Celebrate Maine Home Cooking!
Includes Sister Marie’s Whole Wheat Bread & Sister Frances’ take on Shaker Stewed Tomatoes, including photos from our Shaker Library archives.
Lobster Newburg, boiled dinner, bean hole suppers, whoopie pies, and more! If there’s one thing that brings Mainers together, it’s the flavors of this great state. Whether we’re teaching our kids to cook family recipes, or gathered together and sharing them at the table, we know that our food traditions bring us together as a community. The Maine Bicentennial Community Cookbook celebrates Maine’s rich culinary traditions—old and new— exploring indigenous foodways, hearty Yankee cuisine, community cookbook classics, and favorite dishes of new Mainers. This collection of more than 200 recipes spans kitchens across the state: pulling dishes from grandma’s recipe box, award-winning chefs, Maine personalities, and rustic fishing camps. Celebrating the state’s whole community with recipes from all 16 counties, this cookbook includes heartwarming stories and dishes from both prominent and everyday Mainers, and is beautifully illustrated with family photos, handwritten recipe cards and historic community cookbook covers. This lovely testament to home cooking and the community cookbook tradition in Maine reminds us how the food we cook connects us to the people and places we love. It will surely become a treasured keepsake of Maine’s Bicentennial celebration for all who love to cook—and eat!
Proceeds from community cookbooks have historically gone to benefit a cause within the community. Working with food security advocates within the state, $2 from every book sold will support organizations fighting hunger in Maine.
“True to genre, the book provides a colorful snapshot of places, people, and history, via short personal stories that accompany the recipes and tell about toting wax-paper-wrapped whoopie pies to work in the potato fields or recreating the spicy meatball subs a grandmother used to make to sell at fairs during the Great Depression. ‘The recipes aren’t really the most important thing,’ Schatz says, ‘The most important things are the stories and the sentiments behind the recipes.’”—Down East Magazine
