The School of Essential Ingredients

The owner and head chef of a restaurant by the same name, Lillian teaches a cooking class to a small group of students once a month on Monday nights. Calling her class “The School of Essential Ingredients,” Lillian looks to impart her particular cooking method to her class, a technique that has little use for recipes and instead relies on each person’s understanding and feeling of every necessary ingredient. Lillian taught herself how to cook as she made meals for herself and her mother, eventually using food to draw her mother out of her book-lined shell. Taking her knowledge of the chemistry between food and human emotion, Lillian imperceptibly teaches her students how food can affect their lives and mend relationships. Each chapter delves into the life of a member of the cooking class, revealing the reason they are there and what life is like at home. As the students become more familiar with each other in class, their lives start blending together, intersecting after class and beyond. Food and the pleasure it brings heals several people’s wounds and makes this group of strangers close friends, roommates, and lovers.

It’s hard to describe a novel like this that is so subtle, and where the pieces fit together so perfectly but so seamlessly, it’s difficult to identify the initial components. The writing in this firs t novel is so smooth, it really could have been about anything and it would have been a good book. Bauermeister has a gift for writing about food, and I wonder if it spreads to other topics as well. The metaphors and similes she uses are so poetic, she has you rereading phrases just to capture them in your head forever. I can see myself reading this over and over again. Although this is not magical realism, the food descriptions remind me of Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel. Recommended to me by a coworker who loved it so much her husband read it and loved it too, The School of Essential Ingredients is an appetizing delight.