The School of Essential Ingredients follows the lives of
eight students who 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.
Students include Claire, a young mother struggling with the
demands of her family; Antonia, an Italian kitchen designer
learning to adapt to life in America; and Tom, a widower
mourning the loss of his wife to breast cancer.
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. One by one the
students are transformed by the aromas, flavors, and
textures of Lillian’s food, including a white-on-white cake
that prompts wistful reflections on the sweet fragility of
love and a peppery heirloom tomato sauce that seems to spark
one romance but end another.
Brought together by the power of food and companionship, the
lives of the characters mingle and intertwine, united by the
revealing nature of what can be created in the kitchen.
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