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Richard Olney was born in Iowa in 1927 and went to Paris in 1951 to become a painter. He remained in France for the rest of his life and died there in 1999.
In 1961 he bought a stone house on a hillside above Solliès-Toucas in Provence. It had neither electricity nor running water, and he built the terraces, garden and wine cellar himself. It was in that kitchen, over wood and a small gas flame, that the food in this book was cooked.
The simple in the title does not mean easy in the sense of quick. It means unadorned. Throughout the book, Olney argues against embellishment and in favour of understanding what you are doing, and the recipes are embedded in continuous prose rather than set out beneath a heading with an ingredients list. You read your way to them.
The contents are organised by type rather than by meal. Soups, salads, eggs, pasta and gnocchi, fish, meat and desserts, with a vegetable section that is strikingly substantial for a French book from 1974 and points directly towards the way people cook today. His gratins are what he is best known for. There are also notes on wine throughout, because Olney was at least as serious about wine as he was about food. There are no photographs at all, which was normal for the period but worth knowing if you are expecting a book to look through.
As far as is known, he was the only American to write for Cuisine et Vins de France, and he was the editor behind Time-Life's 27-volume series The Good Cook. That is one reason why his way of thinking spread far beyond this book.
Format: Hardback
Number of pages: 352
Language: English
First published: 1974
The Kitchen Lab Selection
Olney shaped the thinking of the Chez Panisse circle and, indirectly, the entire American ingredient-led movement. A book with that kind of legacy is worth reading regardless of how unassuming it looks. It did not have the greatest impact on the Farm to Table movement, but it is one of the reasons that movement was able to develop in the first place. We should add that it is not an entirely easy read. There is a chance you will give up after ten minutes, but you may just as easily find yourself rereading it every winter for twenty years. It tends to be one or the other, with very little in between.
