Richard Olney's French Menu Cookbook
A recollection
Every aspiring chef needs at least one mentor. Richard Olney was mine. Before I had the pleasure of meeting him in person, I knew him only through his early books, Simple French Food (1974) and The French Menu Cookbook (1970), both of which influenced me more profoundly than any culinary writing of the time and any I have since encountered. These books occupy my culinary consciousness. Their spirit lives in the spirit of what I do.
It was altogether fortunate that the first publication of The French Menu Cookbook coincided with my awakening as a cook. Without it I would be much less of a cook now, perhaps no cook at all. Some ten years later, my interest in this book became intense. At the time, as new chef of Chez Panisse restaurant, I was responsible for creating the nightly changing prix fixe menu and The French Menu Cookbook seemed addressed personally to me. Olney, a friend to Chez Panisse and guest author of several of its special menus devoted to French wine and food, also instructed me by hand-written notes sent from abroad on several occasions. It was also my honor to cook for Richard several times and his generous estimations of the menus I prepared freshened my confidence and bolstered my pride. I cannot say I knew him well personally and in this respect my relationship with his words and his thinking was, and still is, pure. I like it that way. In my 5-6 encounters with him both here and in France in the later years of his life, I found him to be a man of few words, a surprising revelation given how large his writing loomed in my imagination of the man behind it. It was from others that I learned of his charmed life on the herb-scented Provencal hillside he called his home. Olney had frequent visitors who would often stay for days, sometimes weeks, in thrall to his cooking and the seductions of his cellar. His appearance was as unabashed as his cooking. I am told he received summer guests wearing no more than loincloth. To those who kept his close company, Olney was a curious blend of cultured gentleman and lusty sybarite, a disciplined intellectual with the appetites of a beast. He did not suffer fools or foolishness. He was often irascible. On topics of food and wine he was a brilliant reductionist, caustically opinionated, infuriatingly right. Despite his steady habit of Galloise cigarettes and a dizzying capacity for wine and spirits, he possessed an acutely discerning palate. This fact bears out in my recollection of our shared moments at the table, is everywhere evidenced in The French Menu Cookbook and in all of his books that follow.
It is a testament to the enduring quality of a book that one can revisit it 50 years later and find it to be in every way as revealing, as vital, if not more so. Influence is something that can only be understood fully in retrospect. Re-reading The French Menu Cookbook has reminded me of what I was looking for some years ago when I was struggling to find my way as a chef and what it was that I found in Richard Olney's words. In some important respects, we shared similar sensibilities, perhaps even a parallel path to our shared passion for food and wine. I had moved away from the pursuit of a career in another art form, music, Olney from painting. The transition was not easy for me. While the world of food and wine proved far more accessible and rewarding to my efforts, I missed the quiet intensity, the emotional gratification, the enduring reward, and the slowness in the pursuit of music making. Before my introduction to The French Menu Cookbook, I had worked in a number of local restaurants and had spent a grueling year of restaurant apprenticeship abroad. I knew even after I had landed a more comfortable job at Chez Panisse that I would have to find some higher purpose if I were to sustain the profession and the life. Restaurant cooking was fast, loud, hot, late, dirty, imprecise, exhausting, and joyful. What satisfaction could be had from a day's preparation was sadly perishable. In my worst moments, I viewed the fruit of my hard work, so many beautifully styled plates, reduced to sewage in a matter of hours. I floundered for nearly a decade trying to find the metaphor in cooking that might help bridge the gap between my passion for music and the rough kitchen work that was pulling me strongly. The French Menu Cookbook was the poem that released me from turmoil. It embodied the purpose I sought, was critical in helping me to justify and legitimize my choice to become a chef. In it, I found an artist's eye for the winnowing detail and for the beauty of food, a craftsman's patience with process. Olney’s menus for all seasons and moods were luminous examples of the possibilities for achieving economy and harmony of form. Olney was a classicist yet maintained a relaxed relationship with tradition. Aware of the folly of prescriptions for wine etiquette, menu planning and food pairing, he warned that "one must not take all this too seriously…it is great fun to make up rules and then disprove them or attempt to." Beyond his carefully reasoned approach, the trouble he took to conceive and prepare a meal, was a clear sight of the goal. Food was to be celebrated, raucously enjoyed.
As a writer, Olney forged a melodious, often delicious language that is intimately matched to the sensual language of cooking. His natural powers of description stemmed, I believe, from his own highly developed "tactile" sense, what he considered to be
"a sort of convergence of all the senses--the awareness through touching, and also through smelling, hearing, seeing, and tasting that something is 'just right'--to know by seeing the progression from the light, swelling foam of an initial boil to a flat surface punctuated by tiny bubbles, by hearing the same progression from a soft, cottony, slurring sound to a series of sharp, staccato explosions, by judging from the degree of syrupiness or the smooth, enveloping consistency on a wooden spoon when a reduction has arrived at the point, a few seconds before which it is too thin, a few seconds after which it will collapse into grease or burn; to know by pinching and judging the resilience of a lamb chop or a roast leg of lamb when to remove it from the heat; to recognize the perfect amber of a caramel the second before it turns burnt and bitter; to feel the right fresh-heavy-cream consistency of a crepe batter and the point of light but consistent airiness in a mousselline forcemeat that, having absorbed a maximum of cream to be perfect, would risk collapsing through any further addition…."
This “convergence of the senses” remains the most important lesson I took from The French Menu Cookbook. As Olney emphasizes on nearly every page, exercising one's sensual powers is what the act of cooking really is. By extension, it is just this sort of attention on the part of the cook that lies behind the transforming pleasure of a fine meal, the very noticeable difference between one prepared by a hack recipe follower and a responsive cook. The sensual language of cooking is what I set about to learn and which I still work to refine today.
By Olney's own description The French Menu Cookbook is a "gastronomic manifesto”, a reflection of his life in the kitchen and at table over the course of the twenty years he lived in France prior to its publication. In this sense it is a culmination. The French Menu Cookbook is also highly personal. We are invited directly into Olney's life to learn of his upbringing on an Iowa farm (“the rock on which my church was built”), the inspiration he gained from reading and practicing Escoffier; we meet his colleagues, the chefs he admired and his home kitchen in Provence where he worked, cooked, and received. It will soon be evident to the reader that this is not merely a cookbook but rather a diary of how a uniquely gifted cook lived, thought, and sensed. This sets it apart from better known, if to my mind, less important books of the period. Look to Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Child, Beck and Bertholle originally published four years prior to The French Menu Cookbook and you will find a book of recipes applied to occasions. For Olney, the occasion is the recipe for the meal. And the meal bears the mark of a place, a season, a tradition relived in a resonant, new moment around the table. Set in this broader context, Olney’s recipes are removed from abstraction and find their proper habitat in the aesthetic experience of a meal.
I expect at its publication, that many found The French Menu Cookbook to be a difficult, offbeat book, one that perhaps asked too much of the reader. To be sure Olney proposes no shortcuts, is demanding in his insistence on prime ingredients and is not interested in instructing Americans on the best way to resurrect canned peas if fresh peas are not available. He offers no apologies for his predilection for traditional foods that were, and still are, unappreciated by Americans--lamb tripe, calves’ ears, pig’s tail and brains among others—even in these enlightened times. Nevertheless, the reader is never stranded. Olney offers words of caution when the preparation of a menu might “represent a heavy expenditure that…may not justify the result, no matter how glorious”. Most useful is his sensitivity to the position of the cook who, he understands, also must often double as host. The workload of the menus is organized and distributed in such a way as to avoid endless or nerve-wrecking last-minute preparations. Apart from its broad and foundation-building message The French Menu Cookbook is so full of tips and concise practical advice, it should be made indispensable to any cook’s education. I need only list a few examples to give the flavor:
On roasting peppers:
“A heat that is too intense will char the skins before the flesh becomes soft, one that is too gentle will hydrate the flesh before the skins are loosened.”
On timing:
“…it is far better to wait for a roast partridge than to risk making it wait”.
On the first stages of braising:
“The slightest fragment of onions that remains in the pan at this point will inevitably burn while the meat is coloring and leave a bitter taste in the sauce”.
On adjusting the temperature of the stock pot:
“Even if you are on intimate terms with your stove, unless you are accustomed to this kind of preparation and know the precise intensity of the flame necessary, this regulation will require 15 minutes to ½ hour of turning the fire slightly up or down and rechecking a few minutes later…”
On compatibility:
“Serve the cepes toward the end of the salmis service. They marry very well indeed but the subtlety of each risk being muted by the other’s rich presence. One may, by serving in this way, appreciate them together and enjoy them apart.
On the essentials of menu planning:
“…the only thing to remember is that the palate should be kept fresh, teased, surprised, excited all through the meal. The moment there is danger of fatigue, it must be astonished, or soothed into greater anticipation, until the sublime moment of release when one moves away from the table to relax…”
For those who wish to simply read, imagine, or drool about food The French Menu Cookbook stands as some of the most evocative, lyrical, and informative food writing before or since. You may read with fascination of dishes of a bygone era, such as woodcock soufflé, calf's liver with truffled cepe puree, marinated, rolled boar's belly hung in the chimney to smoke over smoldering olive wood, pike dumplings, of thrushes whose "flesh is as lovely as its song…roasted rare, unemptied but for the gizzard which may be replaced by a juniper berry". Discover how to clean a live sea urchin, draw a crayfish, cool your wine, work a drum sieve; learn that the French distinguish three types of skimming of stocks and sauces; salivate over scrambled eggs with truffles slowed stirred in a bain marie and venison, spit-roasted over a fruitwood fire. What becomes clear in Olney's compelling descriptions of these dishes and techniques is that they are not merely "part of a past mythology" but pertinently real.
Although his influence will probably never be felt as strongly as it was in the 70s and 80s, those formative years of California's awakening to its culinary promise, we should be reminded that it was by Olney's example and his intense convictions that chefs everywhere now respect the seasons, have discovered their own gardens and local farmer's markets, roast in the fireplace, make from scratch, flower their salads, and that by sensing while cooking, have found their art.
Paul, this is a wonderful evocation of Richard and a superb description of everything he meant to you as a cook. I also wrote about him, maybe a year ago, but without your sensitivity, alas. Thank you for this!
Found and bought my copy. So looking forward to this.