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.

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’d ever have.

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—a 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—a trim woman with a pixie cut and a low-key elegance, polished by years of Zen meditation—in the battered Haight-Ashbury flat I shared with my boyfriend. So when she told me, over the phone, that she’d be happy to come, I freaked. What could I cook to win her over?

I was pretty sure I’d find an answer in a chunky, pictureless cookbook from 1973, with a picturesque Franglais title: “The Auberge of the Flowering Hearth.” My friend Pamela Kamatani, then a cook at Chez Panisse, had put me on to it: it was Alice’s gospel, she’d said—Alice 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’t merely read “Auberge” 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.

“The Auberge of the Flowering Hearth” 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 “A Book of Mediterranean Food,” by Elizabeth David, “The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book,” and “Honey from a Weed,” 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—ragout of wild hare with Châteauneuf-du-Pape and cream, daube of young spring kid—and almost entirely made from things harvested or hunted nearby. Today, “Auberge” is a curious artifact: a book that’s 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.

It begins as a travelogue, narrated by a writer (implied to be de Groot himself) on assignment in France. He’s headed to the valley of the Grande Chartreuse, high in the Alps above Grenoble, where Carthusian monks have long distilled the region’s 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 café au lait is a thin slurry of coffee and powdered creamer. The narrator descends “over the blast furnaces and steel mills of Lyon,” as the city’s “tongues of flame . . . licked the foul air.”

De Groot finds refuge at the Auberge de l’Âtre Fleuri, a simple countryside lodging recommended by his guide, Michel. His hosts are two women, Vivette Artaud, the manager and maître d’hôtel, and Ray Girard, the soft-spoken, darkly intense chef, who’s half English, half Provençale. 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.

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, “His decision to come to the valley had arisen from his revulsion against the disintegration of the world.” Over the next twelve chapters, de Groot lays out twenty-two menus he attributes to the inn. There’s spit-roasted Alpine grouse and roast saddle of Carthusian chamois, the native goat-antelope; a Gratinée à la Savoyarde of potatoes and wild boletus mushrooms; and neige à la Chartreuse, a soufflé laced with the indigenous liqueur, baked in a long, shallow dish to resemble an alpine range with scorched, craggy peaks. When Artaud and Girard “set their table with the animals and birds of their valley and its surrounding mountains . . . with 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,” de Groot writes, “they are fulfilling the unity of [a] way of life—a unity which seems to me to be of the deepest value but which the world seems to be rejecting.”

This desire for unity between farmer, hunter, maker, forager, cook, and diner has inspired countless chefs in the decades since “Auberge” was published, including Alice Waters, Dan Barber, René 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’s blindness, is full of descriptions of the auberge’s beauty that were likely flights of his imagination, such as the building’s 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.

In the years since the book was published, many “Auberge” devotees, including Waters, have made pilgrimages to the Alps in search of the mythic inn, and found something far less enchanting. “Of course, it existed for him,” Waters said tactfully, in a New Yorker Profile from 2014, when asked if the place was real. “It still exists for us, in the minds of the people around this table. Maybe that’s where the ideal restaurant always will be.” The cookbook author David Lebovitz told me that he didn’t 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’d be sad to go after so many years had passed.

In a 1966 Times profile by Craig Claiborne, published after de Groot’s first cookbook, “Feasts for All Seasons,” the blind writer explained how he cooked in his Greenwich Village kitchen by touching, smelling, and listening. “Small sounds from the oven hitherto unnoticed suddenly become imperative and indicative,” he said. He told Claiborne that the biggest obstacle was overcoming a fear of knives.

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. “He coped with it incredibly well,” she said of his blindness, “but you knew that this was not something that was easy for him, at all. Maybe that’s why his descriptions are sometimes a little over the top. He was heightening everything.” His father was a Dutch painter who was friends with Piet Mondrian. Fiona Rhodes, de Groot’s daughter, told me that “the thing he missed most about not being sighted was not being able to look at art.”

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, “A Weekend of Incredible Gluttony,” published in Esquire, is a survey of the restaurant scene in Lyon, composed with the glib swagger of mid-century men’s magazines: he characterizes the city as a place where “everything smells deliciously of crackly crisp money and pink sauce Choron.” (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. “We had to tick the clock—if the plate was arranged, we had to describe where everything was: this is at twelve o’clock, this is at three o’clock,” Chu, now eighty-two, recalled. “When he wrote what I had described, it was all in Technicolor.”

Their second story, intended for Venture, a travel magazine, was about Chartreuse—the piece that brought the trio to the inn. But they didn’t spend much time there, in Chu’s recollection. “Maybe once or twice we had the lunch,” she said. “And maybe we had one or two dinners. He made a lot of stuff up.” 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’s charismatic proprietors. “I used to call them Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas,” Chu said affectionately.

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’d floated the idea on the phone to Knopf’s Judith Jones, who had edited “Feasts for All Seasons.” “The great strength of this little book,” he told Swan, “would be its total reality.” Jones, who had perfected the technique-wired cookbook early in her career, with Julia Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” was unpersuaded. “I’m afraid I can’t make a sound editorial judgment until Roy can show me the range and quality of the recipes,” she told Swan, a month later. “If that isn’t possible until he makes another trip back to the auberge, then, frankly, I would work on magazine support for the idea at this point.”