What led you to write The School of Essential Ingredients?

In 1999, we had just returned to Seattle after two years living in northern Italy.  I missed food and being around people who celebrated its creation in even the most  simple meals. So, I took a cooking class.  The first night we killed crabs; it rattled me deeply and I had an image of a young mother and the effect it might have on her to kill something.  In the end, her story wasn’t at all what I expected.  And then I started thinking about all the different characters you could have in a class, and started wondering which foods would affect each one – revive a memory, create an epiphany, change the direction of a life – and that’s where the book came from.

How are food and cooking connected to the way we live our whole lives, not just the time we spend in the kitchen or at the table?

The act of cooking provides us with an opportunity to slow down, to focus on our senses rather than the speed of our world.  I think we all want that, miss that, in our everyday lives.  The people I know who pay attention to those things simply seem to be happier and more fulfilled, in the kitchen and out of it.    

My children were incredibly lucky, in that they were 7 and 10 when we moved to Italy and they learned that lesson early.  They are both dedicated foodies and truly creative cooks.  My son just went to college and he inherited my college blender.  The funny thing is, he took it because he wanted to be able to make pesto – which I can assure you was not a use it was put to in the early 1980s.

If you were to make a romantic meal for a cold winter night, what would it be?

 My favorite dish is a ragu sauce with Italian sausage and hamburger, crushed tomatoes, onions, carrots, red pepper flakes and white wine.  Simple – and the white wine is a surprise every time. If you are cooking it for someone before they arrive, the smell that greets him or her when you open the door is amazing, so full of love.  And if you are making it with someone, it can be all about trading tasks and doing the whole kitchen ballet, which can be utterly sensual.  

But actually, the most romantic dinner I ever had was in college, when my not-yet-husband took me to Griffith Park in Los Angeles and made fondue over a pot of sterno.  (and yes, that part of the book is a wink in his direction).

Do you believe in recipes, or is it enough just to know food and fundamental techniques?

I think cooking is a language, and like all languages, it’s easiest to learn early – although I am proof that that it is possible to learn later in life.  The women I met in Italy had learned cooking as children from their mothers.  They approached ingredients as parts of a conversation; they knew how each ingredient talked to the others and they didn’t need or want a recipe to tell them what to do.  They simply listened to the food.  And while I think that recipes can be very helpful – particularly in baking, where amounts need to be fairly specific – I think that if we pay too much attention to recipes we can lose track of our relationship with the ingredients.  

If I am making a dish I have no experience with, I love to go on the internet and find six different recipes for it.  I particularly like Epicurious.com, where people comment on how they have altered the recipes.  I take note of the ingredients, think about which ones sound intriguing, what I might add or subtract, and then I play.

There’s been a movement in recent years toward using local and organic food.  Where do you shop for this kind of food near your home in Seattle?  Where should people look for the best and least expensive local and organic produce in their own areas?

I think there is nothing more inspiring for a cook than a farmer’s market, and we’re lucky in Seattle to have many of them.  I love walking along the stalls at the end of summer and stopping to eat a sample slice of peach that just stops you with its sweetness, makes you wonder why all life can’t be that astonishingly full.  I am also an advocate of organic produce companies and the local farms that will deliver a box of produce to you on a weekly basis.  You never quite know what you are going to get, only that it is going to be fresh and organic – which I think brings out a lot of creativity in cooks.

You had two good friends who died of cancer as you wrote this book.  Also, your father died of a neurological disease.  How did these experiences influence your story?

In 2006, two dear friends of mine were dying, and my father  was failing from a disease related to Parkinson’s.  There is this circle that surrounds people who are dying and to be inside that circle is a beautiful and horrible honor – as the saying goes, there is no time for superficiality.  I was helping my friend Karin write down stories for her daughters; she said it seemed only fair if she got to read something of mine.  I gave her another manuscript, a memoir about renovating a house.  We went to lunch after one of her treatments and she looked across the table at me and said “I don’t know anything about writing, but I think you should write something more from your heart.”  I put down that manuscript and went back to the cooking stories, which I had been working on for years, but none of which I had ever been able to finish.  Neither Karin nor my friend Heidi is Charlie (the irony is that I wrote most of that story years before either were diagnosed).  But after they died, the end of Tom’s story became a place to put the pain of losing them.  Finishing that story was a gift – once I had one, all the rest fell in place.  So in many ways, this is Heidi and Karin’s book.

It is also my father’s book.  I grew up with a brilliant man, an engineer and musician who loved me dearly but rarely knew how to show it.  The irony of my father’s illness was that it included a dementia that made him, little by little, less able to use his brilliant mind and he began to live more from his heart.  I learned a lot about dignity and empathy and forgiveness being with my father as he slid into death, and in the process it profoundly changed the book I was writing.

This is your first novel, although you’ve written other books about literature.  How was the process of writing fiction different for you?

I remember once speaking with an author who had made a comment about her characters in her presentation – how they talked to her and told her what to do, etc.  I was skeptical, and said so.  I declared that no characters had ever talked to me.  She just looked at me and smiled this small smile and said “maybe you aren’t listening.”  
   
So I decided to listen.  Carl was the first character who appeared in my imagination.   I felt such a strong affection for him, and I wanted to do him justice; I wanted people to realize that his decision to stay in his marriage was something complicated and loving, rather than a lack of will.   It wasn't until six months later that I had a dream about his wife, and I realized that she had actually been planning on leaving him when she sat down at that kitchen table, but had changed her mind at the last moment – and that that decision, too, was complicated and loving, and gave their story a complexity I didn't know it had until then.   

Writing Helen’s story was a fascinating experience – and it made me realize how powerful the concept of interconnected stories can be, allowing the reader to delve deeply into each character, and to be, in the end, the only person who truly knows all the connections between them.

What do you hope readers take away from THE SCHOOL OF ESSENTIAL INGREDIENTS?

I always love it when a reader says “Oh, now I am going to go home and cook my husband/wife a real dinner” and you just know what that dinner will turn into.  But perhaps my favorite response was from an American reader living in a small town in Mexico.  She volunteers in a shelter for street kids, cooking them lunch once a week.  She said that even though the kids were obviously hungry, they wouldn’t always eat what she prepared.  She wrote that after she read Isabelle’s story, she cooked a real Mexican pork stew and that the kids ate every bite and she got 83 hugs.  

In the end, what I hope people take away from The School of Essential Ingredients is that cooking can be a sensual experience that slows down time, but that cooking is also about thinking about other people.  When we really cook for other people, we are seeing them – who they are, what will make them happy, excite or comfort them.  And when we eat something that has been prepared, beautifully and especially for us, we feel loved, taken care, seen.