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Also by Erica Bauermeister:

No Two Persons, July 2024
Trade Paperback / e-Book (reprint)
No Two Persons, May 2023
Hardcover / e-Book / audiobook
The Scent Keeper, May 2021
Mass Market Paperback / e-Book
The Scent Keeper, February 2020
Trade Size / e-Book (reprint)
The Scent Keeper, June 2019
Hardcover / e-Book
The Lost Art Of Mixing, February 2013
Hardcover / e-Book
Joy For Beginners, June 2012
Trade Size / e-Book (reprint)
Joy For Beginners, June 2011
Hardcover
The School of Essential Ingredients, January 2010
Trade Size (reprint)
The School Of Essential Ingredients, February 2009
Hardcover

THE SCHOOL OF ESSENTIAL INGREDIENTS
By: Erica Bauermeister

Reminiscent of Chocolat and Like Water for Chocolate, a gorgeously written novel about life, love, and the magic of food.

Putnam
February 2009
On Sale: January 22, 2009
Featuring: Chef Lillian
256 pages
ISBN: 0399155430
EAN: 9780399155437
Hardcover
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Fiction

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.

Read An Excerpt

Media Buzz

Morning Edition - June 11, 2009