Lisa Messinger's
Cookbook Corner

Van Gogh's Table at the Auberge Ravoux
Recipes From the Artist's Last Home and Paintings of Café Life

By Alexandra Leaf and Fred Leeman (Artisan)


You probably won't crave to emulate just the food in Van Gogh's Table At the Auberge Ravoux: Recipes From the Artist's Last Home and Paintings of Café Life, but the lifestyle as well. Auberge Ravoux, in Auvers-Sur-Oise, is a tiny artist's village 20 miles from Paris. Van Gogh found peace there after a tumultuous life and this beautiful book makes it clear why.

Interest in eating and/or cooking is not a prerequisite; the book is a keepsake strictly for the gorgeously reproduced paintings, which take up its first half. Mesmerizing works like "Dr. Gachet Sitting at a Table with Books and a Glass with Sprigs of Foxgloves" (1890); "A Plate of Lemons and a Carafe" (1887); and "Woman at a Table in the Café du Tambourin" (1887) are as compelling here as they have been in any other venue.

If you do want to enjoy some of the same fetching fare as Van Gogh did, there are two routes you can take. The first is to prepare delights from the book (which is written by renowned culinary historian Leaf and professor Leeman who is former chief curator of Amsterdam's Van Gogh Museum), like stewed chicken with mustard-cream sauce; seven-hour lamb Ravoux style with sautéed potatoes and smoked slab bacon; mache, pine nut and raw foie gras salad; and apple tartlets with caramel sauce. Or you could book a flight to France—the auberge today operates as the Maison de Van Gogh, where visitors to the café feast on the same regional cuisine to which the painter paid homage.

RECIPES
—Stewed Chicken with Mustard-Cream Sauce

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