Cookbook Author Richard Olney Dies

Richard Olney, the expatriate Iowan who helped introduce a generation of Americans cooks to real French cooking, died Monday at age 73.

The author of “Simple French Cooking” and “The French Menu Cookbook,” as well as many others, was a prime force in educating the cooks who launched the Bay Area foodie revolution in the 1960s, the revolution that helped create California cuisine.

Olney, a frustrated artist, moved to France in 1951. Except for a brief period later in that decade, he never really left the country again. Famously curmudgeonly, Olney lived alone in the South of France in a rustic hillside house.

His books are treasured for their uncompromising recipes and exact, piquant writing. They praise French food as it always has been--earthy, deeply flavored and richly varied--rather than the intellectualized versions offered by three-star chefs or the tame stuff passed off by lesser writers.

“Why don’t I give an alternative of frozen food with this or that, as some of my editors ask?” he asked in a 1995 interview with former Times food editor Laurie Ochoa. “I know the reader is going to cheat if he wants to, but I’m not going to encourage it.”