
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, October 4, 1995                   TAG: 9510040109
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: 8   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: JUDY WALKER THE ARIZONA REPUBLIC
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

TO HER, FOOD IS POETRY

Molly O'Neill is the Elizabeth David of our generation. She is a lyrical and precise writer whose subject is food. Through this universal topic, she illuminates the most universal of all topics: life.

O'Neill is a reporter for the Style section of The New York Times, covering pop culture and trends, but she is better known as the food columnist for The New York Times Magazine.

Her most recent work, ``A Well-Seasoned Appetite'' (Viking, $25.95), is for those who take cookbooks instead of novels to bed at night to read. (You know who you are. And you will love this book.)

Consider one paragraph from her ``Almost Winter'' chapter preface:

``Of course I think that Earth-dwellers are profoundly affected by its cycles. That the further we are removed from nature, the more powerfully we miss its dictates. That cooking, in the end, is communion. Cooking acknowledges the world as we've found it. One's style of cooking mirrors one's past, one's ambitions, one's reactions to the present tense. But in the end, one can't cook without caring, particularly and universally, though the balance of these preoccupations shifts from cook to cook.''

Why is food her chosen topic?

``I thought I was going to be a poet and painter, and then there was this weird intrusion of having to make a living,'' O'Neill said from New York. ``I didn't like to teach. So by default, I started cooking in restaurants, and I really fell in love with it. I love to cook, I like to feed people. And so it was a natural sort of thing to put together the writing and the food.''

Divided seasonally, her book includes the ``almost'' seasons, such as ``Almost Summer'' and ``Almost Autumn.'' Each segment within the season is prefaced with an essay. Each is a gem. Many are her essays from the magazine, expanded a bit outside magazine editing constraints.

O'Neill said the work in the cookbook also has ``a little bit more connective tissue than in the weekly column, just because I got so enamored of the idea of trying to appeal to people's sense. I was trying to show that if you cook and eat by how you feel, you're going to end up using good sense, employing the senses. It's not like we're victims of our senses. We're victims of mass marketing.

``We've gone a little bit overboard in the last few years in correcting our eating habits, so people have gotten so they don't trust their own taste.''

When she's working, O'Neill said, she cooks a lot on weekends to have things to use during the week. She has a 41/2-year-old child, two dogs and a husband.

She also has a repertoire of colorful stories and characters. Her account of searching for blueberries on a Maine mountain, despite warnings that a mad bull moose was hanging around, is a classic.

It's the writing that makes the book special.

by CNB