In 2014, Boothbay resident Cherie Scott had an identity crisis. Sophia, her 6-year-old daughter, asked Scott to swap out their usual bedtime fairy tale for a real story. “What was it like when you were a little girl in India?”
With that question, Scott realized she’d not taught Sophia about their shared cultural heritage—about the childhood home she had loved and left behind; about cooking in her mother’s tiny, hot kitchen; and about the Indian-spiced aromas swirling through the house in Mumbai (ne Bombay) until 1995, when 16-year-old Scott and her parents immigrated to Vancouver, Canada.
So, she told Sophia real-life stories. She told her about eating ripe Alphonso mangoes on her family’s veranda. She recalled how she ate them as if they were pure gold, scraping the skins dry with her teeth as juice spilled down the front of her school uniform. These stories awakened in Scott a nostalgia for her childhood life so far away from Maine.
Less than three years after landing in Vancouver, Scott headed to acting school in New York City. There she met her American husband, Guy Scott, and in 2008 she moved with him to Maine to live a wholly American life, with Guy running a web development company and Cherie enjoying a career in marketing.
As much as she loved life in Maine, though, she realized she was culturally isolated. Scott found it nearly impossible to locate high-quality Indian food in the state. What existed was either “highly acidic, a sodium bomb, or too sweet,” she says. She realized she needed to reconnect with her Indian heritage.
In 2015, she created Mumbai to Maine, a blog, podcast, and social media platform celebrating tastemakers of Maine and sharing her own culinary pursuits along the way. This platform proved to be the first step on Scott’s path to building a Maine-produced brand of Indian simmer sauces.
She started by building a spice blend, sourcing turmeric, peppercorns, cumin, and Kashmiri chiles, toasting and grinding them to recreate a flavor that brought back a taste memory of her childhood home. The sauce she created with this spice blend, called Caldine, is a creamy coconut sauce common on the west coast of India. Her American family loved the sauce, but Scott felt it was too laborious to create on a weeknight, so she set out to find a way to preserve it in a jar. If she could batch-bottle it for her family, she could then also share it with the world. Her goal was to create a simple way for cooks to create Indian food at home. The jars would represent her story.
Scott enrolled in a course at the University of Maine Cooperative Extension School of Food & Agriculture on processing shelf-stable food products. She was accepted into the Top Gun small business training program run by the Maine Center for Entrepreneurs in 2020, earning a finalist spot for her performance in the pitch competition at the end of the 15-week course. She won $500 at Big Gig, a startup pitch-off competition sponsored by a group of municipal, education, and business organizations in the Penobscot River Valley. And she received word that Greenlight Maine would give her a $5,000 grant and feature her on the MPBN TV series Elevating Voices, which celebrates minority-owned and racially diverse businesses in Maine.
Scott launched her company, Mumbai to Maine, LLC. Her line of sauces, which includes her signature Caldine sauce, as well as Makhani, a buttery-tomato cream sauce featuring a North Indian Mughlai spice blend, and Saag, a Punjabi-spiced spinach sauce, hit the wholesale market in December 2020. The sauces, sold online and in specialty shops throughout Maine, sold out quickly.
Scott and her husband make the sauces in 30-jar batches, three times a week. Starting at 7 p.m., after working their day jobs, getting dinner for the kids, and sanitizing the kitchen for production purposes, the couple begins the eight-and-a-half-hour process of prepping, cooking, jarring, and cleaning up. “We wrap up at about 3 a.m.,” she says, adding that this is what they need to do to keep up with demand.
“No one said that handcrafting in small batches was easy!”
Scott plans to move production to a co-packer in Gray soon. A new line of sauces is in the works for 2022, as is a YouTube channel through which she’ll teach viewers how to cook with the sauces. She has her eye on a national Specialty Food Organization Sofi Award. She knows the competition is fierce, but “that only … feeds my immigrant sensibilities to be a barrier breaker and come out on top.”
In her bio, Scott writes,
“I was born and raised in Mumbai, India but I always wanted a piece of the American dream.”
Now she has it.
