Richard Olney, 71

Richard Olney, 71, France Richard Olney New York Times Wednesday, August 4, 1999 Richard Olney, one of the first food writers to introduce the simple joys of French country cooking to American readers as well as chefs like Berkeley's Alice Waters, was found dead yesterday at his home here in Provence. He was 71. Kermit Lynch, a California wine merchant who has a house near Mr. Olney's, said that the writer's gardener found him in bed. Lynch said Mr. Olney had a bout of Lyme disease two years ago but had appeared ``in wonderful shape'' when the two of them last met about a week ago. Mr. Olney lived alone in a simple hillside house near the French port city of Toulon on the Mediterranean. Surrounded by olive trees, the house centered on a kitchen with a large fireplace, a stone sink and collections of books and terrines. He dined in fair weather on a table set under a grape arbor outdoors. His reputation was based on a pair of early books -- the ``French Menu Cookbook'' and ``Simple French Food,'' which appeared in the early 1970s -- and on the Time- Life cookbook series, which he helped to edit. He wrote more than 35 books on food and wine in all, including an autobiography called ``Reflexions,'' which was in the final editing process when he died. John T. Colby Jr., the publisher of Brick House Press, which is producing the memoir, said it would be published in October. Mr. Olney's influence in the culinary profession was profound, although he was not as well-known to the public as Julia Child or Elizabeth David, the English cookery writer with whom he is often compared. Yet his recipes, set out with clinical precision, were within the capacity of any careful cook; they were simple and direct, the polar opposites of the complex formulas typical of French nouvelle cuisine. Mr. Olney's most important disciple was Waters, who keeps a jacket- less, food-stained copy of ``Simple French Food'' in the kitchen of Chez Panisse. It was Mr. Olney who introduced Waters to David, over a three-hour lunch of white truffles, an extravaganza that neither soon forgot. "He lived his life so consciously and purposefully," Waters said yesterday. ``When some people build a stone wall, they think about it for weeks beforehand. Richard spoke that way, wrote that way and cooked that way -- strict, demanding but unpretentious. There are hundreds of great cooks, but not many with his talent and aesthetic sense.'' Born in Marathon, Iowa, Mr. Olney attended the University of Iowa for a time, then spent a while in Paris, financed by his father, before heading for New York. While studying painting at the Brooklyn Museum Art School, he waited on tables at 17 Barrow St., a small restaurant in Greenwich Village. In 1951, at the age of 24, he left the United States for France, and he never moved back. Many saw Mr. Olney as a hermit, but Colby, his publisher, said he kept in constant touch with friends and family in the United States by fax. Among his survivors is a nephew, John, who, to Mr. Olney's great delight, went into the wine business in California, working at Ridge Vineyards in Cupertino.