Novels Now

The School of Essential Ingredients by Erica Bauermeister
Fiction - Culinary
2009 J. P. Putnam’s Sons
Finished on 3/14/09
Rating: 5/5 (Outstanding!)

Product Description:

Once a month on Monday night, eight students gather in Lillian’s restaurant for a cooking class. Among them is Claire, a young woman coming to terms with her new identity as a mother; Tom, a lawyer whose life has been overturned by loss; Antonia, an Italian kitchen designer adapting to life in America; and Carl and Helen, a long-married couple whose union contains surprises the rest of the class would never suspect.

The students have come to learn the art behind Lillian’s soulful dishes, but it soon becomes clear that each seeks a recipe for something beyond the kitchen. One by one they are transformed by the aromas, flavors, and textures of what they create, including a white-on-white cake that prompts wistful reflections on the sweet fragility of love, and a garlic and red sauce that seems to spark one romance but end another. Over time, the paths of the students mingle and intertwine, and the essence of Lillian’s cooking expands beyond the restaurant and into the secret corners of their lives, with results that are often unexpected, and always delicious.

Anyone who knows me well or has been following my blog knows how much I love to cook and try new recipes. Well, this was certainly my kind of book! I loved the mouthwatering descriptions of the various dishes the students learned to create in their eight months at The School of Essential Ingredients. The author does a marvelous job weaving each character’s background history into the monthly classes, revealing their hopes and dreams, as well as the pain and sorrow in their private lives. I fell in love with each and every character and as I turned the final page, it was with great sadness, as I knew I would soon find myself missing the characters and Lillian’s restaurant. 

The cooking class was held in a restaurant named Lillian’s, on the main street of town, almost hidden by a front garden dense with ancient cherry trees, roses, and the waving spikes and soft mounds of green herbs. Set between the straight lines of a bank and the local movie theater, the restaurant was oddly incongruous, a moment of lush colors and gently moving curves, like an affair in the midst of an otherwise orderly life. Passersby often reached out to run their hands along the tops of the lavender bushes that stretched luxuriantly above the cast-iron fence, the soft, dusty scent remaining on their fingers for hours after.

Those who entered the gate and followed the winding brick path through the garden discovered an Arts and Crafts house whose front rooms had been converted into a dining area. There were no more than ten tables in all, each table’s personality defined by nearby architectural elements, one nestled into a bay window, another engaged in companionable conversation with a built-in bookshelf. Some tables had views of the garden, while others, hidden like secrets in the darker, protected corners of the room, held their patrons’ attention within the edges of their tabletops.

Doesn’t this sound lovely? Oh, how I’d love to take a cooking class in a restaurant such as this, especially one taught by such a down-to-earth person as Lillian.

I first discovered The School of Essential Ingredients when it arrived in the bookstore. The beautiful cover art, graced with a lovely blurb by another favorite author, caught my attention:

A delicate, meltingly lovely hymn to food and friendship. Lillian’s kitchen is a place where the world works the way it should. You’ll want to tuck yourself into one warm corner of it and stay all day.(Marisa de los Santos, author of Love Walked In)

Reading those words, I knew this was a book I had to buy. But as luck would have it, I won an autographed copy after entering a contest over on Lisa’s blog. The inscription in my copy reads, “For Lesley, who loves books and food… Erica Bauermeister”

I found myself wishing Erica had included recipes for all the wonderful dishes described within this gem of a book. I was practically drooling on the pages as the students learned how to bake crab in a lemony-wine sauce (with garlic and butter, of course). The Thanksgiving meal is one I’d love to try my hand at! Imagine how delicious a meal such as this would taste:

Doesn’t that sound like a refreshing alternative to the traditional meal, heavy with mashed potatoes, stuffing, rolls and gravy? And who doesn’t love cheese? After reading the description of a cheese fondue dinner, I was ready to run down to the corner market to buy a block of Gruyere and Emmenthaler and a huge loaf of crusty artisan bread. Mmmmmmmmm. As you can imagine, this is not a book to read when you’re hungry and dinner is several hours away. 

On owning a restaurant:

Lillian loved best the moment before she turned on the lights. She would stand in the restaurant kitchen doorway, rain-soaked air behind her, and let the smells come to her–ripe sourdough yeast, sweet-dirt coffee, and garlic, mellowing as it lingered. Under them, more elusive, stirred the faint essence of fresh meat, raw tomatoes, cantaloupe, water on lettuce. Lillian breathed in, feeling the smells move about and through her, even as she searched out those that might suggest a rotting orange at the bottom of a pile, or whether the new assistant chef was still double-dosing the curry dishes. She was. The girl was a daughter of a friend and good enough with knives, but some days, Lillian thought with a sigh, it was like trying to teach subtlety to a thunderstorm.

On chocolate:

The hard, round cake of chocolate was wrapped in yellow plastic with red stripes, shiny and dark when she opened it. The chocolate made a rough sound as it brushed across the fine section of the grater, falling in soft clouds onto the counter, releasing a scent of dusty back rooms filled with bittersweet chocolate and old love letters, the bottom drawers of antique desks and the last leaves of autumn, almonds and cinnamon and sugar.

On weather in the Northwest:

Helen and Carl walked up the main street of town to the cooking class. It was a clear, cold evening in early February, the end of a miraculously blue day blown in from the north like a celebration. People in the Northwest tended to greet such weather with a child’s sense of joy, strangers exchanged grins, houses were suddenly cleaner, and neighbors could be found in their yards in shirtsleeves, regardless of the temperature, indulging a sudden desire to dig in rich, dark dirt.

On love:

More than anyone he knew, Antonia carried these things with her, in the million sweet and careful rituals that still made up her life, no matter what country she was in. He saw it in the way she cut bread, or drank wine[...] Antonia made celebrations of things he had always dismissed as moments to be rushed through on the way to something more important. Being around her, he found even everyday experiences were deeper, nuanced, satisfaction and awareness slipped in between the layers of life like love notes hidden in the pages of a textbook.

The School of Essential Ingredients is one of those books that could have easily been consumed over the course of a weekend. Well aware that this is a debut novel (with no backlist to satisfy me until Bauermeister’s next release), I chose to savor it as slowly as possible. And, it’s definitely going on my keeper shelf for future re-reads. Fans of Marisa de los Santos, Joanne Harris, Elin Hilderbrand, and Elizabeth Berg will not be disappointed. I know I wasn’t!