Cooks in the past were comfortable about adapting recipes to ingredients at hand, including finding sweet substitutes for white sugar such as maple sugar, molasses, and even thickened apple cider.
Conservationists want us to eat so-called “trash” fish, such as skate, as a way to help save overfished species. Cookbook author Nancy Harmon Jenkins explains that skate is actually delicious and quite easy to cook.
Rhubarb is a tough perennial; along with some humans, deer and woodchucks don’t eat it. It is one of the first edibles to appear in May, with long red stalks ready for use in desserts and, increasingly, in the 21st century, in savory dishes, too.
If you heat your house with wood or own a woodstove, winter is the perfect time to make sea salt. The process, explains Karen O. Zimmermann, is simple: collect salt water in buckets and boil it down in a large pan on the top of your woodstove.
Seafood shacks have strung together a summer narrative for writer Deborah Corey's family. Each spring she and her family wait for the seafood shacks to open, marking each of their opening days on the family calendar. When Corey envisions a map of the Maine coast, she sees the shacks marked by red thumbtacks.
Whelks are not one of Maine’s more glamorous seafood offerings; gnarly and intimidating they require careful cleaning and preparation, including getting them out of their spiral shells. But as food writer Nancy Harmon Jenkins explains, once the hard work is done, whelks make a tasty meal.
Martha Ballard, a midwife who lived in the Hallowell area of Maine at the turn of the eighteenth century, kept a journal of her daily life for 27 years. Looking back at the entries is a wonderful way to learn about early gardening and food preparation. Food writer and Contributing Editor Sandy Oliver takes a look at what Martha was doing in June.
