Brooke Dojny - New England Home Cooking: 350 Recipes from Town and Country, Land and Sea, Hearth and Home

The Harvard Common Press
535 Albany Street
Boston, Massachusetts 02118
www.harvardcommonpress.com

Copyright 1999 by Brooke Dojny
Illustrations 1999 by John MacDonald

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Printed in the United States of America
Printed on acid-free paper

Previously published as The New England Cookbook, ISBN 978-1-55832-139-7

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dojny, Brooke.
[New England cookbook]
New England home cooking : 350 recipes from town and country, land and sea, hearth, and home / Brooke Dojny.
p. cm.(America cooks)
Originally published: New England cookbook. Boston, Mass. : Harvard Common Press, c1999.
Includes index.

Summary: "A witty, authoritative, and comprehensive celebration of cooking in the New England style with over 350 recipes for soups, salads, appetizers, breads, main courses, vegetables, jams and preserves, and desserts. Brooke Dojny, a native New Englander, has adapted traditional recipes to modern tastes by streamlining cooking methods and adding contemporary ingredients. She has also included such Yankee classics as North End Clams Casino, Wellfleet Oysters on the Half Shell with Mango Mignonette, Hashed Chicken with Dried Cranberries, Maine-Style Molasses Baked Yellow-Eyes, New England Cobb Salad, Shaker Whipped Winter Squash with Cape Cod Cranberries, Wood-Grilled Steak au Poivre with a Vegetable Bouquet, Pan-Seared Venison Steaks with Peppery Beach Plum Sauce, Succulent Braised Chicken Portuguese Style, Little Italy Calamari in Spicy Red Sauce, Grilled Chive-Tarragon Lobster, Reach House Blueberry Cobbler, and Chocolate Bread and Butter Pudding"Provided by publisher.

ISBN 978-1-55832-757-3 (pbk.)
1. Cooking, AmericanNew England style. I. Title.
TX715.2.N48D65 2011
641.5974dc23

2011023317

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Cover design by Night & Day Design
Cover photography by Joyce Oudkerk Pool, assisted by
Morgan Bellinger; food styling by Jason Wheeler
Text design by Joyce C. Weston
Text illustrations by John MacDonald

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For my father, Henry Brooke Maury, who took meclamming and let me help him clean fish, andwho taught me to care about all the details

A book of this scope doesn't get written without generous contributions from many, many other people.

The seed for New England Home Cooking was planted by editor Dan Rosenberg, who then nurtured it, brilliantly, to fruition.

When I was forced by time and deadline constraints to stop traveling and researching and to start cooking and writing, Susan Capone Maloney filled in gaps and kept feeding me material. She willingly and unstintingly shared her memories and her knowledge, particularly of the coastal areas of Massachusetts and Rhode Island around Narragansett Bay. And her large collection of community cookbooks provided additional valuable source material.

Others gave similar help in the form of stories, memories, information, professional expertise, and ideas for recipes. These include Karyl Bannister, Nancy Barr, Paul Brayton, Hilliard Bloom, Barbara Carlson, Gus Charos, Eliot Coleman, Marylu Cordisco, Beverly Cox, Peter Cucciara, Barbara Damrosch, Phyllis Diiorio, The Durgin Park Management, Ann Marie Dustin, Sandy Eaton, Mike Elia, Jon Ellsworth, Sarah Everdell, Des FitzGerald, Dorothy Fox, Henry Gonsalves, Mary Goodbody, Bill Grant, Lyndon Grant, Patrick Grant, Rhoda Grant, Rich Hanson, Tom Harty, John Henderson, Corin Hewitt, Janie Hibler, Jennifer Huntley-Corbin, Ann E. Kerrigan, Barbara Kuck, Calvin Kurimai, Leslie Land, Barbara Lauterbach, Helen Limberis, Nunzio LoRusso, Paula Marcoux, Jack Maury, Mary Maynard, Libby Dietz Minsky, John Moulton, Mara Nascimento, Gretchen O'Grady, Freddy Pagliuca, Jeff Paige, Peter Perez, Betsy Perry, Roseanne Person, Bill Petitte, Marilyn A. Poulos, Jim Reilly, Roger Rist, Cathy Romano, Sandra Roxo, Carol Rusnak, Elizabeth Russell, Jackie Salvo, Brinna Sands, Jennifer Schroth, Cynthia Sewell, Gregory Sharrow, Chris Singer, Suzanne Slater, Arnold and Luella Smith, Maddie Sobel, Avery Stephenson, Catherine Van Orman, Ann Walsh-Sullivan, Martha Welty, Allene White, Jasper White, Stephanie Whitney, Julia Wright, and Susan Young.

Deborah Callan brought professional expertise, a discerning palate, and her calm reassurance to the job of recipe testing.

I am grateful as always to friend and food-writing partner Melanie Barnard for her generosity and support.

The late food writer Richard Sax spoke to me throughout this project. He spoke from the pages of his superb book Classic Home Desserts, which I used as both a reference and a model, and I heard his voice in my ear, reminding me to strive for the highest standards of professional ethics.

I am indebted to my wonderful agent, Judith Weber, first for her patience and then for her remarkable professional skills.

And finally, my love and gratitude to my familymy mother, Hester Maury, my father, to whom this book is dedicated, my children, Matt and Maury Dojny, and especially to my forbearing (though seldom hungry) husband, Richard, whose steadfast support anchors our ship.

I had no idea what a lucky child I was. I thought every little girl in America woke up on Saturday morning, as I did in my house in Norwalk, in southern Connecticut, to the unmistakable perfume and sizzle of bacon cooking, and then ate the thick-cut, crisp-edged strips for breakfast with fluffy, eggy pancakes cascading with real maple syrup poured from a little glass jug. I thought every little girl's father caught flatfish and let her watch him clean them and then fried them and their popping orange roe in bacon fat in a cast-iron skillet for lunch. And that every mother made golden cornbread from scratch and served it on Saturday night to sop up the sauce from the sweet, molassesy baked beanssometimes homemade, sometimes B&M from a can doctored up with onion and mustard. I thought a home-cooked dessert every night was every child's birthrightwhether it be homely junket pudding or nutmeg-dusted baked custard or darkly mysterious Indian pudding or warm gingerbread with foamy sauce. And I thought every cookie jar was filled with spiced hermit cookies or Grandmother's brown-edged wafer cookies or snickerdoodles.

In the summer I thought everybody got to spend entire days at the beach digging in the mud for clams. And that on Cape Cod vacations everybody gathered buckets of beach plums for jelly and took a trip to Provincetown to see the Portuguese fishing boats and taste little slices of peppery linguia offered from the end of a fish-scaling knife. Or that everyone got to make a daily stop at a white "clam shack" for a fried scallop or clam or lobster salad roll.

When I got a little older and began venturing further afield in Norwalk, which happened to be, unbeknownst to me at the time, an almost perfect microcosm of the New England ethnic melting pot, I still didn't know how lucky I was to get taken to shop for "foreign" groceries in Little Italyfor pungent provolone cheese, garlicky salamis, bread with a hard crust, avocados! And I didn't know how lucky I was that, on my circuitous walking route home from school, I could first duck into the Greek grocery store for a buttery, sugar-dusted cookie, then stop at Lynn Yobaggy's cellar to fish a few homemade Hungarian pickles out of the barrels, and end up at Libby Dietz's, where we could hope her mother had just baked a batch of an exotic (to me) Jewish fruit-and-nut-filled spiral pastry. Sometimes I would go to Lucille Gagne's house, where always, on the back of the stove, simmered a pot of yellow split pea soup with big chunks of streaky salt pork. And once or twice I sat in the corner of Diane Gaeta's kitchen watching her grandmother preside over the making of her tomato "gravy."