feel like.

JASON: You have to think of a lot of things that recipes don’t necessarily tell you. For example, I have a recipe for fried chicken, which is very simple, but you have to start with an amazingly good chicken, otherwise it’s not worth bothering with. And you do it in about three-quarters of an inch of oil, any kind of canola oil. And that leads to potential problems because that oil is very dangerous if you let it splash on yourself and you have to know what to do, how to get that off quickly so it doesn’t leave a mark. If you drop some on the floor it’s very, very slippery; you’ve got to be careful you don’t trip on it. You have to turn the handle away from where you are so you don’t inadvertently bump it and spill oil that way. What do you do if it catches fire? I think you should really know all those things before you start with your fried chicken.