Fiction about an In-Person Cooking Class Tempts All of Us

The School of Essential Ingredients, by Erica Bauermeister, was fun to read! The book presented a social group that we could all feel a part of, even during the pandemic. The book had several elements that were well-designed for our Book Club: an interesting story about food, a variety of characters in a cooking class who all had personal stories, and interaction among the characters during the classes as well as outside the classes. Perhaps we especially enjoyed the book because it was about what we all used to consider a normal weekly gathering of people in a room, talking, laughing, and eating together; and because most of us had cancelled or not planned similar kinds of gatherings during the pandemic, such as our in-person meetings at Barnes & Noble and our Holiday Party.

Joanne started the discussion by asking what we liked about the book. Dennis liked how each chapter helped solve something in a character’s life. Joanne liked the way the book exemplified eating one’s way through problems. Shirley liked the emphasis on the senses, particularly taste and smell. Lydia said the book inspired her to cook a whole chicken. Marcia liked the way Lillian had used food to get her mother’s attention when her mother had been reading constantly to avoid thinking about her husband’s death. Marcia also liked the way Lillian had somewhat paired the students in ways that helped fill each other’s needs. Pat enjoyed the way the students had formed a community, so that she wondered what the students’ connections were after the classes ended. Joanne missed the characters when she finished reading the book.

We inadvertently mentioned some things we didn’t like about the book. Pat thought the descriptive language in the book was too expansive at first but then started liking it. Joanne said some of the descriptions became trite. I agreed. I remember feeling that way for a while but then not noticing it any more. Lydia remembered that the first class, when the students were taught to kill a crab and remove the shell, almost caused her to stop reading the book. Joanne said that she had figured the first dish the students would prepare would be pasta and that she was surprised by the crab-cooking exercise. Joanne and I were brought back to the years we had both spent in Maryland, going to the Eastern shore and eating steamed crabs. The seasoning might have been mostly “Old Bay,” but I found it magical at the time. The distaste for killing and shelling the crabs inspired Joyce to remind us that we tend to be mentally separated from our food’s origins. Joyce added that many people don’t experience food directly from a garden, and Dennis added that growing a garden will teach you how many other creatures want to eat what you’re growing!

Joanne asked which character we related to the most and then went around her Zoom Room and called on us in turn. Pat chose Tom, because of his loss. She also mentioned that she liked Chloe and liked Helen the least. I chose Antonia, because I felt like she wasn’t looking for anything special but found Ian. Joyce liked Helen and Karl, because although they were in different places in their lives and so were getting different things from their relationship, they stayed together. Joanne favored Isabel, because her mind had ruled her life, and she was still cerebral, though she was having memory problems. Carol liked the way Chloe was always trying hard at everything, though she was a very young adult and made a lot of mistakes. Carla liked Lorraine’s ability to help people bond through food. She also liked how hard Chloe was trying at everything, despite her bad romance and her daily difficulties. Carla especially liked the way Antonia worked to help her clients to make good choices, despite their attraction to current trends. Lydia chose to mention Chloe’s bad boyfriend as a good character for the story. We restrained ourselves from going off on a tangent about bad boyfriends and continued around the Zoom Room. Cindy T. liked Lillian, because food and even cooking classes have played big roles in Cindy’s personal life. Cindy said she and her family had taken cooking classes at such places as Whole Foods and as long ago as 1975. Cindy completed a class about cheeses on Zoom recently; she said the students had to go pick up the cheese samples. Dennis told us a great story about his wife, Judy and her learning to cook and continuing to learn alongside their now-grown daughter. Marcia said she got something from each character and related to several of the characters in the book: Lillian teaching students even though her restaurant was successful and she probably didn’t need the money, Antonia working to convince her clients to let her design a kitchen that matched their rustic new house, rather than a modern trendy kitchen, Chloe who realized that her relationship with her boyfriend wasn’t going to work when he told her she would never cook anything good, Tom who had suffered the loss of his wife, and Lillian working to get her mother to pay attention to her instead of just books.

Since we had gotten somewhat attached to the characters in this book, Carla mentioned that she had read the author’s sequel, The Lost Art of Mixing, which continued the stories of Lillian and Chloe but none of those of the other characters from The School of Essential Ingredients.