Julie, an only child, earned her bachelor’s and then, in 1977, her master’s degree, both from Juilliard.
Unfortunately, “When I got out of Juilliard, the day I graduated, I knew I was never going to play the piano again,” she says without a hint of regret.
“I hated giving piano lessons," she explains, admitting she lacked the patience necessary to work with the young and not necessarily talented. Also, she had no illusions about her own pianistic gifts. "I knew I was never going to be a concert pianist, because as good as I was, there was better.”
PHOTOS: From top, chocolate raspberry truffle cake, key lime blueberry tarts, coconut cream pie. And Julie Jacobson.
Julie’s mother, in addition to being a trained pianist, was a skilled linguist. Again the daughter headed in a related direction.
“I was always encouraged to do what interested me,” she says, so after Juilliard she enrolled at Fordham University and earned a second Bachelor’s Degree, this one preparing her to teach Latin.
But finding no jobs in education, she ended up working for many years in retail at Bloomingdale’s and Saks Fifth Avenue. No sense of destiny fulfilled there.
Inspiration finally came from the place she least expected.
For over 60 years, her maternal grandparents had owned and operated the Quality Market on South Street in Morristown. Her father and Aunt worked there, selling everything from meat and produce to blankets and pillows.
Julie spent her youth in the store, helping with delivery orders, and adding up customer’s accounts on the back of brown paper bags. Mostly, though, she hung out, doing her homework. She loved getting to know the regular customers, and she loved being surrounded by the bounteous displays of fresh fruits and vegetables.
“The store was ‘locavore’ before we even knew the word,” she says. "They sold fruit and eggs from a farm in Basking Ridge. It was always the freshest and best.”
“My grandparents wanted me to do anything but food," she says. "They had done it all their lives–that’s how I ended up at Juilliard."
Ironically, leaving the nest that her family’s literal mom-and-pop market represented, only brought her closer to discovering how much she loved food. Manhattan was teeming with good restaurants of every description.
“Eating out became an Olympic Sport!" she says with a laugh. "It should have been for college credit."
After all this time, she had never even turned on an oven. But somewhere inside her a pilot light was glowing. Perhaps it had been lit all those years when she hung out in the store, thinking her mind was 100 percent absorbed in a book.
On nothing but a whim, she says, she enrolled in the six-month program at The New York Restaurant School.
After an apprenticeship at Le Relais restaurant, she went called on restaurants, toting samples of her baked goods and landed a, so to speak, plum 2-year contract to bake her blueberry tarts for George Lang’s famed Café des Artistes in Manhattan.
With that feather in her cap, the family made room for a kitchen in the back of the market and cleared a display area in front for Jacobson to sell her pies, cakes, cookies and tarts.
In the 1990s, as her grandmother aged, it finally became necessary to close the Morristown store. The location now houses multiple businesses, including Guerriero’s Ristorante and David Todd’s City Tavern.
After going through a divorce, Jacobson moved her baking business to a commercial kitchen in Monmouth County. There she attracted a number of restaurant clients, including, Jimmy’s in Asbury Park and The Buttered Biscuit in Deal.
She describes her style of baking as using the best ingredients to make “something that is not highly decorated, not overly sweet … something your mother might have made.”
At this time of year, Jacobson’s phone begins ringing with orders for apple pies, blueberry-key lime tarts, cheesecakes, and her signature coconut pie, “which basically put me on the map at the Shore,” she says. The recipe, adapted from a cake she had loved as a child, “is light and fluffy, and no one realizes how fattening it really is. It’s truly a guilty pleasure.”
Jacobson, 58, now provides delectable baked goods to restaurants and private clients. “I’ve found my bliss in baking!” she says.
Lest it all sound too blissful, know that Julie works seven days a week, including weekends, as a Locator Coordinator for Saks. That way she retains her benefits, medical as well as fashion.”It’s worth it,” she says. “I love clothes and shoes, so the combo doesn’t get any better!”
SUZANNE ZIMMER LOWERY is a food writer, pastry chef and culinary instructor at a number of New Jersey cooking schools. Find out more about her at suzannelowery.com.