Molly O'Neill, the food writer who "would transform herself from a chef into one of America's leading chroniclers of food," as the New York Times put it, died June 16. She was 66 and had cancer.
"She came of age when the seeds of the modern farm-to-table movement were being planted, became a keen observer of what she called the 'essential tension in the American appetite,' which to her mirrored the conflicts in American culture. It was a tension between the refined and the lowbrow, the processed and the natural, 'the civilized and the wild,' " the Times wrote.
In The New York Cookbook, published in 1992, she focused on the culinary highlights of the city, exploring "the nooks and crannies of all five boroughs, bringing back tales of pierogi makers and grillers of Jamaican jerk chicken and stirrers of avgolemono soup," the Times continued. "She included 500 recipes from the famous and the people who should have been famous, including roast chicken from the city's four-star chefs, Katharine Hepburn's brownies, Edna Lewis's greens and Robert Motherwell's brandade de morue."
Her American Food Writing: An Anthology with Classic Recipes, published in 2009, focused on 250 years of American culinary history. Other books included A Well-Seasoned Appetite: Recipes from an American Kitchen (1995), The Pleasure of Your Company: How to Give a Dinner Party Without Losing Your Mind (1997) and One Big Table: A Portrait of American Cooking (2010). In Mostly True: A Memoir of Family, Food, and Baseball (2006), she touched, in part, on her baseball-loving family. Her brother Paul O'Neill was a major league player, for the Cincinnati Reds, and from 1993-2001, the New York Yankees.
O'Neill also was restaurant critic for New York Newsday before joining the Times in 1990 and writing for the Sunday magazine and Style section for a decade.