In the original dust jacket. Board binding the same as the cover.

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For conditions, please view our photographs. A nice clean rare copy from the library gathered by the famous Cambridge Don, computer scientist, food and wine connoisseur, Jack Arnold LANG. Jack founded the Midsummer House, Cambridge’s paramount restaurant. This dining experience is hidden amongst the grassy pastures and grazing cattle of Midsummer Common and perched on the banks of the River Cam.

Jack Lang loved this book which he treated as his personal guide. 

As those who knew him will attest, Francophile and food writer Richard Olney was one of a kind-a writerly cook who had a tremendous influence on American cooking via his well-worn cottage on a hillside in Provence. Born in the Midwest in 1927 and drawn to France at the tender age of twenty-four, Olney was unapologetically attracted to the style, flavors, and tastes of French cooking when most Americans were smitten by the wonders of the new prepared foods in their markets. With unrelenting passion and precision, Olney studied and explored the cuisine, carefully documenting all he had learned for future generations of chefs, cooks, and food lovers. His first of several landmark works, THE FRENCH MENU COOKBOOK, was well ahead of its time with its authentic French recipes and then-unheard-of seasonal approach to cooking. Little did we know then that THE FRENCH MENU COOKBOOK would provide inspiration for Alice Waters and her compatriots as they built the groundwork for a culinary revolution in America. Brimming with the honest and enlightening explanations of how the French really cook and the 150-plus authentic recipes, this book is a masterful resource that is a must for every serious cook.

Review: Looking back to 1970, the year this book was first published, puts its sophistications in context and underscores the enormity of its contributions. America was deep in culinary ignorance, eating out of cans and supplementing that metal-tinged blandness with gut-busting mountains of artificial ‘foods’. America was lost somewhere between the post-war meat-and-potatoes era and the chemical concoctions of the 80s and beyond. Small glimmers of possibility illuminated the occasional suburban cocktail party, when hostesses under the influence of Julia Child trotted out a few hotel-food hors d’oeuvres, and a few ethnic enclaves still held up a candle of flavor, but America was largely a culinary wasteland. Servings were large, everything was bland, and mealtime had become TV time. Without flavor or family, American meals were effectively dead. It was into this lunar food landscape that Richard Olney introduced several revolutionary ideas at once in The French Menu Cookbook. I should say that he re-introduced these ideas, because they had existed, with varying degrees of sophistication, for as long as people had eaten, but an industrial food system had interrupted that great cultural memory. This book’s structure is its message: the food is introduced not by category, but by course within menus, and the menus themselves are organized by season. For those of us who have heard the gospel of seasonality and regional availability and freshness from Alice Waters and Paul Bertolli, at al, it can be easy to forget that this idea is still, 36 years after The French Menu Cookbook, radical, and so against the grain of the industrial food complex as to be almost an act of treason. But Richard Olney’s way with food started that revolution at possibly the most inopportune moment in American history.

Richard Olney (April 12, 1927 – August 3, 1999) was an American painter, cook, food writer, editor, and memoirist, best known for his books of French country cooking. Olney was born in Marathon, Iowa. He lived in a house above the village of Solliès-Toucas in Provence, France, for most of his adult life, where he wrote many classic and influential cookbooks of French country cooking. He had first moved to France in 1951, to Paris, where he was close friends with (and painted many of) the American and English bohemian expatriate set, including James Baldwin, filmmaker Kenneth Anger, painter John Craxton, poet John Ashbery, and composer Ned Rorem. His knowledge of traditional classic French food and wine got him a job writing a column entitled Un Américain (gourmand) à Paris for the journal Cuisine et Vins de France beginning in 1962. After The French Menu Cookbook was published in English in 1970, his then-revolutionary approach of seasonal menus and close attention to wine pairings began to attract notice in Britain and America. Alice Waters, of Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkeley, California, and Kermit Lynch, the Berkeley wine writer and retailer, were both disciples. He introduced Lynch to many French wine growers, including Lucien and Lulu Peyraud of Domaine Tempier, who were then re-establishing the Bandol AOC as a vineyard area of the first rank. James Beard was an important American mentor, and Olney, in the midst of his career, taught a series of cooking classes in Beard’s West Village apartment. Despite this, Olney, in a memoir, presents a mixed picture of Beard’s character.

From 1977 to 1982, Olney edited the 28-volume Time-Life book series The Good Cook. By the time of his death, from heart failure, in addition to the Time-Life set he had written many of his own books about food and wine. His last book, Reflexions, a memoir, was published posthumously by Brick Tower Press. Olney died aged 72 in Solliès-Toucas. The Observer Food Monthly panel of chefs, cooks, writers and restaurateurs elected The French Menu Cookbook as their favourite cookbook in early 2010, but were saddened that it was very difficult to find. Since then the book has been republished.