Molly O’Neill, a freewheeling author, born right into a family bent on elevating baseball gamers who might rework herself from a chef into certainly one of America’s leading food chroniclers, died Sunday in Manhattan. She turned into 66.
Her circle of relatives said the reason changed into cancer; her lengthy and public about with the sickness and an advanced liver transplant was, in traditional Molly O’Neill style, going to be the difficulty of her final ebook.
Ms. O’Neill ushered in an era of food writing inside the Nineties that was as plenty approximately journalism as deliciousness, built on the paintings of writers like M. F. K. Fisher, Richard Olney, Elizabeth David, and Craig Claiborne, the previous meals editor of The New York Times.
“I desired to be they all,” she wrote in 2003, “with a slice of Woodward and Bernstein on the aspect.”
Ms. O’Neill, who got here of age when the seeds of the current farm-to-table motion had been planted, has become a keen observer of what she referred to as the “vital tension within the American urge for food,” which to her reflected the conflicts in American culture. It becomes a tension between the refined and the lowbrow, the processed and the natural, “the civilized and the wild,” she wrote in “American Food Writing: An Anthology With Classic Recipes” (2009), which analyzed 250 years of American culinary records.
That ebook built on work she had performed in “The New York Cookbook,” published in 1992. In that ebook, she explored the nooks and crannies of all five five boroughs, bringing lower back testimonies of pierogi makers, grillers of Jamaican jerk chicken, and stirrers of avgolemono soup. She covered 500 recipes from the famous and the individuals who should be well-known, including roast chicken from the town’s 4-star chefs, Katharine Hepburn’s muffins, Edna Lewis’s greens, and Robert Motherwell’s brandade de more.
“For more than 20 years, I tried to tease the excellent from the mundane and to apply the familiar — the sprig of basil, the bottle of olive oil — to usher readers into social, geographic, and cultural worlds where they in any other case won’t cross,” she wrote in The Columbia Journalism Review in 2003.
With American food writing these days together with many voices and cultures, it is simple to neglect that Ms. O’Neill became seeing you earlier than the globe-trotting Anthony Bourdain and the Los Angeles eating place critic Jonathan Gold had been household names, at the least in meals-centric households.
Editor’s Picks
Sea Ranch, California’s Modernist Utopia, Gets an Update
Nazis Killed Her Father. Then She Fell in Love With One.
“This is exactly what Tony Bourdain changed into doing, and no person gave her any credit for it,” stated Ruth Reichl, the writer and former Times eating place critic.
“She celebrated all sorts of chefs and articulated that cooking brings us together,” she introduced. “And she had no prejudice about whether this type of meal changed into something higher than that food.”
Ms. O’Neill regularly wrote the forms of tales that other food writers chased, like a 1992 article for The Times. She discovered that salsa had changed rapidly, making ketchup the king of American condiments.
She wrote, “To the food enterprise, the upward push of salsa symbolizes more than a developing gustatory sophistication. It is the death knell for the cooking ketchup compliments.”
“I just don’t forget reading that salsa piece and trying to shoot myself,” Ms. Reichl stated. “Why didn’t I think about that?”In her later years, Ms. O’Neill committed herself to teaching younger meal writers. She taught classes online, held monthlong summer season retreats and raucous weekend seminars at her property in Rensselaerville, N.Y., and opened her house to different instructors who would possibly need to run a category on the energy of making an awesome pie crust.
