Residing on Maine's Islesboro Island, Sandra Oliver is a revered food historian with a vast knowledge of New England food history, subsistence living, and Yankee cooking. For the past five years, she has published her weekly recipes column, "Tastebuds", in the Bangor Daily News. The column has featured hundreds of recipes—from classic tried-and-true dishes to innovative uses for traditional ingredients. Collecting more than 300 recipes from her column and elsewhere, and emphasizing fresh, local ingredients, as well as the common ingredients found in most kitchens, this volume represents a new standard in home cooking.

An evocative, gorgeous four-season look at cooking in Maine, with 100 recipes No one can bring small-town America to life better than a native. Erin French grew up in Freedom, Maine (population 719), helping her father at the griddle in his diner. An entirely self-taught cook who used cookbooks to form her culinary education, she now helms her restaurant, The Lost Kitchen, in a historic mill in the same town, creating meals that draw locals and visitors from around the world to a dining room that feels like an extension of her home kitchen. The food has been called “brilliant in its simplicity and honesty” by Food & Wine, and it is exactly this pure approach that makes Erin’s cooking so appealing—and so easy to embrace at home. This stunning giftable package features a vellum jacket over a printed cover.

Maine is one of the hottest culinary destinations in the country. To celebrate, Down East Books is proud to present the Best Maine Food series, a new line of cookbooks showcasing the state's great food. Kicking it off is this revamped edition of a true Maine classic. In these redesigned pages, longtime food columnist Marjorie Standish tells you how to prepare everything from finnan haddie to dilly green tomatoes to blueberry buckle.

Go back to the basics in the kitchen and rediscover the joy of cooking with simple tools and fresh local and seasonal ingredients. A complete guide to the essentials of home cooking from the popular cooking school at Maine's Salt Water Farm. Good cooking has nothing to do with fancy equipment, complicated recipes, or trendy, hard-to-find ingredients. The fundamentals are really quite simple: it's about instinct, technique, and freshness. Annemarie Ahearn, dubbed by Food & Wine Magazine as someone "changing the way America eats," believes that developing these essential skills can lead to a greater sense of confidence and fulfillment in the kitchen. Her credo: 1) Grow at least some of your own food to establish a deeper connection with the earth that provides your nutrition, 2) Be familiar with a range of cooking techniques so you can develop flexibility and intuition in the kitchen, and 3) Master the age-old cooking skills that will serve you your whole lifetime--cooking in cast iron, sharpening knives, and using a mortar and pestle. With these classic skills under your belt, and with 75 tried-and-true seasonal recipes, you'll be on your way to putting consistently delicious, satisfying meals on the table every day while you learn to fall in love with the process.

From the Atlantic Ocean to well-tended organic farms, Maine offers some of the best raw materials for rustic, hearty cuisine. Add the independent spirit and quiet humor of the people and it becomes apparent why chefs, fisherman, and artisans are drawn to the state. Their fierce pride, respect for the land, and lack of pretension are recognizable ingredients in the food they produce, from fresh lobster to blueberry pancakes. Dive in to the salty personality of Maine’s cuisine!

Down-home recipes from the best restaurants, food artisans, bakeries, and farmers across the state. Eating a hot buttered lobster roll is like taking a mini-vacation: it conjures the scent of salt in the air and the crash of waves on the rocks—the essence of a day at the beach in Maine. Now, with Real Maine Food you can re-create this humble delicacy as well as more than 100 other Maine dishes at home. Maine has developed its own distinctive regional cuisine, characterized foremost by the excellent seafood caught off its pristine coast but also by the wild blueberries, potatoes, and other produce from its rich soils. The authors take a ride on a nineteenth-century schooner, build a beach clambake, and judge a pie-eating contest at a state fair—all in search of the best recipes from accomplished small-town home cooks as well as renowned restaurants and food artisans. Among the dishes are Smoked Haddock and Leek Pie, Lobster Gruyere Grilled Cheese, Crab and Corn Frittata, Blueberry Pancakes, and Peanut Butter Whoopie Pies. Real Maine Food taps into the magic that draws visitors to the state year after year.

There's nothing better than settling into a nice, warm, home-cooked meal at the kitchen table. Kathy Gunst takes us into her own kitchen, introducing us to the flavors of fresh, seasonal Maine ingredients prepared in simple and inspiring ways. With essays conveying the mood of each month, Gunst gives readers a sense of Maine food and life. She follows each essay with a handful of recipes incorporating the seasonal ingredient or theme.