This desire for unity between farmer, hunter, maker, forager, cook, and diner has inspired countless chefs in the decades since \u201cAuberge\u201d was published, including Alice Waters, Dan Barber, Ren\u00e9 Redzepi, Enrique Olvera, and Samin Nosrat. It hardly matters that the book is, essentially, a work of fiction. The text, which never acknowledges de Groot\u2019s blindness, is full of descriptions of the auberge\u2019s beauty that were likely flights of his imagination, such as the building\u2019s gray stone walls, which are partly covered in roses and which de Groot first encounters washed in the pale light of a late-autumn morning.<\/p>\n
In the years since the book was published, many \u201cAuberge\u201d devotees, including Waters, have made pilgrimages to the Alps in search of the mythic inn, and found something far less enchanting. \u201cOf course, it existed for him,\u201d Waters said tactfully, in a New Yorker Profile<\/a> from 2014, when asked if the place was real. \u201cIt still exists for us, in the minds of the people around this table. Maybe that\u2019s where the ideal restaurant always will be.\u201d The cookbook author David Lebovitz told me that he didn\u2019t even bother trying to find the auberge back when he was travelling in the region, even though the book had meant so much to him. He thought it\u2019d be sad to go after so many years had passed.<\/p>\n In a 1966 Times profile by Craig Claiborne, published after de Groot\u2019s first cookbook, \u201cFeasts for All Seasons<\/a>,\u201d the blind writer explained how he cooked in his Greenwich Village kitchen by touching, smelling, and listening. \u201cSmall sounds from the oven hitherto unnoticed suddenly become imperative and indicative,\u201d he said. He told Claiborne that the biggest obstacle was overcoming a fear of knives.<\/p>\n Petra Chu, a professor emerita at Seton Hall University, was a graduate student of art history at Columbia in 1967, when she began working as an assistant for de Groot at his home office in the West Village. \u201cHe coped with it incredibly well,\u201d she said of his blindness, \u201cbut you knew that this was not something that was easy for him, at all. Maybe that\u2019s why his descriptions are sometimes a little over the top. He was heightening everything.\u201d His father was a Dutch painter who was friends with Piet Mondrian. Fiona Rhodes, de Groot\u2019s daughter, told me that \u201cthe thing he missed most about not being sighted was not being able to look at art.\u201d<\/p>\n Chu and another young assistant, Bonnie Messenger, were with de Groot and his service dog, Nusta, on the fateful trip to France in 1968. He was reporting two stories. The first, \u201cA Weekend of Incredible Gluttony<\/a>,\u201d published in Esquire, is a survey of the restaurant scene in Lyon, composed with the glib swagger of mid-century men\u2019s magazines: he characterizes the city as a place where \u201ceverything smells deliciously of crackly crisp money and pink sauce Choron.\u201d (In this story, too, his blindness goes unmentioned.) De Groot tasted his way through lavish meals, with Chu and Messenger describing the visuals into his tape recorder. \u201cWe had to tick the clock\u2014if the plate was arranged, we had to describe where everything was: this is at twelve o\u2019clock, this is at three o\u2019clock,\u201d Chu, now eighty-two, recalled. \u201cWhen he wrote what I had described, it was all in Technicolor.\u201d<\/p>\n Their second story, intended for Venture, a travel magazine, was about Chartreuse\u2014the piece that brought the trio to the inn. But they didn\u2019t spend much time there, in Chu\u2019s recollection. \u201cMaybe once or twice we had the lunch,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd maybe we had one or two dinners. He made a lot of stuff up.\u201d The food was delicious, Chu said, though the inn itself was more basic than de Groot described. In photos that Chu and her husband took in 1971, her first and only time back, the dining room appears spartan and comfortless. But the idyllic natural scenery was real, as were Artaud and Girard, the inn\u2019s charismatic proprietors. \u201cI used to call them Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas,\u201d Chu said affectionately.<\/p>\n De Groot began to pitch the cookbook a few months after he returned from France. In January, 1969, he told his agent, Oliver Swan, that he\u2019d floated the idea on the phone to Knopf\u2019s Judith Jones, who had edited \u201cFeasts for All Seasons.\u201d \u201cThe great strength of this little book,\u201d he told Swan, \u201cwould be its total reality.\u201d Jones, who had perfected the technique-wired cookbook early in her career, with Julia Child\u2019s \u201cMastering the Art of French Cooking<\/a>,\u201d was unpersuaded. \u201cI\u2019m afraid I can\u2019t make a sound editorial judgment until Roy can show me the range and quality of the recipes,\u201d she told Swan, a month later. \u201cIf that isn\u2019t possible until he makes another trip back to the auberge, then, frankly, I would work on magazine support for the idea at this point.\u201d<\/p>\n But it\u2019s unlikely that de Groot ever returned to the auberge. Travel could be costly and difficult for him, and he sometimes found navigating unfamiliar places like toilets humiliating. By summer, he and Swan were still trying to sell Jones on the book that she called\u2014possibly disdainfully\u2014the \u201cAuberge of the Flowering Chimneys.\u201d The recipes still hadn\u2019t materialized. \u201cI may be wrong,\u201d she told Swan in a rejection letter, \u201cbut I would hate to enter into a project that I had reservations about,\u201d especially since de Groot had proved difficult to work with on \u201cFeasts for All Seasons.\u201d After at least two more publishers passed on the book, Bobbs-Merrill offered a contract.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This desire for unity between farmer, hunter, maker, forager, cook, and diner has inspired countless chefs in the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":61536,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[266],"tags":[359,43733,18,117,518,2220,19,17],"class_list":{"0":"post-61535","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-cuisine","10":"tag-eire","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-food","13":"tag-france","14":"tag-ie","15":"tag-ireland"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61535","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=61535"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61535\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/61536"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=61535"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=61535"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=61535"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}