Writer Kate Shaffer and photographer Derek Bissonnette bring the vibrancy of the Maine food system into focus on the pages of The Maine Farm Table Cookbook: 125 Homegrown Recipes from the Pine Tree State (Countryman Press, June 2021). Through the lens of Bissonnette’s camera and via Shaffer’s lyrical pen, readers get planted in wheat fields in Somerset and Aroostook counties and then are transported into the commercial kitchen of renowned bakers Kerry Hanney of Night Moves Bread + Pie in Biddeford and Lydia Moffet and Tim Semler at Tinder Hearth in Brooksville, who use local flours in products from Baltic rye bread to wood-fired pizza dough.
Readers visit Dandelion Spring Farm in Bowdoinham to harvest vegetables with farmer Beth Schiller and move into the kitchen to make her recipe for Wilted Frisee Salad with Ground Lamb and Fresh Chile. Shaffer explains Colin and Arianna Smorawski’s techniques for humanely and sustainably raising the heritage Meishan pigs on Roaring Lion Farm in Sedgwick, and then she steps cooks through her recipe for Pork Chops in Creamy Pepper Sauce.
Readers can take a turn in Linda Greenlaw’s lobster boat docked in Surry, ride in a flat-bottom boat to see oysters growing in floating cages with Abigail Carroll, founder of Nonesuch Oysters in Scarborough, and make their own pot of Blue Hill Bay Mussels with Crispy Kale as chef Devin Finigan serves them in her Deer Isle restaurant, Aragosta at Goose Cove.
Shaffer admits in her introduction that no single book could tell the story of every one of Maine’s 7,600 farms on record. But the stories she does tell, and the recipes she’s chosen to illustrate how good local Maine food can be, are well worth the read.
Here are a few summertime recipes to whet your appetite for your own copy of The Maine Farm Table Cookbook, available at your favorite local bookseller now.
