Review: The School of Essential Ingredients by Erica Bauermeister
The School of Essential Ingredients
by Erica Bauermeister
On the first Monday of every month, chef Lillian closes down her restaurant to diners so that she can teach cooking classes. The
students come for a variety of reasons - a desire to improve their cooking, guilt over receiving the class as a gift, joy spent in meeting new people and trying new things - and each has his or her own story to tell. So, each class session is told through the eyes of a different student, until by the end of the book you’ve met everyone and been inside their head. Starting as strangers, friendships are formed, romances blossoms, and old desires resurface as the classmates join together in preparing meals together.
Oh, the meals. This book will have you DROOLING all over the place because everything sounds so. darn. good. There’s a pretty delicacy to her sentences that I really like; it sweeps you up in its arms and carries you around Lillian’s kitchen, onto the tongues of her students and the flavors sweep over you ‘til you can taste everything yourself. (Don’t read this if you’re on a diet. Seriously. You’ll cry.)
Lillian encourages her students to slow down and appreciate the “essential ingredients” of cooking, but she isn’t talking about garlic or chocolate or anything you eat. Instead, she considers the act of preparing the food - the mood you’re in when you make the food, the time you dedicate to its preparation, the delight you experience sharing the treats with friends and family - to be the real ingredients that prove so indispensable. This work of fiction is a loving tribute to the slow food movement, and will definitely inspire you to drag out your pots and spend more time in the kitchen.
But as wonderful as the food in this book is, the students will also touch your heart and really get to you. They come from many walks of life, from all ages and situations. For me, a story about an older woman who is slowly losing her memories really struck home. My grandmother had a stroke when I was young, and later she succumbed to Alzheimer’s. I can’t really remember the “good” Grandma, only the one who couldn’t recognize me and had trouble with conversations because she couldn’t remember words or ideas that had once been so central to her life. Hearing the story of Lillian’s student really made me miss my grandmother, and at the same time allowed me to appreciate in a new way the struggles she must have faced in the early years of her disease, when she was still lucid and capable of conversation, but memories would occasionally scramble. Isn’t that one of the marks of a good story? When it reawakens something forgotten inside you, or allows you to re-evaluate the characters in your memories to understand them in a new way?
When I first heard the concept of the book at Book Group Expo in 2008, I was worried that the format - a series of short stories, really, since each chapter has a different narrator - wouldn’t allow the characters to develop fully. But I was curious, so I waited and waited until the book was actually released in January to finally see the results. Bauermeister did a wonderful job of merging narratives and keeping consistency. The book was definitely worth my impatience of the past few months!
To read more about The School of Essential Ingredients, buy it or add it to your wishlist, click here.