The School of Essential Ingredients

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Westgate Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Fiction / General / Bauermeister, Erica.	4-week checkout	Due 05-17-2024

Eight students gather in Lillian's Restaurant every Monday night for cooking class. It soon becomes clear, however, that each one seeks a recipe for something beyond the kitchen as Chef Lillian, a woman whose connection with food is both soulful and exacting, helps them to create dishes whose flavor and techniques expand beyond the restaurant and into the secret corners of her students' lives.

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COMMUNITY REVIEWS

Good read submitted by sbaccouc on May 18, 2011, 5:28am This was a good read, and the stories well intertwined!

For Those Who Love A Perfectly Happy Ending submitted by Sara W on June 21, 2011, 9:09pm I read the blurb on the back of this book as saying "Fans of Laura Esquivel are going to fall in love with Erica Bauermeister's beautiful story." After finishing the book, I flipped it back over and re-read the sentence, which actually reads: "Fans of Maeve Binchy and Laura Esquivel are going to fall in love with Erica Bauermeister's beautiful story." Ahh. That explains a lot.

This book centers on the power of food and the existence of an incredible, mystical relationship with cooking. There are gorgeous descriptions of ingredients, of sauce-making, of perfect desserts. It's a big love letter to gastronomy and an appreciation of taste and smell.

It's also, well, a tad sappy. The characters are extremely sensitive - and each can communicate with others through only the most understanding of glances, or the kindest half-smile. In the same chapters where I scoffed at the sentimentality, I found myself next to tears in just a few pages. Even if I wasn't crazy about what Bauermeister was doing with her characters, the language she used to make it happen was wonderfully moving.

"The School of Essential Ingredients" is really a place where everything works out, where the people are wholeheartedly good and the eating is divine. My final reaction was, so what if it's romanticized to within an inch of it's life? It's delicious.

Lyrical submitted by Carolyn J Petersen on July 17, 2020, 12:36am It maybe that, as the previous reader remarked, this book is a little “sappy”. It contains some of the most beautiful word usage I have ever seen. It creats a different way to interact with food, with all the senses.

Loved it! submitted by jgetty on January 3, 2021, 7:29pm Intriguing gentle story with each chapter describing people's lives, and the monthly cooking class that connects them all. Loved the food descriptions, too, yum! Written very descriptively and I loved all the details on colors, smells, expressions, lives and hopeful futures! Great book!

I loved this... submitted by smgop on August 19, 2021, 8:19pm This is a delightful, gentle story whose characters quietly slip into your acquaintance. Loved it!