Down East Delicious: 175 Recipes from Down East Kitchens
By Sandra Oliver
Sandy Oliver, of course, should be a familiar name to readers of The Working Waterfront. For many years, she has written the “Journal of An Island Kitchen” column for the newspaper. Oliver studied as a food historian and who, as her column tagline notes, “gardens, cooks, and writes on Islesboro.” She also wrote the column “Taste Buds” for the Bangor Daily News for many years.
Her new book, Down East Delicious: 175 Recipes from Down East Kitchens, is joined by a reissue of her earlier Maine Home Cooking.
The recipes from readers of her columns have become content for the two cookbooks. She loves getting recipes, she notes, especially those specific to Maine, which have been passed along generations and still hold up, and often include some family history. And she gets lots of questions asking for time-tested recipes, and for her own personal favorites.
There’s “swaggon,” for example. Cooked on the stove top, the dry beans include some salt pork and onion…
Oliver enjoys providing suggestions for using seasonal produce, as home gardening is a favorite activity. In her August column for The Working Waterfront she provided great suggestions for beets (use raw beets baked with butter and blue cheese, or grated raw beets and sweet potatoes mixed together and fried like latkes.) In Maine Home Cooking, Oliver features a beet relish recipe. Using cooked and cubed beets with horseradish and cider vinegar, and sugar and salt to taste, she thinks of it more as a salad than a garnish.
On the topic of relishes, her introduction begins, “Basically, making relish seems to be about taking some firm bland vegetable that you have a lot of, chopping it all up, adding spices, sugar, and vinegar, and putting it away to brighten up the flavor of dinner later on.” One example is a zucchini relish.
There are also recipes for chutneys, one of the things I most like to make every summer (and enjoy the rest of the year, with a fruity schmear topping goat cheese or cheddar on a cracker). Last year I used some of my apples and quince for chutney, this year blueberries. But next year I’ll try a recipe from this book and use rhubarb.
In Down East Delicious, Oliver shares what she’s received as recipes, questions, and suggestions from 2012 on. Delving even more deeply into Maine’s classic cooking, she provides recipes for dishes that might be unfamiliar.
There’s “swaggon,” for example. Cooked on the stove top, the dry beans include some salt pork and onion, with milk and butter added towards the end, making it more of a chowder or stew.
With a French-Canadian influence, we get poutine, and from Ireland, a Dublin coddle.
Other less-familiar foods you may not have heard of, eaten, or made at home include old-fashioned milk toast, mincemeat (which can utilize venison), vinegar pie, lumberjack cookies, double-scrub chocolate cake, and smoked haddock with mashed potatoes and cheese.
Marlborough Pudding Pie is an apple-type pie, made with applesauce instead of sliced raw fruit. I’m looking forward to baking that, as I usually freeze homemade applesauce every fall and enjoy new recipes using it
Both books feature Oliver’s homespun stories about recipes, contributors, and history, and offer real insight into authentic Downeast cooking, from both the past and the present. And you don’t need to feel you’ve embarked on scholarly research while perusing recipes here—the books read as if a friendly neighbor is sharing her passion with you and making it accessible.
Oliver, from experience in her own Islesboro kitchen, appreciates flexibility in recipes and points out when minor changes are possible, given availability of ingredients. And most importantly, these books help make old styles of cooking things, like using a wood-fueled stove, now work in our 21st century kitchens and with modern-day groceries.
Tina Cohen is a Massachusetts-based therapists who spends part of the year on Vinalhaven.
