The French Menu Cookbook: The Food and Wine of France - Season by Delicious Season. Richard Olney
loomed in my imagination. It was from others that I learned of his charmed life on the herb-scented Provençal 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 a 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 Gauloise cigarettes and a dizzying capacity for wine and spirits, he possessed an acutely discerning palate. This quality was ever-present during our shared moments at the table and is everywhere evidenced in The French Menu Cookbook and in all of his books that followed.
It is a testament to the enduring quality of a book that one can revisit it after thirty years and find it to be in every way as revealing and vital as it was upon first opening it, if not more so. Influence is something that can only be understood fully in retrospect. Re-reading The French Menu Cookbook reminds me of what I was looking for some thirty 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 discovering our passion for food and wine. I had moved away from the pursuit of a career in another art form, music, while Olney had started out as a painter. 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, and the enduring reward 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 fleeting. 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 would reconcile my passion for the elegance of music with 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 and was critical in helping me legitimize my choice to become a chef. In it, I found an artist’s eye for the telling detail and for the beauty of food, and 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 he 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 of this too seriously… it is great fun to make up rules and then disprove them, or attempt to.” Beyond his carefully reasoned approach, and 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 crêpe batter and the point of light but consistent airiness in a mousseline 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 rote 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 the table over the course of the twenty years he lived in France prior to its publication. In this sense it is a culmination. It is also highly personal. We are invited directly into Olney’s life to learn of his culinary initiation in the kitchen of his Iowa home (“the rock on which my church was built”), and the inspiration he gained from reading and practicing Escoffier. We meet his colleagues and the chefs he admired. We venture into 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 nine 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 suspect that at its first publication, 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—lambs’ tripes, pigs’ tails, and calves’ ears 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, must often double as host. The workload of the menus is organized and distributed in such a way as to avoid endless or nerve-wracking last-minute preparations. Apart from its broad and foundation-building message, The French Menu Cookbook is so full of tips and concise practical advice that it should be made an indispensable part of 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 dehydrate 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 onion 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 flame necessary, this regulation will require 15 minutes to ½ hour of turning