The Olney way to go

My sister-in-law recently returned from europe. she very kindly brought me a present, which I adore. It is a cookbook written by richard olney titled Lulu’s Provencal Table.

Richard Olney has been somewhat of a food hero of mine for as long as I have been interested in food. In fact, the first cookbook I bought was a book edited by him; Terrines, Pates and Galantines. I purchased it in the early 1980s while at Melbourne University. I should have been studying economics, but this book was far more interesting. It was a hardback and covered the basics of transforming meat and game into the most wonderful looking pates and terrines.

Looking back, I could not have chosen a more inappropriate book to start a culinary career. There was no doubt it was inspirational, but the techniques were advanced and way beyond the sort of cooking I had attempted. Most of the recipes required ingredients that were almost impossible to find – duck livers, pork fat, caul, venison just to name a few. The dishes were cooked in a terrine mould that was not readily available at that time.

Thirty years on and the explosion in cooking has meant most of those items are now quite easy to find. The store I frequented in Melbourne for terrine dishes and moulds was Scullerymade in High Street Malvern. It opened its doors in 1978 and is still going strong. I used to window shop its marvellous copper moulds and cooking utensils mainly imported from France. What I didn’t know at the time was much of what excited me about cooking came from Provence and was written about extensively by Richard Olney in the 1970s.

Born in Marathon, Iowa, Olney was educated at Iowa University and the Brooklyn Museum Art School in New York. In 1951 he moved to Paris to pursue a career as a painter. His passion, however, was always food. He bought a small, dilapidated house above the village of Solliès-Toucas that he restored over many years. At the same time he taught cooking, wrote on food and wine and produced his masterpiece, Simple French Food in 1974. He lived a solitary life without radio, television or computer but was incredibly well connected to most of France’s greatest winemakers and restaurateurs. He died in 1999, leaving a legacy of classical food and wine writing gastronomic feast for the senses.