In this photo, probably from the 1970s, Richard Olney stands in the kitchen of the farmhouse he restored in Solliès-Toucas, France, about an hour east of Marseille. He built the hearth behind him with his brothers Byron and James. “It was that sort of Midwest ethic,” Byron’s daughter Liz Olney Arms said. She described the brothers as the kind of people who simply knew how to build things. Photo courtesy of Liz Olney Arms
Writer: Wini Moranville
Julia Child, James Beard, M.F.K. Fisher. If you’re a food enthusiast, you’re likely familiar with most of those names.
But Richard Olney? Unless you’ve delved deeply into culinary history, the name might not land. Yet if you cook with an eye toward the seasons and the freshest, most local ingredients you can find — or seek out restaurants that do — he has likely shaped your food life as much as, if not more than, any of those better-known culinary luminaries. Born in tiny Marathon 100 years ago, his work in the late midcentury helped spark a revolution in American cooking that began in California and soon spread far beyond.
Alice Waters, who pioneered New American cooking in the 1970s and ’80s with her Berkeley restaurant Chez Panisse, wrote that early in her career, Olney’s “French Menu Cookbook” “articulated precisely what we were struggling to demonstrate. … It reminded us that we had much to learn, and it gave us courage by confirming our implausibly high standards.”
Chef and cookbook author Paul Bertolli, who helmed Chez Panisse as executive chef for a decade, has written, “It was altogether fortunate that the first publication of [Olney’s] ‘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.”
Former New York Times restaurant critic Ruth Reichl has called Olney an inspiration to nearly every good cook of her generation. He even appears as a character in her recent book, “The Paris Novel.”
All this, about a man from a small town in northwest Iowa.
Born on April 12, 1927, the son of the town’s banker who was also a lawyer, Olney left Marathon to study painting at the University of Iowa but soon moved to France, supported by a modest allowance from his father.
He arrived in Paris in 1951, when a small sum could support a struggling artist, albeit one who lived in an $18-a-month room he later described as “banal and badly lit.” On the Left Bank, he found his artistic community and a place that was probably more welcoming to a young gay man than the midcentury Midwest. He later moved to the working-class suburb of Clamart, where, in an artist’s garret with a tiny kitchen, he often cooked for his crowd, as he had for his family since his childhood in Iowa. His mother, with eight children to raise, had welcomed her son’s experiments in the kitchen.
In Clamart, Olney’s simple pot-au-feu, a classic of French home cooking, earned him a seat at France’s grand dining tables. He prepared the dish for a friend, a writer for the prestigious magazine Cuisine et Vins de France who later raved about it in print, deeming Olney’s version the best of his life. “My pot-au-feu became famous in French gastronomic circles,” Olney wrote in his memoir, “Reflexions.”
Olney later started writing for Cuisine et Vins himself, penning a column called “Un American (Gourmand) à Paris.” His writing showcased profound insights into French gastronomy and gained him entrée into France’s most influential food and wine circles. Chefs and winemakers soon became part of his entourage.
Beginning in the early 1960s, Olney restored a ruined farmhouse in Provence, near the town of Solliès-Toucas, decades before Peter Mayle’s bestseller “A Year in Provence” made it every Francophile’s dream to do the same. Though it always remained rustic, Olney lived there the rest of his life and welcomed family and friends to his generous table year after year, often cooking the freshest food he could grow, forage or find locally, accompanied by wines he’d source from his wine-tasting trips.
When he began writing cookbooks for the American market in the 1970s, Olney’s groundbreaking shift was the insistence that “one can only eat marvelously by respecting the seasons.” Such a focus may seem second nature today, but it was a revelation at the time. This was before the widespread resurgence of local farmers markets, before CSAs and long before a multitude of chefs everywhere started paying attention to the seasons and listing the names of producers and farmers on their menus.
Before Olney, Americans had been dazzled by the style of food served in fussy formal dining rooms: dishes smothered in heavy sauces, crêpes that were ostentatiously and needlessly flambéed and meats cloaked in pastry — cooking Olney deemed “the presentation and complication of the false.” He argued instead for uncomplicated food that let fresh, in-season ingredients speak for themselves. A different vision of great cooking began to take hold.
Olney’s reach extended into the home as well. As chief consultant to “The Good Cook,” a popular Time-Life collection of 28 cookbooks, he helped steer home cooks back toward handcrafted, ingredient-driven food at a time when convenience cooking had become entrenched in American kitchens. The books became a trusted reference for food editors.
“It was a great series,” Nancy Byal, who retired as executive food editor at Better Homes and Gardens, told ia magazine. “We used these books for research and information.”
But how much can Iowans really claim Olney as one of our own? After all, the French discovered him first, and all his big successes happened when he lived in France.
And yet, it’s possible that Olney became a force in the culinary world not in spite of his Iowa upbringing, but in part because of it. Olney’s father, the small-town banker who prayed nightly at the table, supported his artist son’s move to Europe. As Olney’s brother Byron later recalled in Justin Spring’s exceptional biography, “The Gourmand’s Way: Six Americans in Paris and the Birth of a New Gastronomy” — which traces the intertwined lives of Olney, Julia Child, M.F.K. Fisher, Alice B. Toklas and other Americans who helped reshape postwar food culture while living in France — “Mother and Father were intelligent, educated, and tolerant people,” and both father and son shared “a recognition of the importance of knowing oneself and living accordingly.”
Growing up in rural Iowa also gave him a healthy respect for hard work along with the know-how and self-reliance to build and fix things. Never afraid to get his hands dirty, he did much of the restoration of his farmhouse himself, sometimes with the help of his brothers, sometimes with local artisans, including a mason who accepted the job provided Olney carried the cement, sand and gravel up the steep footpath. He pruned trees, he gardened, he foraged for food, he built a kitchen hearth, a wine cellar and an aviary.
As Olney’s brother James once wrote in a letter quoted in “The Gourmand’s Way,” “You could take Richard out of Marathon, but you could never take Marathon out of Richard.”
Far from being the storied expatriate American who cuts ties with all things back home, Olney was devoted to his family. He kept in touch with frequent letters. His brothers and sisters, and later nephews and nieces, visited him nearly every summer. “The most beautiful time of year is when I’m with my family,” he wrote in a letter to his brother Byron the spring before Richard died.
Another enduring connection to Iowa was through food itself. On the first page of his first book, “The French Menu Cookbook,” Olney writes:
“The rock on which my church was built was the provincial kitchen of my home in Iowa — not too bad a background, in as much as I grew up at a time when eggs were still fresh, Jersey milk was unpasteurized and half cream, chickens were from the back yard, packaged cake mixes and frozen foods were unknown, and garden fruits and vegetables were eaten in their proper seasons.”
Olney recognized what was great about French home cooking — seasonality and simplicity — because he’d already tasted it in Iowa. His gift was to remind readers that these virtues could illuminate anyone’s cooking, anywhere.
Why, then, is Olney not more widely known? It didn’t help that he could be, in the words of Paul Bertolli, “caustically opinionated, infuriatingly right.” That combination was unlikely to win him friends among the culinary cognoscenti of his time. His memoir includes harsh judgments of some of his popular contemporaries. About Julia Child, he wrote to a colleague, “The fact that she’s a television star doesn’t mean she knows how to cook.” On M.F.K. Fisher, he wrote to his brother James, “She remains sweet but is essentially empty-headed, has no palate … and her writing is silly, pretentious drivel.” He even goes so far as to accuse James Beard of passing off Olney’s recipes as Beard’s own.
Furthermore, Olney didn’t seem to chase fame. Though he traveled often for work and book tours, the life he chronicled most lovingly was the one he built on a hillside in France, especially when family and friends gathered around his table. Indeed, largely unspoken but profoundly felt throughout Olney’s writings is a sense that beautiful food and fine wines mean nothing unless shared with those you cherish.
His brother James described the last meal Richard shared with five of his siblings as an “atmosphere of euphoria, of well-being and joy at being all together at last.”
Two weeks later, in the summer of 1999 — just a few days before his death on Aug. 3 — Olney wrote to a friend, “My summer is over. Family and friends have left.”
After a life spent helping to reshape the way America cooks, his thoughts returned to the family and friends he’d gathered around a table brimming with simple, seasonal food — constants in a life that took him from Marathon to Paris to the south of France. He never lost the thread.
Richard Olney with niece Liz in Vicenza, Italy, in 1971. According to family recollections, when Richard visited, Liz would wake from her afternoon naps and immediately run to find him. Photo courtesy of Liz Olney Arms
Richard Olney takes a photo during a visit to Marathon in 1974 to celebrate his parents’ 50th anniversary, while his father, a banker and lawyer, looks on with fondness. “I think my grandparents weren’t quite sure who this son of theirs was,” Richard’s niece Liz Olney Arms said. “But they were very supportive.”
Richard cooks for his family in Solliès-Toucas in 1993. “Cooking was just part of who he was,” recalled Olney Arms, who remembers him as an intuitive cook who wasn’t overly particular or precise. He chose ingredients that looked good and trusted they would taste good.
An undated self-portrait. “Richard was an artist in his soul,” his niece said. “Whether that was painting or drawing or writing or cooking, those were all facets of the same artistry.”
Wini Moranville has covered the Des Moines dining scene since 1997. She currently reports on local restaurants and food finds on her Substack, Dining Well in Des Moines. She is also the author of the memoir “Love Is My Favorite Flavor: A Midwestern Dining Critic Tells All” and the cookbook “Everyday French Cooking.”
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