“The School for Essential Ingredients” Comes to Life at Field Arts and Events Hall

Writer Erica Bauermeister has three loves: good food, books and conversation. 

Tuesday night, June 23, she’ll indulge in them all. And she’s inviting the rest of us to join her. 

“The School of Essential Ingredients: A Celebration of Food & Community” is an evening mixing a four-course dinner, Marrowstone Vineyards wines, and stories about cooking, writing and friendship. The setting for the 6 p.m. event is the Sunset Lounge on the second floor of Field Arts & Events Hall, 201 W. Front St., Port Angeles, and tickets are available at fieldhallevents.org.

Bauermeister, whose debut novel was published just before she turned 50, will share some behind-the-scenes looks at how that book took shape. She’ll also read passages connected to the courses. 

That novel was 2009's “The School of Essential Ingredients,” a tale of eight people who meet one another in a Monday-night cooking class. Among them are Claire, a young mom; Antonia, an Italian starting a new life in America, and Tom, a widower mourning the loss of his wife. 

Lillian, the chef and teacher, guides them as they learn to cook. Along the way her students, steeped as they are in the aroma and taste of real food, are changed. They start out strangers, learning their way around the kitchen. They open their hearts and become friends.  

The evening at Field Hall’s Sunset Lounge won’t be the usual wine-pairing dinner, said Jeff Andrew, the chef who developed the menu. During the meal, guests will change places at the table, to meet new dining companions. A place-card arrangement will pair people up, course by course.  

It will unfold like this: Guests will sit with the people they came with for the first course: pea shoot salad with pine nuts and manchego, paired with Marrowstone’s 2025 Grenache Blanc. Then they will sit with someone new for the second course, which Andrew calls “garden risotto meets Claire’s roasted crab,” with tastes of the winery's 2023 Sangiovese. 

Next is house-made Pappardelle tossed with Tom’s pasta sauce, paired with Marrowstone’s 2025 Albarino for the third course—along with a new dining and conversation partner. For the final dish, Carl’s white cake filled with strawberry mousse, guests will return to the people with whom they began the evening. The wine: Mourvedre Rosé from Marrowstone Vineyards. 

This might be a little daunting, of course. Yet Bauermeister, who hosted a dinner like this back when her novel was about to be published, said it conjured a delicious kind of magic.

“People had amazing conversations, because when you know you only have 20 minutes [with this companion], you give it your all,” she said. 

Bauermeister feels strongly about the power of food to relax, delight and connect us. Here’s a chance, she added, to not talk about what you do for work, but instead converse on what you care about in life, and what food has meant to you. 

In the 17 years since “The School of Essential Ingredients” appeared, Bauermeister has become a best-selling author. Her novels include “Joy for Beginners,” (2011), “The Lost Art of Mixing” (2013), “The Scent Keeper” (2019), and “No Two Persons” (2023). She’s also published a memoir, “House Lessons: Renovating a Life,” about her family’s overhaul of their home in Port Townsend. The book was the Port Townsend Community Read in 2021. 

Bauermeister, who is at work on a new novel to be published next June, is also a faculty member at this year’s Centrum Port Townsend Writers Conference July 12 through 19. She’ll do morning intensive sessions with participants, give a craft lecture, and read from her work during one of the free faculty readings held each night of the conference. 

Bauermeister’s night to read, along with writers Dawn Pichón Barron and Claudia Rowe, will be July 15; these public events start at 7 p.m. in the Wheeler Theater at Fort Worden State Park. More information about the Port Townsend Writers Conference is found at centrum.org.