Two Classic Maine Cookbooks

Marjorie Standish's Cooking Down East, and Marjorie Mosser's Good Maine Food both dating to the mid-20th century, reflect traditional Maine cooking. One is a "her's" book, and one is a "his" book.

Both have recently been reprinted by Down East Books. I'm fresh home from the launch on Wednesday in Portland, Maine, where I spoke about the two, having written a new foreword and scattered commentary for the Mosser book. Star chef Melissa Kelly of Primo restaurant did a foreword for the Standish book and inserted some of her own recipes. Melissa cooked from Standish and her own repertoire: Oysters Rockefeller, two kinds of crab cakes, a fish stew and a clam chowder, doughnuts, cannoli, and blueberry cake, all passed around for our delectation. Truly lovely fare.

What do I mean by his and her books?

Cooking Down East is a companion in the kitchen for the household cook (at the time the book was written, that would have been most commonly a woman). The recipes are homey--chowders, blueberry desserts, meatloaf, finnan haddie, pot roast, baked beans, squash pie. Good home cooking. Standish writes in an advisory fashion. Her recipes have incredible legs. In the column I write weekly for the Bangor Daily News, the response to various queries I post for recipes results in family favorites that someone's mother or gram found in Standish's book.

The copy of the book I own is full of splatters and spills, and handwritten recipes on scraps of paper stuck into the book. Used constantly, Standish's cookbook was a friendly, useful, woman-to-woman kind of book.

Good Maine Food by Marjorie Mosser is dominated by Mosser's uncle, the historical novelist Kenneth Roberts. The cookbook was assembled when Robert's Trending into Maine chapter on Maine food, kicked up a pile of nostalgic correspondence. Readers sent recipes and Roberts seemed to be determined to put together a profile of traditional Maine food in the form of a cookbook, heavily larded with his own commentary. No lack of opinion there. He had experienced the last of the Maine culinary tradition, he was sure, with his grandmother's mincemeat and ketchup.

Robert Tristam Coffin similarly held forth similarly in Mainstays of Maine, where the sainted black iron stove in the kitchen under the control of the dominating female relative generated memorable smells and hearty boy-supporting fare. Roberts was not to be outdone.

Besides, the swashbuckling, thumping good tales that Roberts wrote, point to a man's man: someone who fished and hunted and presented some patient woman in the kitchen with dead animals and birds to cook toothsomely. In Mosser's book there is no lack of game and fowl recipes. In the earliest version there is hardly any effete fare at all, though apparently Roberts thought the book ought to have wider appeal and recipes from what Mainers invariably describe as "Away", all of which Maine is surrounded by, invade the cookbook. Timbales, au gratins, aspics and omelets were in fact, going out of fashion even as they were added to the book. Extra-regional favorites as scrapple, jambalaya, and burgoo crop up unaccountably.

One gets the impression that old Uncle Ken sat in the living room with his pipe rack by his side, foot on a hassock, and bellowed out from time to time, "Mrs. R., listen to this," as he read a letter from a reader who suggested a recipe, and then he's holler for his secretary and niece Marjorie to add it to her file for the next edition of Good Maine Food. It was his cookbook, after all.

The 1974 edition of Mosser's cookbook, the one reprinted by Down East is a fun read for men and women alike, suitable for the living room. The Standish one you will take into the kitchen and spill and spatter on. Both represent Maine food history both in the traditional form, and in the gradual overlays that time and change invariably make.

Marjorie Mosser and Good Maine Cooking

I can’t say I have ever seen a Queen Anne Revival recipe. Usually food doesn’t seem to adopt identifiable stylistic elements the way architecture, clothing, furnishings and art and music do. However, styles and ideas do affect food conservatively—that is, usually delayed and not very powerfully.

Down East Publishing Company, the same who do the magazine Down East, are reprinting Marjorie Mosser's Good Maine Cooking. Mosser was the secretary and niece of historical novelist Kenneth Roberts, who was actively writing in the mid-20^th century. Mosser’s book was reprinted in 1974 with additions to (and no deletions from) the original 1939. I am writing the foreword to the new reprint of the 1974.

I looked over the contents of the earlier book, and the notion of Arts and Crafts kept floating into my mind.

Abby Carroll has identified the whiff of Colonial Revival in the New England food of the late 19^th century during her research for her dissertation for Northeastern. When I think about it, I recall that tables in the late 18^th century were set with the same symmetrical sensibility as the Georgian houses that housed them. It is not as if someone said, in the Martha Stewart Living of the 1700s, “Today we are going to set our table in the latest Georgian style.” Rather it is in the air, and drifts down gently, exerting the mildest but persistent influence.

So in Mosser’s book there are lots of good old Maine baked beans, handcrafted donuts, brown bread, salt codfish dinners and all kinds of solid home produced food by the craftswoman of the kitchen. Memories of Roberts’ boyhood a riddled with the smells of home cooking, and the pages of the books are full of the kinds of things he ate growing up. It seems all Arts and Craftsy to me.