The Lost Art of Mixing (A School of Essential Ingredients Novel)

by Erica Bauermeister

After the exhilaration that was summer in the Pacific Northwest, autumn was like the sigh of an adolescent who realizes he must indeed grow up.

wonder, how much could you hold in your arms if they

weren’t full of the constantly falling pieces of yourself?

She liked to think of Isabelle going into the pantry, finding something she wanted but didn’t expect to be there, realizing someone had thought of her.

Chloe stopped. She’d never thought of it before—how, as a child, whenever she had gone to make a batch of cookies, there was always a new package of chocolate chips in the cabinet.

MEMORIES TURNED INTO RECIPES, recipes turned into stories.

but sometimes it was rather luxurious to be in the passenger seat. You could let your mind wander.

“The point is if you believe I would never do it on purpose—and if I believe

the same of you. That’s how you deal with stuff.”

Lillian’s love for her kitchen was the radiant gratitude

of an artist for a space where imagination moves without obstacles, the small, quiet happiness of finding a home, even if the other people in it are passing through—maybe even a bit because of that.

evanescent,

somehow food and love could fix anything.

it was the creation of the dish that spoke to her—the careful warming of the milk and the beating of the eggs, the dark mystery

of nutmeg, the pouring of the liquid into small, round ramekins that she would set in a shallow bath of water in the oven, the watching as all the parts came together and turned from liquid to solid, gentled white and then just slightly gold.

the intimacy of familiarity,

chefs who knew much and pretended more,

order to live, sometimes you simply had to leap into the gap left by sorrow, the only hope that you would feel the solid ledge of the other side under your feet as you fell.

“I loved turning on the burner in the morning, that whoosh it makes when it lights. It meant the day was starting.

Talking with her was like driving at night, not knowing where you were going and then, just for a moment,

seeing something you recognized better than yourself. It made her feel off-balance.

She didn’t even need to count before

words and ideas, faces and memories would scatter off into corners where she couldn’t find them. Sometimes they came back; other times they were simply gone.

“It’s kind of like an attic,” she said to Rory. “It has all your stuff but somebody else keeps throwing empty boxes and blankets on top of it, so you can’t always find what you’re looking for.”

It was interesting, Isabelle thought, the children that chose you. Some came through your body; others came in cars in the middle of the night. Sometimes it seemed as if the ones who had their own transportation were easier.

Astonishing how many recollections could be held inside one bowl,

She held on so tightly to an idea of family that she often overlooked the people within her own.

grief was a country as difficult to leave as it had been terrible to enter.

“They aren’t leftovers,” Charlie used to tell him as she took the bits and pieces of a

previous day’s meal out of the refrigerator. “They’re a head start.”

her insights a river you could flow into, float down,

knowing you would be taken care of.

He wondered if a baby that had spent its gestation on the water would love boats later, or perhaps simply come into the world believing it was as peaceful as everything that had come before. It would be nice to think so.

but with adults, it was as if they were talking through oxygen masks; you had to concentrate hard to understand what they were really saying.

the language that ran underneath their words tended to hold the meaning.

Sometimes Finnegan wondered why adults used words at all. Some days words seemed more like clothes, created to distract attention from things you didn’t want other people to notice.