Spreading the Joy of Community Cooking

Second Volume of Maine Cookbook on Tap This Summer

The 13,000 copies of the award-winning Maine Bicentennial Community Cookbook, published in 2020, evidently did not satisfy Mainers’ raging appetite for homegrown recipes lovingly packaged with endearing stories and photos depicting how our neighbors cook. That cookbook’s curators, Margaret Hathaway, Don Lindgren, and Karl Schatz, are rolling out a second Maine community cookbook later this month.

While the format of the Maine Community Cookbook, Volume 2: 200 More Recipes Celebrating Home Cooking in the Pine Tree State is like its predecessor—recipes, stories, photographs, and food-related memorabilia submitted by folks living throughout Maine or reprinted from historic community cookbooks—the recipes will be new to readers, with many arranged by their iconic ingredients such as apples, blueberries, rhubarb, potatoes, and lobster. Contributors to this volume include home cooks from all 16 counties, chefs and food writers, and well-known Mainers like senator Olympia Snowe, historian Heather Cox Richardson, Olympic gold medalist Joan Benoit Samuelson, and humorist and summer resident John Hodgman. This volume also includes more contributions from children and high school students, including some from a cooking (and gardening) club from Nokomis High School in Newport.

The essays included in the book tackle different segments of the state’s culinary culture and history. There are pieces on the constitutional amendment on the right to food (adopted in 2021) and the history of vegetarianism in Maine. Others look at Avis Dudley’s homestead restaurant in Aroostook County and what dinner was like on Malaga Island, the 41-acre landmass at the mouth of the New Meadows River inhabited by a fishing community of Black, white, and interracial people until they were forced to leave in 1912. Some essay contributors return from the first volume—authors Nancy Harmon Jenkins and Sandy Oliver share more of their encyclopedic knowledge of Maine’s food—but there are new voices, too, like Somali immigrant and author Abdi Nor Iftin and Good Shepherd Food Bank of Maine president Kristen Miale.

As with the first iteration of this community cookbook, $2 from the sale of each book will be distributed to nonprofits fighting food insecurity and inequity in Maine. Sales of the first volume enabled the authors to distribute over $20,000 to organizations fighting hunger in each of Maine’s counties. The book, being published by Islandport Press in Yarmouth, will be available from local booksellers after June 15.

For more information: maine200cookbook.com

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