The Olney Table : Richard Olney’s Quiet Revolution

“A dreary old cliche has it that ‘one should eat to live and not live to eat.’ It is typical that this imbecile concept, a deliberately fruitless paradox born of the puritan mind, should deny sensuous reaction at either pole, and it is fortunate that neither pole really exists, for man is incapable of being either altogether dumbly bestial or altogether dumbly mental.’ ”

--Richard Olney, “Simple French Food”

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At Berkeley’s Chez Panisse, the table closest to the kitchen is the best one in the house. Of course, the kitchen is probably the most beautiful in America, dramatically spot-lit, with a center display of rustic loaves and seasonal produce, not to mention the hearth fire that casts a burnished glow on the sharp cheekbones of the staff.

Tonight, more than other nights, all eyes are on that table. The guests of honor are so important that Alice Waters herself has taken a seat at this table, here in her own restaurant where after twenty-some years in business she may only be seen during mealtimes on certain days of the week--almost never on a busy Friday night. There is Kermit Lynch, the Berkeley wine merchant who made rustic French wine chic, paying homage to his close friends as well. And all around the dining room are patrons who have each put up $75 for the privilege of catching a glimpse of the celebrated cookbook author Richard Olney and the subject of his latest book, Lulu Peyraud, who may be the best-known home cook in France. In this small world, Olney is bigger than Clint Eastwood.

Outside this room, however, not everyone is a fan.

Some people complain that Richard Olney is a curmudgeon.

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“Why are cookbooks so bad?” he asks a few days later in Los Angeles, over a plate of braised tripe. “They’re written by mindless and illiterate people.”

Some people complain that Richard Olney is elitist.

“Why don’t I give an alternative of frozen food with this or that, as some of my editors ask? I know the reader is going to cheat if he wants to, but I’m not going to encourage it.”

Nevertheless, some people insist that Richard Olney might be the greatest cookbook author America has ever produced. “Richard Olney is a cook’s cook,” wrote Alice Waters when the revised version of his first work, “The French Menu Cookbook,” was released. “(He) is someone who truly lives what he believes.”

“This most talented author’s approach to cooking amounts to a new and complete philosophy of food,” wrote “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” co-author Simca Beck.

” . . . a foodie hero,” wrote Paul Levy in, well, “The Official Foodie Handbook.”

Julia Child may be more famous, M.F.K. Fisher more literary, James Beard more legendary and Irma Rombauer more precise, but Olney is the Karl Marx of the new American cooking, the expatriate theorist who revolutionized the way the best American chefs think about food.

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And what food he presents: vegetable gratins made with quarts of cream, meats roasting in the fireplace, braised game birds and stuffed cabbages, beef Bourguignon --beef Bourguignon !--to which no others can really be compared, onion puddings and carrot puddings, filling bread soups and baked eggs, and master instructions for sauteing meat and poultry that are less a recipe, really, than a whole way of life.

Olney imposes both spontaneity and order on his cooking. He seems incapable of writing so much as an introduction to a simple endive recipe without suggesting half a dozen other ways in which the vegetable may be cooked, practically an open-ended novella.

Among cookbook writers, Olney alone seems to seems to mourn the fact that in choosing one possibility one is, of necessity, abandoning all the others; he alone seems to long for the life of the sort of person who might subsist on a dish he describes.

“(The potato-leek soup) that is prepared night after night in the kitchens of nearly every Parisian concierge . . . carries within it always the message of well-being,” he says in “Simple French Cooking,” “and, were my vice and my curiosity more restrained, I too would adore to eat it every day of my life.”

It may seem like ancient history in 1995, but no American cookbook writer until Olney had bothered to esteem honest peasant cooking, French hearth cooking, over the cuisine of the toqued aristocracy (though it should be said that Olney’s recipes are hardly humble). “Simple French Food” may have been the “Communist Manifesto” of the culinary revolution that took hold in the late ‘70s.

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In the post-Olney world, home cooks no longer feel obliged to follow recipes down to the last pinch of oregano--Olney encourages improvisation. No longer must a restaurant chef feel she is obligated to serve retreads of classic French cuisine in order to be taken seriously. Fewer and fewer people identify themselves as gourmets these days; they are food lovers instead. The ideal now seems less the chandeliered Paris three-star than the rough, tree-canopied wood table somewhere in Provence. Fresh ingredients are more important than fresh ideas.

Certainly these changes would have happened without him, but Olney’s words gave shape to the frenzy of activity already in progress.

“ ‘Simple French Food,’ ” wrote John Thorne in his similarly titled but very different “Simple Cooking,” “is one of a very short list of books that makes us think cooking through the sheer artful force of its example. Like a poem, it affects us with the impact of actual presence, shoving us mercilessly toward revelation.”

Later, in “Outlaw Cook,” Thorne wrote, “ ‘Simple French Food’ is one of our great cookbooks, a match of sensibility and subject so perfect that even when we go to it for no more than a recipe, it is impossible not to linger awhile in its company--the prose inviting, the author’s love and mastery of his subject endlessly compelling.”

Olney’s is a hard influence to shake once it takes hold.

“To me he represents an uncompromising attitude toward food,” Waters told one reporter. “We’ve tried to follow in his footsteps (here at Chez Panisse). If you buy lovely tomatoes, you just slice them. If you get the wrong ones you are constantly trying to doctor them.”

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Buying the right tomatoes--the freshest seasonal ingredients--then leaving them alone for the most part, is what Olney’s cooking is all about. It’s also what’s best about the New American cooking so prevalent now--the Urban Rustic aesthetic that can be traced back to Alice Waters in Berkeley.

“It was once written in the New Yorker that I was the granddaddy of California Cuisine,” says Olney, “but I don’t know what California Cuisine is.”

That may be Olney’s way of saying, don’t blame him for the atrocities of the revolution, like that kiwi vinaigrette on your plate--he wouldn’t touch the stuff himself.

“Nouvelle cuisine,” Olney says, his head of close-cropped hair shaking in disgust as he rides in the back seat of the BMW that whisks him to a radio interview, “is the pretension of presentation and has nothing to do with flavor.”

Pleading ignorance seems to be something of a hobby for Olney. He says it was five years after the publication of his first book that he realized he had a loyal following in this country.

“I arrived in San Francisco during a promotional tour for ‘Simple French Food’ to do a demonstration at Williams-Sonoma,” he remembers, “and the place was packed with young restaurant people who told me they idolized me. I had no idea. I’m not a professional cook and I never intended to make a big thing of writing. One never knows how this sort of thing happens.”

But one can trace a history.

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Olney grew up in northwestern Iowa, seemingly predisposed toward cookery. “I’ve always had a passion for the table,” he says. “No one could keep me out of the kitchen when I was a child.”

His hometown was the sort of place where farmers would hire all the local kids to go out to the fields with sacks and take all the bugs off the crops. “We’d get a penny or so for every sack,” Olney remembers. “I think I got enough once to buy a tropical fish for my aquarium.”

He attended the University of Iowa, but that was his father’s idea. Young Olney wanted to be a painter; he got himself to New York and its museums as quickly as he could.

He ended up waiting tables in Greenwich Village, at a restaurant located in a former stable. Old Chianti bottles held melting candles and were scattered all around; Piaf records were played almost constantly.

“The waiters and waitresses were mostly artists or writers and we pretended to be European,” Olney says. “I don’t think restaurants like that exist anymore--too innocent.”

In 1951, Olney made it to France.

Most people don’t prepare for their first trip to Europe by memorizing Escoffier, but Olney did. “Only in translation,” he protests.

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He intended to spend three to four years wandering the continent, like any other artistically minded young man. He stayed much longer.

At first he lived in a small Paris hotel. Then he found an apartment in the suburbs. “It was very chic,” Olney recalls, “in a very old house dated from 1820 and surrounded by a garden. I decided I couldn’t leave France.”

But in 1957 he had to leave--he’d run out of money.

“I came back to New York and spent two years selling books at Doubleday on 5th Avenue, painting portraits and decorating big apartment houses with false marble so I could save enough money to get back. I used to have nightmares that I’d never get back.”

What was it he missed?

“There are as many idiots in France as there are anyplace else,” Olney says, “but I like the spirit of the people--there’s a little wickedness, you know? And as far as the South of France is concerned, I love the light, I love the landscape, I love the odors in the air.”

Upon his return, Olney set about finding a house in Provence. He bought what he calls “a total ruin” in 1962, spent his summers fixing the place up and moved in permanently in 1966. “She’s still an old wreck, but it impresses everyone,” he says. “I’ve lived there year-round ever since.”

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Meanwhile, as Olney found himself doing less and less painting on canvas, he began writing about food. It started out as a joke. Friends and acquaintances who knew his cooking had been after him to start a restaurant.

“Ridiculous,” he told them. “I’m temperamentally unsuited to that nervous pressure.”

Then the co-founder of the magazine Cuisine Vin France thought it would be amusing to have an American write about food for the French. “I thought I’d write a couple of articles and the joke would be finished,” Olney says. “I mean, I don’t think writing about food sharpens one’s appreciation for the table.

“Well, I wrote for years and years and received vast quantities of fan mail in response to these monthly articles in which I presented a menu, recipes and a choice of wine,” Olney continues. “Simon & Schuster asked me to write a book based on that concept and that’s how “The French Menu Cookbook” came about. Not so long after its publication, Atheneum asked me to write another book that turned out to be “Simple French Food.”

That book had a profound effect on the food world, apparently influencing cookbook authors without their knowledge. In 1983, The Washingtonian broke the amazing story that caused a national cookbook scandal. It was alleged that Richard Nelson used 39 recipes from “Simple French Food” in his “Richard Nelson’s American Cooking” without attribution, even mimicking Olney’s turns of phrase. (It seems American and French cooking have more in common than most people think.)

Olney then did what up to then was considered unthinkable: He sued. (Publishers don’t like to sue other publishers, so Olney got his own lawyer.) Six months later, Olney settled for an undisclosed amount and publication of Nelson’s book was stopped without any admission of wrongdoing.

Olney was happy. “We wanted to make a strong statement that would alert publishers that cookbook writers weren’t trifles,” he told The Washington Post just after the ruling.

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Still, that wasn’t Olney’s longest-lived adventure in the publishing world. After the success of “Simple French Food,” Time-Life asked Olney to put together a new series of cookbooks called “The Good Cook.”

It took some cajoling, but Olney, after being tricked into trips to London and essentially conceiving the series, finally agreed. That’s when the fighting began.

“I wanted to do a genuine teaching series,” Olney says. “They wanted to pretend it was a teaching series with a lot of recipes for people to follow. I would go into the kitchen and start inventing and they couldn’t stand it. They had no faith.

“Of course, I got along very well with everybody in London because they were with me all the time. I had my researchers, the photographers adored me, and the chief European editor, who became a very close friend, learned how to cook. I was always giving wine tasting lessons to the researchers and writers and so forth in the studio, as if I was running a school.

“But the American editors on this side, in Alexandria, were making trouble all the time. They wanted me to do a dry run of everything we were shooting. We never would have got any books published--I had to produce a book every two months. And the creativity is in the first run. Do a dry run and it’s dead.”

Another problem for Olney, the Time-Life editors didn’t want Olney to create any original recipes for the series. Everything had to come from a previously published source.

But Olney’s friend and fellow food writer Alan Davidson had a clever solution.

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“I asked (Richard),” Davidson wrote in “On Fasting and Feasting,” a collection of food essays he edited, “ ‘What would happen if a new journal on food history were to be published--perhaps one issue only--in which some of these “missing” recipes were published, just the way you want them, in fact written by you under a pseudonym?’ He pondered. ‘Well, I guess that would solve the problem.’ ”

That marked the beginning of the career of a little-known food writer named Nathan d’Aulnay, and the start of the still-ongoing journal, Petits Propos Culinaires.

“They’re lucky that I’m mean and stubborn,” Olney says.

“Finally,” he continues, “after the first eight or 10 volumes the editors realized they had a success on their hands and then they stopped making trouble for me.”

Still, the schedule was almost impossible. “I’d spend two weeks in France, two weeks in London, and so on back and forth. When I was in London I didn’t have time to correct copy; I was in kitchens all the time. When I was at home, they installed one of the first fax machines in my place. It was a huge thing, the size of a refrigerator; it honked all night long. About 2 o’clock in the morning 100 pages of copy would come through. The next morning, I’d spend the day correcting copy and sending it back. That would go to Alexandria where they would pose all sorts of questions that would come back to me and I’d correct again.

“It was a very exciting thing to have done, but it gave me ulcers.”

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It also took Olney out of circulation for a time. Twelve years passed between “Simple French Food” and the next Olney book, this one a wine book called simply “Yquem.”

Perhaps this added to his reputation--he was the elusive American lost in the South of France, living, most imagined, the carefree lifestyle so many fantasize about when Provence inhabits their daydreams.

Late last year, Olney came out with an absolutely charming book documenting the life and cooking of Lulu Peyraud, wife of the owner of one of Provence’s greatest wineries, Domaine Tempier, in Bandol. Where “Simple French Food” reinterpreted “ la cuisine de bonne femme ,” elevating the status of French home cooking, “Lulu’s Provencal Table” pays homage to one of its greatest practitioners, making her food accessible through the warmth of her personality as expressed by Olney.

Even now, however, Olney says he almost feels guilty writing recipes, especially those of an intuitive cook like Peyraud. “It robs the preparation of the spirit, somehow,” he says.

“I don’t think I have a wonderful palate anymore,” he then says out of the blue. “Experience of eating has replaced sensitivity. It’s a great loss, but at 30 one has a better palate than at 65 or 70.”

Twenty-five years after his first book was published, one thinks back on the painting career Olney once aspired to.

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“Undoubtedly I would be more well-known as a painter if I hadn’t done the books,” he says. “The last show I had was in 1961 in New York and my dealer was furious with me because I didn’t come over for the opening.

“If I had continued to have shows regularly, to paint regularly, certainly I would have had a career in painting.

“But painting is something you do with blinders, like writing. Only dentists can be Sunday painters--I’ve been under pressure for 30 years on one project or another. It would only frustrate me to paint a little picture once every two months. At the moment, I write.

“Perhaps I’ve screwed up my life,” he concludes. “But perhaps I’ve done something pretty valuable too.”

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The Books of Richard Olney

1970, “The French Menu Book” (Simon & Schuster), revised 1985, (David R. Godine)

1974, “Simple French Food” (Atheneum)

1977-83, “The Good Cook” series of Time-Life cookbooks (27 volumes)

1986, “Yquem” (David R. Godine)

1988, “Ten Vineyard Lunches” (Interlink Publishing)

1991, “Romanee-Conti” (Flammarion)

1993, “Provence the Beautiful Cookbook” (Collins)

1994, “Lulu’s Provencal Table” (HarperCollins)

* Recipes, H12