Kate Shaffer - The Maine Farm Table Cookbook

the MAINE FARM TABLE COOKBOOK

125 Homegrown Recipes from the Pine Tree State

KATE SHAFFER

with photography by

DEREK BISSONNETTE

THE COUNTRYMAN PRESS

A Division of W. W. Norton & Company

Independent Publishers Since 1923

Text copyright 2021 by Kate Shaffer

Photographs by Derek Bissonnette copyright 2021 by Derek Bissonnette

Photographs on pages 27, 28, 30, 32, 33, 35, 47, 48, 55, 60, 71, 72, 75, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 87, 88, 90 (top), 91, 96, 103, 108, 109, 113, 114, 117, 118, 123, 124, 131, 132, 135, 136, 141, 142, 145, 151, 156, 158, 161, 162, 165, 166, 167, 179, 181, 182, 188, 190, 196, 198, 199, 201, 202, 204, 207, 208, 213, 215, 216, 223, 227, 228, 231, 237, 238, 239, 241 (top), 245, 249, 250, 251 (left), 252, 257, 260, 261, 262, 269, 274, 276, 284, 285, 287, 288 from the Lines+Angles library courtesy of Lines+Angles, Inc.

Photographs on pages 65 and 66 by Nicole Franzen

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, The Countryman Press, 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110

For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact W. W. Norton Special Sales at or 800-233-4830

Art director: Allison Chi

Production manager: Devon Zahn

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Names: Shaffer, Kate, author.

Title: The Maine farm table cookbook : 125 homegrown recipes from the Pine Tree State / Kate Shaffer.

Description: New York, NY : The Countryman Press, a division of W. W. Norton & Company, Independent Publishers Since 1923, [2021] | Includes index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020048980 | ISBN 9781682684856 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781682684863 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Cooking, AmericanNew England style. | CookingMaine. | Cooking (Fish) | Cooking (Lobsters) | LCGFT: Cookbooks.

Classification: LCC TX715.2.N48 S52 2021 | DDC 641.5974dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020048980

The Countryman Press

www.countrymanpress.com

A division of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110

www.wwnorton.com

978-1-68268-485-6 (pbk.)

Recipe Credits:

(page 20): The Millers Table at Maine Grains

(page 24): Janice Bouchard

(page 38): Lynne Rowe

(page 44): Lydia Moffet

(page 54): Beth Schiller

(page 58): Noah Barnes

(page 67): Reprinted from The Lost Kitchen 2017 by Erin French

(page 94): Sara Jenkins

(page 101): Margaret Mitchell

(page 120): Betty Tyler

(page 149): Devin Finigan

(page 154): Abigail Carroll

(page 172): Benjamin Conniff

(page 288): Michele Levesque

(page 178): Linda Greenlaw

(page 185): Joshua Berry

(page 194): Ken Burkett

(page 212): Katia Holmes

(page 214): Jennell Carter & Alicia Menard

(page 234): Abby Snell

(page 254): Stacy Begin

(page 267): Sarah Havener Brown

This book is dedicated to my husband, Steve, who has the weirdest ideas.
Twenty-one years ago he said, In Maine, we can do anything. Lets go.

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

There are over 7,500 operating farms in Maine. That represents thousands more people who work to put fresh, close-to-home food on our plates every single day. I wish I could have written about them all. The same is true for the intensely creative chefs and innovative food producers using ingredients produced by friends and neighbors, connecting us all to this dynamic, essential, life-giving system. I wish I could have told all their stories.

But there are only so many pages in this book, and the unglamorous truth is that writers live and die by word counts and deadlines.

That said, my journey took me to farms and kitchens all over the state; a choose-your-own-adventure that was mapped out organically by word-of-mouth referrals from farm to farm, farm to chef, chef to farm, and chef to chef. It was a magical way to experience Maine, and I am so grateful to all the people who wrote out directions or connected me with their farming and cooking friends.

For me, this was a project like none Ive tackled before: a collaboration with recipe developers and testers, a chef/photographer, and an international food photography company. If it sounds weird to you, imagine being in the middle of it. But Shannon Day of StockFood made it all seem totally normal. And do-able. Even in the middle of a global pandemic and national civil crises. Ultimately, she is the reason this book is in your hands.

INTRODUCTION

I arrived in Maine in the summer of 2000, a California-born nomad, fresh from a six-month trek wandering east along the highways of America. My husband Steve and I had traveled as far as the roads would take us, stopping only by Maines jagged coastline to watch the white-capped expanse of ocean engulf our eastward horizon. For Steve, it was a quiet return home to a state that had captured his heart as an undergrad at the University of Maine in the early 1990s. For me, it was as good a place as any to start carving out a career in fooda career that I navely believed began and ended with my own skills as a cook, and had little to do with the land and people and culture around me.

My first job was in the newly built kitchen of our local food co-op in Blue Hill, Maine, a sparkling coastal village whose year-round residents supported themselves not only by harvesting lobster and clams, but also by farming the remarkably fertile, loose-soiled land to the north. The new cafe was meant to highlight the fruits, vegetables, and meats that local farmers brought to the co-ops doors on a daily basis.

Having lived almost my entire life on the northern California coast, I was no stranger to farm-to-table cooking. But growing up, these were culinary programs adopted by restaurants that were not only out of reach of my familys budget, but far from the experience of most cooks working the prep stations and the cooking line in most full-service restaurants. The majority of my own professional kitchen experience in California was prepping and cooking produce and meats delivered in the gigantic tractor trailer trucks of national food distributors.

On my first day in the kitchen of a humble Maine food co-op, I met and shook the hands of a half dozen farmers, young and old, who delivered produce picked from their fields that very morning. Suddenly, unwittingly and without credential, I was welcomed into the fold. What had once seemed an exclusive club of cooks was, in Maine, simply the way we did business. Without asking for it, and because I had landed arbitrarily in our nations easternmost state, I was gifted the privilege to work with the best, the freshest, and the most nutritious ingredients on the planetingredients grown in my own backyard.