It was early in 1985, during the first warm, blossoming weeks of spring in San Francisco, when I became hellbent on getting my old job back.<\/p>\n
Until the previous fall, I had been a cook at Greens, a restaurant run by Zen Buddhists in a converted Army warehouse by the bay. In those years, it was a groundbreaking place: a vegetarian restaurant that swore off the hippie health foods of the seventies and instead served meatless versions of hearty, provincial French and Italian dishes. Greens embodied the ascetic lushness of the farm-to-table movement, which, in Northern California, was synonymous with the Berkeley restaurant Chez Panisse. Each morning that I worked at Greens, a farm truck would grind in from Marin, ferrying crates of fog-damp young lettuces and Swiss chard, and luminaries like Julia Child and Diana Kennedy regularly popped through the swinging doors to say thanks after a meal. A few weeks after I had quit, for reasons I now strain to recall, I realized that it was probably the best kitchen job I\u2019d ever have.<\/p>\n
I invited my former boss, the chef Annie Somerville, to my apartment for lunch on a day when the restaurant was dark. I resolved to make something that would remind her what a great cook I was\u2014a meal that would showcase not just my technical skills but my sophistication, my knowledge of the holy texts. The thing is, I never really expected her to accept: I could barely imagine Annie\u2014a trim woman with a pixie cut and a low-key elegance, polished by years of Zen meditation\u2014in the battered Haight-Ashbury flat I shared with my boyfriend. So when she told me, over the phone, that she\u2019d be happy to come, I freaked. What could I cook to win her over?<\/p>\n
I was pretty sure I\u2019d find an answer in a chunky, pictureless cookbook from 1973, with a picturesque Franglais title: \u201cThe Auberge of the Flowering Hearth<\/a>.\u201d My friend Pamela Kamatani, then a cook at Chez Panisse, had put me on to it: it was Alice\u2019s gospel, she\u2019d said\u2014Alice as in Waters, the sovereign spirit of Panisse, and her circle of kindred, keyed-in chefs that included Annie, Judy Rodgers, David Tanis, Joyce Goldstein. You didn\u2019t merely read \u201cAuberge\u201d or mine it for recipes; you vanished into it. The book, a manifesto of French countryside cooking, conjured a world where cooking could connect people to the land they lived on. Maybe it could also manifest a world where an impulsive twenty-five-year-old fixed his mistake.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Auberge of the Flowering Hearth\u201d is among a handful of influential English-language cookbooks of the twentieth century which were revolutionary for the way they conceived of the form not as a utilitarian recipe collection but as a literary work requiring immersion in a constructed world. (Others include \u201cA Book of Mediterranean Food<\/a>,\u201d by Elizabeth David, \u201cThe Alice B. Toklas Cook Book<\/a>,\u201d and \u201cHoney from a Weed<\/a>,\u201d by Patience Gray.) Its imperiously named author, Roy Andries de Groot, was an aristocratic Englishman who started his career as a BBC announcer, and who lost vision in one of his eyes reporting on volunteer firefighters during the London Blitz. (This injury would eventually lead to total blindness.) De Groot found success as a food-and-drink writer, and the book recounts his discovery, in 1968, of a tiny French farmhouse inn, where the meals were sumptuous\u2014ragout of wild hare with Ch\u00e2teauneuf-du-Pape and cream, daube of young spring kid\u2014and almost entirely made from things harvested or hunted nearby. Today, \u201cAuberge\u201d is a curious artifact: a book that\u2019s little known outside of a passionate circle of Francophile chefs and food writers, and which in more than fifty years has almost never gone out of print.<\/p>\n It begins as a travelogue, narrated by a writer (implied to be de Groot himself) on assignment in France. He\u2019s headed to the valley of the Grande Chartreuse, high in the Alps above Grenoble, where Carthusian monks have long distilled the region\u2019s namesake liqueur. The country he observes en route to the valley is poisoned by commercialism, a place of yellow-gray smog and oil-slicked airports, where a caf\u00e9 au lait is a thin slurry of coffee and powdered creamer. The narrator descends \u201cover the blast furnaces and steel mills of Lyon,\u201d as the city\u2019s \u201ctongues of flame\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0licked the foul air.\u201d<\/p>\n De Groot finds refuge at the Auberge de l\u2019\u00c2tre Fleuri, a simple countryside lodging recommended by his guide, Michel. His hosts are two women, Vivette Artaud, the manager and ma\u00eetre d\u2019h\u00f4tel, and Ray Girard, the soft-spoken, darkly intense chef, who\u2019s half English, half Proven\u00e7ale. The pair met during the Second World War, when both were on the nursing staff at a military hospital, and resolved to stay in the Alps together once the war was over. In 1948, they acquired the auberge, the heart of which is an enormous, double-sided fireplace with hooks for smoking meats, pits to hold braising pots, and a spit. In warmer weather, the fireplace would serve as a stage for the large bouquet of flowers that gives the inn its name.<\/p>\n The valley of the Grande Chartreuse is a pastoral counterpoint to the industrialized ruin that de Groot has just seen. Describing the friar who established a monastery in the valley in 1084, he writes, \u201cHis decision to come to the valley had arisen from his revulsion against the disintegration of the world.\u201d Over the next twelve chapters, de Groot lays out twenty-two menus he attributes to the inn. There\u2019s spit-roasted Alpine grouse and roast saddle of Carthusian chamois, the native goat-antelope; a Gratin\u00e9e \u00e0 la Savoyarde of potatoes and wild boletus mushrooms; and neige \u00e0 la Chartreuse, a souffl\u00e9 laced with the indigenous liqueur, baked in a long, shallow dish to resemble an alpine range with scorched, craggy peaks. When Artaud and Girard \u201cset their table with the animals and birds of their valley and its surrounding mountains\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0with the cheeses carefully made and the fruits and vegetables laboriously grown by their farmer neighbors, with the wild mushrooms they pick themselves in the woods, with the wines from the nearby mountain vineyards,\u201d de Groot writes, \u201cthey are fulfilling the unity of [a] way of life\u2014a unity which seems to me to be of the deepest value but which the world seems to be rejecting.\u201d<\/p>\n 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","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It was early in 1985, during the first warm, blossoming weeks of spring in San Francisco, when I…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":91304,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[1022,18120,171,990,156,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-91303","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-entertainment","11":"tag-food","12":"tag-france","13":"tag-united-states","14":"tag-unitedstates","15":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91303","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=91303"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91303\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/91304"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=91303"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=91303"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=91303"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}