Wild Blueberry Pie

Blueberry pie, hot from the oven, sits on the sideboard to cool just a bit before it is brought to the table to be shared. The server, who is also the baker, cuts into it. The crust, layered and friable, shatters beneath the knife blade. Dark purple juices roll out, a syrupy cascade that flows slowly across the plate, glistening and sticky, surrounding berries that pop on the palate with the flavor of northern sunlight. Gathered by hand in the early morning, they were still dew-damp when they arrived in the kitchen. They were simply rinsed, sugared, and tumbled into a deep dish between two layers of lardy crust that turned deep gold in the oven’s heat.

Maine wild blueberries are tiny and sweet, with a hint of acid and an earthiness that bespeaks their terroir, the peaty soil resting on granite that forms Maine’s blueberry barrens. They grow only in Maine and parts of maritime Canada, and they are precious. Calling them “wild” is actually about as accurate as calling Maine lobster “wild.” Both emerge from the wild, and both reproduce in it, but it takes the guiding hand of humans to coax the wild stock to fruition.

What does Maine blueberry pie taste like? Like summer on the coast of Maine, like sun-bathed, salt-licked pastures. If you’re the cook, you make it once a week or so during the short season in late July and August, and no one ever gets tired of it. You make it with love, you serve it with vanilla ice cream, and when it’s all gone, when the last blueberry of the season has been baked into a pie and consumed, you look around you at all those happy faces, smiling through their blue-stained lips and teeth, and think, well there! That will do until next summer, when the blueberries come around again. — Nancy Harmon Jenkins

Nancy Harmon Jenkins is the author of eight books about food, including, The Four Seasons of Pasta, written with her daughter, chef Sara Jenkins. A former New York Times staff writer, she has also written for Saveur, Food + Wine, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and numerous other publications.

Grape-Nuts Ice Cream

As a teenager in the ’70s, I watched the TV commercials in which author and foraging proponent Euell Gibbons emerged from a stand of cattails, took a seat at a small rustic table, and poured himself a bowlful of Grape-Nuts, proclaiming it tasted like wild hickory nuts. This was grownups’ food, I understood. Serious food. Some years later, I figured I would consume those gravely nuggets and their 6 grams of fiber with appropriate earnestness.

Then I discovered Grape-Nuts ice cream. A mixture of vanilla ice cream and nubs of barley-and-wheat cereal, this frozen treat has a loyal following in New England, particularly Maine. The history of its rise to regional cult favorite is spotty, but its popularity here makes sense to me. The flavor profile — fragrant, rich, not-too-sweet — puts it in the same category as old-fashioned Maine desserts like Indian pudding and hermit bars (both of which, come to think of it, would be enhanced by a scoop of Grape-Nuts ice cream).

Vanilla ice cream transforms Grape-Nuts, and Grape-Nuts transforms vanilla ice cream. The ordinarily brittle barley-and-wheat kernels turn soft and slightly chewy, and they, in turn, impart an understated maltiness to the frozen custard. It’s more of a friendly interaction than the kind takeover wrought by chocolate chunks, cookie crumbles, and peanut-butter cups. It’s grown-ups’ ice cream — complex, subtle, and delicious. — Virginia M. Wright

Virginia M. Wright is a Down East contributing editor.

Salted Fish

Almost any white fish — cod, pollock, hake — salted just enough to preserve it and dried until pleasantly chewy, used to work for coastal Mainers a snack (good with whiskey!) or even dinner. Older Mainers might recall a slab of “slack-salted fish” nailed up outside the back door or strung from the clothesline, where a strip could be pulled off and chewed like jerky. Soaked, poached, and served with boiled vegetables, a slack-salted fish or salt-cod boiled dinner made a fine alternative to a corned-beef boiled dinner. The fish one was enhanced with egg sauce or fried salt-pork fat dribbled over and the crunchy bits sprinkled on.

Usually a home-produced item, slack-salted (that is, lightly salted) fish was briefly available for purchase even in small mom-and-pop stores until about 20 years ago. Travelers on Route 1 through Bucksport might recall a simple sign on a building next to the road that read “Slack Salt Fish.” Tozier’s in Searsport used to carry bits of slack-salted fish sold in plastic baggies, but it’s gone these days, possibly banished by health departments or abandoned by a younger generation uninterested in eating something that flies might have perched upon.

But air-drying fish is a centuries-old preservation practice. As early as the 1500s, the Maine coast hosted European fishermen who caught cod on the Grand Banks and salted them aboard their fishing vessels. Once ashore in Maine, often on rocky islands just off the mainland, fishermen laid still-wet salted fish out on drying racks, then barreled them up dry to take back to Europe. Unlike pliable slack-salted fish, dried cod required overnight soaking to make it edible. — Sandra Oliver

Contributing editor Sandra Oliver, who lives on Islesboro, is a food historian and the author of Maine Home Cooking and Food in Colonial and Federal America.

Boiled Dinner

By the time you’re finished slicing up corned beef and placing the potatoes, carrots, beets, onions, cabbage, and maybe rutabaga or turnips all around the meat, it becomes pretty obvious that a boiled dinner is all about vegetables. In this era of sous-vide cooking and grilled everything, boiled dinner sounds backwards, homely, even soggy. Prepared carefully, though, it’s exquisite and colorful, with vegetables richly flavored by the beef.

The famous Down East food writer Marjorie Standish claimed that Mainers started thinking about boiled dinner as soon as they dug their root vegetables in fall. True, probably, in the 20th century, but during the 18th and 19th centuries, stored root vegetables also sustained Mainers all through winter and into spring. Beef during these months had been butchered the season before, and as long as weather was reliably cold, the meat could be stored fresh or frozen naturally in a barn or outbuilding. Salting and corning extended the meat’s usefulness. Corned meat and root vegetables met up in pots cooked over open fires or on wood-burning stoves. Recipes for boiled dinner are virtually impossible to find until the 20th century — before that, no one needed a recipe.

Arguably the best reason for making boiled dinner is the toothsome hash made the next day, the leftovers chopped up, mixed, and fried. With beets, it’s called red-flannel hash. Warms me up just thinking about it. — S. O.

Smelt

As the ice begins to thicken throughout the Kennebec River estuary, the shacks start popping up on Merrymeeting Bay’s tidal streams. If everything goes right, smelt fishers renting from commercial smelt camps enjoy the venerable tradition of hunkering down in a toasty shanty for an incoming tide during the coldest weeks of a Maine winter, pulling up tiny fish from shallow river channels for midwinter feasts.

Smelt are anadromous, like salmon and shad: they spend most of their lives in salt water but spawn in fresh, swimming up rivers in January and February en route to spring spawning grounds. Among ocean-going fish, they’re diminutive. Adults run some 6 to 9 inches, barely a mouthful for the creatures that eat them, which include about every aquatic predator. In February, I watched a flotilla of mergansers diving on migrating smelt in the open water under Bowdoinham’s Cathance River bridge, hysterically contesting each silvery capture. Meanwhile, a few yards away, below Jim McPherson’s smelt camp, the tiny fish ran an annual gantlet of worm-baited hooks.

Inside a smelt shack, a row of maybe eight fishing lines are suspended above a race hole, a narrow gap in the ice kept open with saws and chisels. The usual bait is marine sandworms, sliced into gory morsels and threaded onto hooks. A fisher drops just enough weighted line to keep the bait off the muddy bottom and awaits the incoming tide. When a stream of smelt passes below, the action is a blast. The fish sometimes strike the hooks as fast as anglers can haul and re-bait them.

Cooking up a mess of smelt is an essential Bowdoinham winter experience. Delicate and cucumber-scented, they’re best fried or roasted tender-crisp — simply prepared and simply not to be missed. — Sam Hayward

Chef Sam Hayward is a partner at Portland restaurants Fore Street and Scales and a James Beard Foundation Best Chef – Northeast honoree.

Baked Beans

Steaming-hot baked beans in tiny brown-and-white bean pots fogged up the windows of our old Studebaker station wagon after we left the Eastern States Exposition in Springfield, Massachusetts, sometime in the 1950s. The Maine state exhibition building was our last stop, we were hungry, and the pots printed with “State of Maine Baked Beans” appealed, a snack to tide over my family on the two-hour ride home.

I don’t remember whether the beans in the pots were big or little, but I’ll bet they were big, probably yellow eyes, still the standard for traditional home-baked Maine beans. Certainly not little Navy beans, which Boston bean bakers use — I learned the distinction upon marrying a Mainer. Colorful Jacob’s Cattle, soldier, Marfax, and other beans still used in Maine are remnants of the hundreds of varieties once grown here, descendants of beans introduced to colonists by Native Americans, which, of course, grew more reliably in this climate than the European peas and beans settlers brought over.

The tradition of Saturday night baked beans — with a chunk of salt pork, served with brown bread and ham or hot dogs — is customary across New England and survives vigorously in Maine. Baked beans carried a stigma of poverty in the early 1900s, since eating them implied a family couldn’t afford meat. But a large pot fed families for days, and even larger kettles sustained the lumbermen during spring logging drives. The camp cook preceded the men downriver, dug bean holes along the shore, placed kettles inside atop hot coals, then buried them to bake slowly in-ground. Today, religious and civic organizations and families across Maine still make bean-hole beans for fundraisers, reunions, and “bean suppahs” at Grange halls, churches, Masonic lodges, and the like.

And my little bean pot? Still have it — it holds paper clips on my desk. — S. O.

Game Meat

I love eating game, but I don’t hunt. Luckily for me, most people I know in Maine either do or know someone who does. Procuring venison — either deer or moose — can be as easy as mentioning to the right person that you love to cook and eat it. That’s how my husband and I once acquired several pounds of moose from the freezer of a neighbor whose uncle had shot one that year.

That’s the thing about Maine game: it can’t be bought or sold — only shot, bartered, or freely given. My preference is to barter for it, since inevitably, both parties come out of the exchange feeling like they’ve won. Hunters tend to accumulate a lot of meat in their freezers, and they’re usually happy to swap some for something good, like whiskey.

Our friend and contractor, Andrew, a bow hunter, supplies us with ground venison, button-buck roasts, deer tenderloin and steaks. It’s the ultimate protein: free range, organic, lean, with a better omega 6 to omega 3 ratio than domestically raised meats. A note to the squeamish: it’s not as gamey as you think; if butchered and cooked right, it’s not gamey at all. I like to pan-fry Andrew’s expertly dressed deer steaks in butter and serve them with a blueberry–red wine reduction and mashed potatoes. Moose, the leanest meat I’ve ever eaten, begs for extra love in the form of fat and rewards the effort of barding with a little bacon or schmaltz.

Wild treasures abound in the Maine woods if you know how to find and gather them: fiddleheads, mushrooms, blueberries, wild greens. Game meat is maybe the ultimate prize, the top of the foraged food chain. It’s a dividend of patience and perseverance and marksmanship, yes, but also of friendship. — Kate Christensen

Portlander Kate Christensen is the author of Blue Plate Special: An Autobiography of My Appetites, How To Cook A Moose, and seven novels. Her most recent is The

Chowder

At its best, eating a bowl of chowder is like eating creamy brine packed with soft chunks (potato and fish) and chewy nuggets (clam and corn) — peppery, milky, porky seawater on the tongue, sliding down your gullet, chewy and soft in the teeth. My general recipe is probably very similar to yours and everyone else’s in New England. Chopped fatty pork with onion and celery all melted together as a base. A bay leaf and marjoram or thyme. Corn and diced potato. Plenty of fish broth and clam juice and whatever seafood you see fit to throw in — clams in their shells, shrimp and scallops, chunks of fresh, firm, white local fish like cod or haddock — with a dash of hot cream stirred in at the end and a sprinkle of minced parsley on each bowlful. Most people throw oyster crackers on top and/or a pat of butter to slide around and melt on the surface.

New Yorkers buy their chowder from corner delis in round cartons with packets of saltines. It’s a thin, oily, tomato-based stew full of slippery vegetables and tough little bits of clam. Manhattan clam chowder is a close relative of both Mediterranean bouillabaisse and San Francisco cioppino. I loved that stuff when I lived there, but now that I live in Maine, I can’t believe it goes by the same name.

At some point in history — I’m imagining a cold, blustery day, when tomatoes were out of season but the cow was producing in her winter barn — some resourceful cook (culinary lore suggests a French Canadian or Nova Scotian) stirred in some hot milk or a ladleful of fresh cream, and the result was so good, so deeply satisfying, an entire region of chowder-makers never looked at a tomato again.

Melville famously described the ultimate thick, floury New England chowder in his Try Pots Inn scene in Moby-Dick, when Ishmael quails at the idea of this strange-sounding supper, then exults in surprise when it arrives: “Oh, sweet friends! hearken to me. It was made of small juicy clams, scarcely bigger than hazel nuts, mixed with pounded ship biscuit, and salted pork cut up into little flakes; the whole enriched with butter, and plentifully seasoned with pepper and salt.”

Whenever I sit down to a bowl of New England chowder — whether it’s corn, clam, fish, or seafood —I feel this same exact excitement. Oh sweet friends! hearken to me. There’s nothing better on a raw day, in any season, to warm the gullet, cockles, and soul. — K. C.

Mixed Fry

I grew up in curd country, in a far-off Shangri-la of saturated fat known as Wisconsin, where it is unremarkable to casually munch cheese curds out of a bag, like popcorn, and where a pile of them battered and deep-fried is a perfectly acceptable side dish. The first time I encountered poutine — which Acadian Mainers tend to call “mixed fry,” “mixed fries,” or “fry mix” — was in Quebec, where I read the menu as a throwing of a gauntlet: we see your Wisco curd habits, monsieur, and we raise you rich brown gravy and a huge pile of fries.

I am no connoisseur of the dish, but because my upbringing instilled a certain laissez-faire attitude towards heart disease, I probably order more of it at restaurants than your average diner (for the table, you understand). I’ve been known to detour 40 or 50 miles out of my way to visit an Auburn sports bar or an Aroostook diner rumored to have the goods. And while the truck-stop variety — swapping out curds for stringy, commodity mozzarella, sometimes not even melted — is dismayingly common here, Maine’s bench of mouthwatering mixed fries is deeper than an industrial pasteurizing vat.

They’re legendary at Two Rivers Lunch in Allagash, piled high next to a burger. They’re damn near ubiquitous around Portland, where chef Rob Evans’s version at Duckfat, with Belgian fries and duck gravy, arguably set the standard in 2005, and where Blue Rooster subs tots and adds pork belly. I’ve literally stood in line for a plate of duck-confit poutine at the Black Birch in Kittery, where curds are melted to a sauce-like consistency and meat is piled on top like a savory little toque. In fact, I’ll throw down a gauntlet of my own: for quality, if not ubiquity, Maine’s poutine scene can go pied à pied with our northwestern neighbors. — Brian Kevin

Brian Kevin is a former Down East editor. 

Fiddleheads

I’d be lying if told you I loved fiddleheads. I’ve reluctantly rolled them into the curriculum at my cooking school because my students love cooking and eating them. I appreciate them for their botanic beauty, their newfound market value, and their symbolism of springtime, but to be honest, fiddleheads have always tasted a bit like a swamp to me. For a few weeks each spring, they rise up soft and green along the banks of cold-flowing rivers, tightly coiled tips of young ostrich ferns that offer themselves to foragers by the dozens. Their stalks in the wet mud and heads moist with morning dew, they’re the emeralds of the forest, and they inspire fond nostalgia among those who’ve collected them in baskets while trolling backwoods waterways.

As a product of Midwestern suburbs, I am unmoved by such nostalgia. But I do appreciate the many culinary tactics that will “de-swampify” a fiddlehead fern. Properly cooking fiddleheads means not overcooking them — they’re best cooked hard and fast, either on a grill over high heat or boiled quickly and then sautéed in a buttery pan. Fiddleheads should snap even after they’re cooked. Use them like asparagus, tucked into a pasta primavera or into an eggy pie, and always eat them in moderation and well washed. Fiddleheads are thought to be oh-so-mildly toxic, so whether you’re bending beside the river with a pocket knife or reaching for handfuls at the market, don’t go overboard — greed will only leave you with an aching gut and a sore conscience. — Annemarie Ahearn

Annemarie Ahearn runs Rockport’s Salt Water Farm Cooking School and is Down East‘s recurring recipe columnist. She’s the author of the cookbook Full Moon Suppers at Salt Water Farm.

Italians

I’ve been a few different guys during my time on this Earth. I’ve worked blue-collar jobs, strapped into a three-point harness to dangle beneath overpasses in Skowhegan. I’ve worked office jobs, sequestered in front of a MacBook for marathon stretches in a cubicle in Rockland. I’ve cut off my fingertip knocking out fried haddock sandwiches in a sweltering commercial kitchen in Spruce Head. But while the jobs have been diverse, one constant has remained throughout my working life in Maine: the ham Italian I eat for lunch at least once a week.

Foodies may sneer at the factory-to-table pedigree of Maine’s version of an Italian sub. You won’t find any dry-aged mortadella on a Maine Italian, no artisanal salami from heritage-breed pigs, no crimson-colored heirloom tomatoes, no house-brined pickles, no black-truffle aioli, no bread baked from a century-old sourdough starter. The enduring appeal of the Italian is harder to pin down.

For me, it has to do with the subtle chemistry of its ingredients: The impossibly soft, nutrient-devoid, bleached-white bread absorbs the slick, cheap salad oil and balances perfectly with the snap of sweet, fresh veggies. The sour brine from the pickles seeps into the processed white American cheese, breaking it down on some mysterious molecular level into a soft, fatty cream. The barely-there slip of salty boiled ham, sprinkled with black olives, seems like merely a gesture, a nod to the hungry dockworkers of 1902 (when Giovanni Amato started selling the sandwiches from his pushcart in Portland), who wouldn’t be caught dead ordering a vegetarian sub. After 117 years, it’s still the sandwich that fuels hardworking Mainers, immune to the ebbs and flows of popular food culture and changing tastes. It’s the sandwich that’s always there for me, no matter who I am at the time.  — Malcolm Bedell

Malcom Bedell is the co-author of Eating in Maine. He blogs about midcoast Maine eats at Eat Rockland and about other eats at Mashed and elsewhere.

New England IPA

If a beer could be a fruit, the New England IPA would be a mango — the opaque orange complexion, the smooth and rich body, and the flavor like juiced tropical fruit. It’s the style that pretty much defines the Maine beer scene nowadays. Crawl the state’s breweries and you’ll be hard-pressed to find more than a handful that don’t have at least one juice-bomb IPA on the tap list. Duck into any bottle shop and hazy IPAs seem to occupy 80 percent of the shelf space. Considering that basically nobody knew about this mega-hoppy beer style a decade ago — and considering that few hops are grown here — it’s about the unlikeliest of ales to have captivated our taste buds.

The improbable history goes thusly: hoppy beer got started in Britain in the 1700s, when brewers started adding extra hops to pales ales exported to colonial India, for hops’ preservative effect. Hence, India pale ale, or IPA, the style that finally caught on in the U.S. in the 1980s, on the West Coast, where most American hops are grown. West Coast brewers innovated a distinctly American style of IPA — piney and grapefruity, not floral and earthy like the English version, but still crystal-clear. It was a Vermont brewer in the ’90s who started messing around with unfiltered IPAs that were hazy and juicier and less bitter than traditional IPAs, but he didn’t get much attention for it until more recently.

That’s where Maine comes in. Right as beer nerds started taking note of hazy IPAs, Bissell Brothers Brewing, of Portland (and now also Milo), opened in 2013 and staked their reputation on a lineup of hazy ales. Now, the Bissells are considered among the OGs and true masters of the New England IPA. Other breweries, like Portland’s Definitive, have followed a similar model. And breweries around the country have hopped on the bandwagon — these days, New England-style IPAs are made in Pittsburgh and Denver and San Diego and just about everywhere else. But it’s Maine, as much as anyplace in New England, that beer pilgrims flock to experience the ale in its native environment. And for those of us who live here, with 130-plus breweries around, the nearest opaque, juicy pour is probably just down the road. — Will Grunewald

Will Grunewald is Down East‘s current editor-in-chief.

Humpty Dumpty Chips

As a teenager, blessed with little money and even less ambition, I spent many summer days sitting idly with my friends on the wall outside the Tenants Harbor General Store. We would pool our limited resources to buy a giant purple bag of Humpty Dumpty Sour Cream & Clam flavored potato chips, a long-forgotten flavor that combined the sharp tang of dehydrated sour cream with the brine of “natural and artificial” seafood flavoring, making for a strangely addictive chip that made my mouth feel like it needed to put on deodorant.

Sour Cream & Clam was (and is) one in a long line of peculiar Humpty Dumpty flavors that you didn’t find in your name-brand-ier chip lineups, a lineage that includes Ketchup, Dill Pickle, and Smokin’ Bacon. In those days, the practice of snack-food brands one-upping each other with mind-boggling flavors was less common, and Humpty Dumpty, founded in South Portland in 1947 and later acquired by a Canadian company, remains dedicated today to oddball chip varieties at bargain prices.

For me, though, the brand will always be synonymous with adolescence in Maine, when a single bag delivered the calorie payload necessary to fuel entire lazy, adolescent afternoons, back when the only items on our to-do lists were telling stories and worrying the grownups. And long before I had ever had my cholesterol checked. — M. B.

Indian Pudding

You probably just pronounced it wrong in your head. In Maine, you have to run it all together: injn pudn.

The dish, of course, has nothing to do with Indians and little to do with Native Americans. Instead, it refers to Indian meal, which is what colonial New Englanders called cornmeal back when they learned about corn from the Native Americans. The first American cookbook, American Cookery, published back in 1796, actually has three recipes for Indian pudding.

So it’s old. And nowadays, outside of Maine roadside diners, the sweet, dark-brown mush is almost forgotten — some would say with good reason. But even if it’s not appealing to modern tastes, it’s still much loved by those of us who grew up on it. Warm, savory, and comforting, it served as the evening meal for many families, all on its own. It also made a great breakfast, porridge-y in the nicest way, with a little cream on top. My mother served it for dessert, along with vanilla ice cream. That combination — Indian pudding, soft and warm from the oven, sweet with syrup and spicy with ginger and nutmeg and cinnamon, topped with a dollop of ice cream that melted around the edges to make a vanilla-fragrant sauce — on a cold winter’s night, it was old-fashioned heaven on a plate. — N. H. J.

Allen’s Coffee Brandy

Mornings in Maine, contrary to popular belief, are not a perpetual Robert McCloskey story. Those in the fishing and logging industries are up well before sunrise, often undertaking brutal work in punishing conditions. So it’s only natural that some might derive motivation to get through the day (or to start it) from a bit of Allen’s in their coffee or a cold glass of Allen’s and milk.

Mainers have all kinds of nicknames for the state’s bestselling liquor (by volume — Fireball cinnamon whiskey recently surpassed it in sales). Most are affectionate, some are not, and few can be printed by this magazine without alienating its more virtuous readers. What most of them salute are the velvet-hammer-ish properties of a 60-proof liqueur, flavored with real coffee-bean extract, mingling with one’s Oakhurst over ice. On the one hand, I used to get exasperated when I worked in a liquor store with the parade of repeat customers who put away a liter of the stuff on a daily basis. (A 1.75-liter plastic bottle costs about $15.) On the other hand, it bothers me when I see Allen’s served or consumed ironically, as a sort of lowbrow stunt beverage, a mockery of those who truly enjoy it.

Allen’s popularity in Maine is a cult thing — it’s a top-selling drink exactly no place else and more or less unknown outside New England. And like all cult beverages, it inspires very specific, ritualized orders among its fans. Good bartenders know which regular patrons prefer their Allen’s and milk “on the very dark side.” Other, equally devoted fans of the brand simply observe a little splash in their coffee whenever they shovel the driveway. For my part, I’ll take a Rumford — half Allen’s and half Moxie, served over crushed ice. And yes, a pint glass will do just fine, thank you. — Joe Ricchio

Joe Ricchio is Down East‘s former food editor and a Maine dining guru.

Oysters

Anyone can grow a few hundred oysters, which I know because I have grown a few hundred oysters, several times over, thanks to the equivalent of a marine community-garden program in my former home of Damariscotta. The Damariscotta River is one of the world’s richest, most prolific grounds for the eastern oyster, producing more than a half-dozen varieties of the briny, sweet, buttery treats of the sea. Getting to be a dilettante oyster farmer there is like having a Napa Valley winegrower set aside a row of grapes and tell you, “Here, you can just have these to mess around with.”

Before I moved to Maine, my primary familiarity with oysters derived from the Rocky Mountain variety. (Those are bull testicles, for what it’s worth — I have no idea whether that joke lands outside of Montana.) The ocean kind, it turns out, are way better. And what’s more, some of the most pleasant and memorable mornings I’ve spent in the last 10 years have been wading in the Damariscotta at low-ish tide, tending to my oyster bags while horseshoe crabs wriggle on by, osprey circle overhead, and bemused egrets eye me from the shallows.

Increasingly, the Damariscotta may be just the tip of the shell. I started my oyster dabblings during the first stirrings of a Maine aquaculture boom that’s still gathering steam — oyster production here has tripled in the last decade. In the last couple of years, an oyster-bar boom seems to be following on its heels, and I predict we’re not far from a day when a visitor seeking a taste of Maine is as likely to ask for a tray of Gliddens or Bagaduces or Abigail Pearls as they are for a lobster roll. — B.K.

Wrinkles

I grew up on stories of Harpswell fishermen who took bags of steamed periwinkles to school for lunch, but I didn’t start eating them myself until I ran into them below a cloak of fermented black-bean sauce at a restaurant in Chinatown, in New York City. The snails were the same ones that walk slowly up and down wharf pilings in Maine harbors, that line rocks below thatches of seaweed, that inhabit salt marshes. And they tasted delicious. Still do.

Some Mainers call them wrinkles (although the word can also refer to whelks, the periwinkles’ larger and carnivorous cousins, also an old coastal Maine delicacy). Those who harvest them — mostly by hand, a back-breaking task performed at low tide — are wrinklers. Nearly all of the state’s modest commercial harvest happens way Down East, where the periwinkles are meatier, but anyone with a pail and some free time can pick up to 2 quarts a day without a permit.

Steam them with white wine, a bay leaf, and a few peppercorns, if you like, until the meats — that is, the snails — loosen in their shells, then toss them in garlic butter and serve with toothpicks with which to pull out the meat. Or steam them with beer and plain butter instead. Cold, they actually make for a very good lunch. — Sam Sifton

Sam Sifton is the food editor of The New York Times and the guest editor of Down East‘s April 2019 food issue.

Brown Bread

Back when I owned a seaside restaurant in Rockport, I faced the challenge of pleasing two clienteles: those passing through in the summer months, usually with money to spend, and those who lived in the area year-round, who tended to be a bit more discerning with their disposable income. Come Columbus Day, we’d alter our menu, making it more familiar and affordable for folks who weren’t headed south for the off-season. Winter offerings included slow-cooked molasses baked beans, smoked haddock fillets, steamer clams in salt water, and New England–style brown bread.

Our head chef spent hours testing a recipe for brown bread. Classically, it’s cake-y and sweeter than table breads, relying on wheat and rye flours and cornmeal (the colonial recipe predates refined white flour), along with (sometimes) raisins and molasses. Once he perfected his recipe, he insisted I sign a non-disclosure agreement. The kitchen steamed the brown bread in cleaned, recycled cans and served it with soft, salted butter on a hand-hewn cutting board. Leave it to a fine-dining restaurant to take the humblest of dishes, deconstruct it, and turn it into a piece of conceptual culinary art.

When the chef told me he was running out of cans, I found myself at Hannaford, loading up on $1.29 cans of B&M brown bread. It was delicious, and it made for some excellent staff meals, rendering the cans usable for the “authentic” presentation of our menu variety. Precious though it may have been, I’d be lying if I said ours wasn’t the best brown bread I have ever had. As a woman of my word, I will never reveal the recipe. — A. A.