Before there were crock pots for slow cooking, we had bean pots. I’ve been working my way through Marjorie Standish’s cook books which I know many of you have copies of. She wrote a weekly column for the Maine Sunday Telegram in Portland, and included recipes from her mother and grandmother that she remembered from […]
It is one thing to put up jars of jam and jelly when the strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, blueberries, and other fruits are in season; it is lots of fun to give them as gifts, and receive them, too. But really, how much toast can you eat with jam on it? At the end of any […]
Here is a recipe from Java by way South Africa, a truly different way of preparing vegetables than most of us Yankees have encountered. I first tasted this at my friend Barbara’s house, thought it delicious and asked for the recipe. It is called atjar, and it could be considered a way to preserve vegetables […]
Over the past few months we have featured a few recipes which have vegetables showing up in odd places. There is the Deep Dark Chocolate Zucchini Cake which nearly everyone I make it for absolutely adores; shaved, raw winter squash salad, Beet Chocolate Cake, and Beet Sorbet. A while back I asked for other recipes […]
Ham and lamb traditionally grace the Easter Dinner table along with scalloped potatoes, maybe asparagus, salad, and just because it is a special occasion, dinner rolls. Both make grand centerpiece roasts and if one of them is your favorite, I won’t talk you out of it. You might, however, like a change and this way […]
March is prime maple-syrup making time. This past Sunday was the annual 2017 Maine Maple Syrup Sunday observed with open-sugarhouses, samples, demonstrations of making maple syrup, and sugar-bush tours. And even though Vermont’s middle name is Maple Syrup, still Maine produces quite a lot of syrup and maple sugar products and this year eighty-five! sugaring […]
Cooked pumpkin on pasta? Excuse me? This is not your grandmother’s pasta dish. I am so old that my Swedish-born grandmother was one of the spaghetti eating pioneers of the late 1920s, early ‘30s. In Depression-era Waterbury, Connecticut, my grandparents’ Italian neighbors ate spaghetti with tomato sauce on it. Gram asked her neighbor for the […]
Let them eat corned beef. Instead, just for a change, let’s have some beef braised in good old Irish stout with onions, carrots, and prunes simmered alongside. Or, if you really love your annual corned beef and cabbage fest, then you can try out this recipe some other cold, dank March day when a bit […]
It cured my doldrums and maybe it will cure yours. Just before sleep one night, when I pondered how bored I was with all the commonplace sandwiches of my existence (tuna; cheese and lettuce; egg salad; peanut butter and jelly; meatloaf) the idea of combining cheddar, bacon, and apple floated into my imagination. Next day, […]
Does anyone still cook Sunday dinner? A kind of old-fashioned, main meal of the day with roast, potatoes, side vegetables and dessert that everyone sits down to around noon or 1:00 p.m.? Maybe you know that in the 1700 and 1800s most people ate their main meal around mid-day; easily done by farm families, […]
Sandy Oliver Sandy is a freelance food writer with the column Taste Buds appearing weekly since 2006 in the Bangor Daily News, and regular columns in Maine Boats, Homes, and Harbors magazine and The Working Waterfront. Besides freelance food writing, she is a pioneering food historian beginning her work in 1971 at Mystic Seaport Museum, where she developed a fireplace cooking program in an 1830s house. After moving to Maine in 1988, Sandy wrote, Saltwater Foodways: New Englanders and Their Foods at Sea and Ashore in the 19th Century published in 1995. She is the author of The Food of Colonial and Federal America published in fall of 2005, and Giving Thanks: Thanksgiving History and Recipes from Pilgrims to Pumpkin Pie which she co-authored with Kathleen Curtin. She often speaks to historical organizations and food professional groups around the country, organizes historical dinners, and conducts classes and workshops in food history and in sustainable gardening and cooking. Sandy lives on Islesboro, an island in Penobscot where she gardens, preserves, cooks and teaches sustainable lifeways.
