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It was during Lillian’s first skirmishes with the printed word
that she discovered cooking. In the time since Lillian’s father
had left, housework had become for Lillian’s mother a travel
destination rarely reached; laundry, a friend one never remembered
to call. Lillian picked up these skills by following her
friends’ mothers around their homes, while the mothers pretended
not to notice, dropping hints about bleach or changing
a vacuum bag as if it were just one more game children played.
Lillian learned, and soon her home — at least the lower four and
a half feet of it — developed a certain domestic routine.
But it was the cooking that occurred in her friends’ homes
that fascinated Lillian — the aromas that started calling to her
just when she had to go home in the evening. Some smells were
sharp, an olfactory clatter of heels across a hardwood floor. Others
felt like the warmth in the air at the far end of summer.
Lillian watched as the scent of melting cheese brought children
languidly from their rooms, saw how garlic made them talkative,
jokes expanding into stories of their days. Lillian thought
it odd that not all mothers seemed to see it — Sarah’s mother,
for instance, always cooked curry when she was fighting with
her teenage daughter, its smell rocketing through the house like
a challenge. But Lillian soon realized that many people did not
comprehend the language of smells that to Lillian was as obvious
as a billboard.
Perhaps, Lillian thought, smells were for her what printed
words were for others, something alive that grew and changed.
Not just the smell of rosemary in the garden, but the scent on
her hands after she had picked some for Elizabeth’s mother, the
aroma mingling with the heavy smell of chicken fat and garlic
in the oven, the after-scent on the couch cushions the next day.
The way, ever after, Elizabeth was always part of rosemary for
Lillian, how Elizabeth’s round face had crinkled up into laughter
when Lillian had pushed the small, spiky branch near her nose.
Lillian liked thinking about smells, the same way she liked
the weight of Mary’s mother’s heavy saucepan in her hands,
or the way vanilla slipped into the taste of warm milk. She
remembered often the time Margaret’s mother had let her help
with a white sauce, playing out the memory in her head the
way some children try to recover, bit by detail, the moments
of a favorite birthday party. Margaret had pouted, because she
was, she declared stoutly, never allowed to help in the kitchen,
but Lillian had ignored all twinges of loyalty and climbed up on
the chair and stood, watching the butter melt across the pan like
the farthest reach of a wave sinking into the sand, then the flour,
at first a hideous, clumping thing destroying the image until it
was stirred and stirred, Margaret’s mother’s hand over Lillian’s
on the wooden spoon when she wanted to mash the clumps,
moving instead slowly, in circles, gently, until the flour-butter
became smooth, smooth, until again the image was changed by
the milk, the sauce expanding to contain the liquid and Lillian
thought each time that the sauce could hold no more, that the
sauce would break into solid and liquid, but it never did. At the
last minute, Margaret’s mother raised the cup of milk away from
the pot, and Lillian looked at the sauce, an untouched snowfield,
its smell the feeling of quiet at the end of an illness, when the
world is starting to feel gentle and welcoming once again.
. . .
When Lillian reached the age of eight, she began to take
over the cooking in her own household. Her mother raised no
objections; food had not disappeared along with Lillian’s father,
but while it was not impossible to cook while reading, it was
problematic, and because of Lillian’s mother’s tendency to mistake
one spice for another if a book was unusually absorbing,
meals had become less successful, if also occasionally more
intriguing. All the same, the transfer of cooking duties from
mother to daughter was met with a certain amount of relief on
both sides.
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.
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