Excerpt from The School of Essential Ingredients by Erica Bauermeister, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

She shook the last of the water from the potatoes. The skins came off easily, like a shawl sliding off a woman’s shoulders. Lillian dropped one hunk after another into the big metal bowl, then turned on the mixer and watched the chunks change from shapes to texture, mounds to lumpy clouds to cotton. Slices of butter melted in long, shining trails of yellow through the moving swirl of white. She picked up the smaller pan and slowly poured the milk into the potatoes. Then salt. Just enough.

Almost as an afterthought, she went to the refrigerator and pulled out a hard piece of Parmesan cheese. She grated some onto the cutting board, then picked up the feathery bits with her fingers and dropped them in a fine mist into the revolving bowl, where they disappeared into the mixture. She turned off the mixer, then ran her finger across the top and tasted.

“There,” she said. She reached up into the cabinet and took down two pasta bowls, wide and flat, with just enough rim to hold an intricate design of blue and yellow, and placed them on the counter. Using the large wooden spoon, she scooped into the potatoes and dropped a small mountain of white in the exact center of each bowl. At the last minute, she made a small dip in the middle of each mountain, and then carefully put in an extra portion of butter.

“Mom,” she said, as she carefully set the bowl and fork in front of her mother, “dinner.” Lillian’s mother shifted position in her chair toward the table, the book rotating in front of her body like a compass needle.

Lillian’s mother’s hand reached for the fork, and deftly navigated its way around the Collected Works and into the middle of the potatoes. She lifted the fork into the air.

“It was the first time, in a manner, that I had known space and air and freedom, all the music of summer and all the mystery of nature. And then there was consideration — and consideration was sweet. . . .”

The fork finished the journey to Lillian’s mother’s mouth, where it entered, then exited, clean.

“Hmmmm . . .” she said. And then all was quiet.



“I’ve got her,” Lillian told Elizabeth as they sat eating toast with warm peanut butter at Elizabeth’s house after school.

“Because you got her to stop talking?” Elizabeth looked skeptical.

“You’ll see,” said Lillian.

Although Lillian’s mother did seem calmer in the following days, the major difference was one that Lillian had not anticipated. Her mother continued to read, but now she was absolutely silent. And while Lillian, who had long ceased to see her mother’s reading aloud as any attempt at communication, was not sorry to no longer be the catch-pan of treasured phrases, this was not the effect she had been hoping for. She had been certain the potatoes would be magic.



On her way home from school, Lillian took a shortcut down a narrow side street that led from the main arterial to the more rural road to her house. Halfway down the block was a small grocery store that Lillian had found when she was seven years old on a summer afternoon when she had let go of her mother’s hand in frustration and set off in a previously untraveled direction, wondering if her mother would notice her absence.

On that day years before, she had smelled the store before she saw it, hot and dusty scents tingling her nose and pulling her down the narrow street. The shop itself was tiny, perhaps the size of an apartment living room, its shelves filled with cans written in languages she didn’t recognize and tall candles enclosed in glass, painted with pictures of people with halos and sad faces. A glass display case next to the cash register was filled with pans of food in bright colors — yellows and reds and greens, their smells deep and smoky, sometimes sharp. The woman behind the counter saw Lillian standing close to the glass case, staring.

From the prologue to The School of Essential Ingredients by Erica Bauermeister. Copyright Erica Bauermeister 2009. All rights reserved. No part of this book maybe reproduced without written permission from the publisher.