Tag: Food

How to end a most memorable summer

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

When last summer ended, I proclaimed it my best one ever – in part because there were no complications from an employer or romantic upheavals. Instead, it was filled with new adventures, explorations along the Bold Coast and out on the waters, introductions to fascinating characters and geezers (both positive terms, in my estimation) who live here at least a goodly part of the year, plus a sequence of fascinating artists in residence combined with local painters and photographers and their galleries as well as a world-class chamber music series by mostly resident performers. Whew! And, oh yes, I had plenty of time to devote to a new book and setting up posts for this blog. I even got a new laptop, which meant importing and tweaking everything.

This time around has simply amplified everything.

The temperatures are generally cool on the island – often ten degrees less than what’s happening on the mainland even just seven miles to the west – so I rarely suffered from sweltering. On the downside, heritage tomatoes are rarely found here. Remember, in Dover I lived on tomato-and-mayo sandwiches from the beginning of August into October, some years, though in no small part due to global warming. Even so, the ocean temps here are too cold and the currents too treacherous, for any swimming, though inland lakes and streams provide a welcome alternative.

Well, that’s only half of it. Summer is when Eastport comes into its full glory. The streets are swarming, like a big party. To think, I’m experiencing the ideal of summering on a Maine island, combined with a lively artistic dimension! Never, in my wildest dreams, would I have expected that.

But all good things must come to an end.

Three-quarters of the Eastport’s population is what Mainers call Summer People. Now they’re mostly going-going-gone and we’re on the verge of getting back to our more essential state, something akin to a ghost town.

Not that we go down that easily.

This weekend featured the annual Salmon Festival, a delightfully low-key event highlighting local musicians, galleries, and crab rolls served by the senior center and Episcopal Church on Saturday and salmon dinners on Sunday, as well as tours of the salmon farms at Broad Cove.

The Salmon Festival is a low-key event, centered on the waterfront..
Historian Joe Clabby tells a circle at the amphitheater about the region’s rich past. One local wag calls this our “NPR festival,” in contrast to what’s coming next weekend.
Celebrating local seafood, there are crab rolls on Saturday and a big salmon dinner on Sunday.
And, of course, live music.

The event honors what was once the Sardine Capital of the World in its current incarnation as a center of aquaculture in the form of salmon.

But it’s also a prelude to next weekend’s blowout, the Pirate Festival.

On Saturday, a mini-flotilla, armed with water balloons and squirt guns, sailed down to invade neighboring Lubec. Next week, they’re expected to return the favor, all in good spirits.

 

What’s made your summer special?

 

Up to mustard

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

While most of Eastport’s sardines were packed in cottonseed oil, some brands boasted of mustard, too, or of even smoking them first.

Even those that weren’t still might be smothered in a mustard sauce.

In 1900, J. Wesley Raye, the 20-year-old son of an Eastport sea captain, founded his mustard business in the family smokehouse in 1900 and moved it to its current site in 1903 to meet demand from the canneries.

Not just Eastport’s, either. Much of the family’s mustard, as the Raye’s website touts, was shipped by both rail and steamship, two means of transport long gone from the city. But, as they boast, their mill remains the last one in America to make mustard the old way. Theirs is made in small batches from mustard seed they’ve ground slowly on millstones made in France.

One of its many styles today.

If you don’t recognize the name, you might know the taste. It’s rebranded by some high-end labels.

The old mill is still in operation. Note the railroad boxcar at left.
Yes, there’s more.
Their downtown retail store is a bright spot on Water Street, selling much more than mustard alone.

 

A few things Mainely about lobsters

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Somehow, lobsters have become identified with Maine the way maple syrup has stuck to Vermont, even though both are found abundantly in neighboring states and provinces. I won’t even get into moose in this discussion.

Here are some talking points.

  1. Unlike other varieties, ours are distinguished by having large claws. One claw, the crusher, is larger than the pincher.
  2. They have clear blood.
  3. They smell with their eight legs but have poor vision. Their four antennae help them locate food. They can also swim backward.
  4. They chew with their stomachs, which are located right behind their eyes. They lack teeth but have a “gastric mill” that reduces their prey.
  5. They live on the ocean floor and never stop growing, which they accomplish by molting. Some are known to be more than a hundred years old. In fact, they show no signs of aging and almost universally die of external factors.
  6. It was once a poor-man’s dish, typically fed to servants. Impoverished families sent their children to school with lobster in their lunch buckets and an envy of the richer kids’ roast beef or chicken.
  7. Lobster comprises 75 percent of Maine’s commercial fishery value. In 2016, a banner year, the state’s 6,000 lobster-fishers landed more than 130 million pounds worth more than $533 million.
  8. A traditional lobster pot or trap has two sections – a “parlor,” where they enter, and the “kitchen” behind it. But for much of the region’s history, they were more likely to be harvested by hand along the shore and tide pools, where they washed up after storms.
  9. Most lobsters are caught in the summer months, before the shellfish trot off to deeper waters where they’re harder to harvest. In Eastport, many of the lobster boats do double-duty each winter, rigged to drag the bay bottoms for scallops. A few even go after urchins.
  10. Maine commercial lobstering is tightly regulated – more than in neighboring Canada – and licensing involves a long waiting list. You’d better apply well before your twenty-third birthday if you’re interested. Even if your dad still has his boat.

This was once the sardine capital of the world

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 5 Comments

Don’t laugh. Sardines were once big business.

The first sardine canning in America happened in Eastport in 1876, and at its peak, 18 canneries were packed in against the waterfront downtown, along with the fishermen’s dories and fishing boats at the docks.

One of the few surviving cannery buildings. This one was small in comparison to others right downtown. 

The largest of them, the L.D. Clark and Son factory, extended far into the water from the north end of Shackford Cove only a block where I now live. It was the world’s largest sardine cannery, employing 500 men and women who packed 4,000 cases of 100 cans daily when the small Atlantic herring were available.

Heads and other parts were cut from the fish and dumped into the harbor, where they were devoured by bottom-feeders that then attracted whales close to shore.

Over the years, though, the fishery was depleted, though whales can still be seen in season.

And then the market and American tastes changed.

Does anyone eat sardines anymore?

Few signs remain of the city’s once flourishing industry.

The 1908 Seacoast Canning Co. plant, which made sardine cans.

 

 

Why Maine’s blueberries are special

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

Across the country, pumpkin flavoring seems to infuse about everything on the menu come October, and something similar happens every summer in Maine with blueberries. The tourists and summer people, especially, seem to eat it right up. (Err, couldn’t help myself there.) So it’s not just lobster they come to devour.

Here are some facts about Maine’s in relation to the rest of the nation and world,  mostly.

  1. The local brewpub calls its obligatory blueberry ale Skul Clothes. The name puzzled me until I was told that’s how kids traditionally earned the money for their school clothes each year, at least before mechanized machines took over most of the patches. “It’s hard work, down on your hands and knees,” as one recent high school graduate told me. “But the pay’s good.” After that, I could tell the locals who walked in for the first time, looked at the offerings on the chalkboard, and broke out in a grin. They’d all done it.
  2. Ours are lowbush, wild, unlike the highbush varieties cultivated elsewhere. We lead the world in lowbush production, though it’s a drop in the bucket compared to the highbush harvests of British Columbia, Oregon, or Washington state. While Atlantic Canada produces half of the world’s wild blueberry tally, that covers more than a single province – Nova Scotia is the leader there.
  3. Lowbush berries are smaller but more flavorful, in our humble opinion.
  4. They’re also preferred in making blueberry wine.
  5. Blueberries are one of the few commercially-available fruits native to North America. The First Nations, some of whom called them star-berries for their blossoms and the tiny ring at their base, have been eating them for at least 13,000 years
  6. They top the list as an antioxidant and are rich in Vitamin C and even manganese.
  7. Wild blueberry patches are burned every two years.
  8. Wild blueberries freeze in just four minutes.
  9. Some research indicates they counter memory loss in aging. I’ll have to remember that. They’re also good for the heart, cancer-risk reduction, and lowering blood pressure.
  10. I like mine fresh, with yogurt or cream. Pancakes, muffins, jams and jellies come next.

Wholly mackerel

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The humble mackerel – usually less than a pound apiece – is a popular fish caught around here. Its delicate nature means it doesn’t keep long, so for human consumption, it’s typically smoked for preservation. An oily fish, it tastes somewhat like salmon. More commonly, it’s used as bait in lobster traps.

I think it’s a beautiful fish.
The Breakwater is lined with fishermen.
Two heads left on a pier, likely used as bait.

We’re rolling in wild blueberries

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments
The handheld rake was invented in 1910. I can’t imagine trying to pick large quantities of blueberries without it.

What’s harvested by the ton in Washington County is not just blueberries, but wild blueberries – lowbush, laced with small pellets of complex, concentrated flavor, rather than the big, juicy, cultivated highbush kind.

What grows here, I’ll argue, is tastier and richer than the more coddled kind I had previously known and even grown.

As you can see, traditional picking can be backbreaking work. But old-timers tell you it delivers better berries than the newer mechanized harvesters do.

Maine has a near monopoly in the production of the wild lowbush berries in the United States. Neighboring parts of Canada are also of note. Still, the output is only a fraction of what’s harvested from the domesticated highbush farmers in other states.

You can drive right past a blueberry barren like this and not know it’s loaded with ripe fruit.
Here’s what a stop to look reveals.
For a few weeks each spring, clusters of commercial honeybee hives are placed by the hundreds throughout the barrens. The electrical fencing is intended to keep bears out.

Just so you know.

What’s your favorite kind of berry? And your favorite way to eat (or drink) them?

Should we be offering pizza by donation?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

As long as I’m reflecting on our Christmas gift-giving (why not, it’s time to start planning for the next round), I should mention our new Ooni Kanu 16 outdoor pizza oven from England. What, not Italy? Or Greece?

The second time she spoke up from her laptop and uttered the words, “I’d sure love to have one but (sigh) it’s beyond our budget,” adding, “I can dream, can’t I?” I knew it was time for the rest of us to put our conspiratorial resources together.

After several miscommunications on our end, we got the order off, knowing it wouldn’t arrive in time to be wrapped up and put under the tree, so we came up with an amusing announcement envelope to cover us in that part. My crude cartoon slowly kicked in and generated a grin.

The said item arrived in February, big relief, and we can see why it was such a hot item last fall, even before the international shipping delays kicked in.

The oven can sit on a table, for one thing, and be fueled by charcoal, wood, or propane, which can fire it as high as 900 degrees Fahrenheit, cooking a pizza at a lower setting in minutes.

We can finally find a pizza in Sunrise County that matches our high standards. Deep-dish and thin are options. And it’s not limited to pizza, either. I’m thinking of a Vietnamese dish that would glory to such instantaneous blazing.

Well, this has required me to take one more step into 20th century technology, specifically 20-pound propane tank use. As for grilling, I’m sticking to charcoal.

Now, where do we stock up on unused pizza boxes?     

Chief Doe-Wah-Jack’s pride and joy

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Comedians Bob and Ray had a regular schtick involving a radio advertisement for Monongahela steel ingots as home décor. You know, “Hey, ladies, are yours getting rusty,” sort of spiel. Usually, it was sitting in the living room.

Having lived in the Rust Belt not far from the Monongahela River, I knew about the massive pig-iron ingots riding flatbed trailers from one part of town to another. Who knows how much they weighed – the trucks carried no more than two at a time – the beasts looked deadly foreboding.

Our equivalent was in the kitchen, though better dressed and somewhat smaller.

The Classic Round Oak Chief was a top-of-the-line cooking stove that ran on firewood, coal, or kerosene. After 1898, they were manufactured by the “estate of P.D. Beckwith” of Dowagiac, Michigan, and featured a popular mascot, fictional Native American Chief Doe-Wah-Jack – a sly way of teaching the pronunciation of the town. They’re highly collectible in restored condition, but that means getting to a buyer in some other part of the country.

I’ve used wood cooking stoves, back in the ashram, but I wasn’t so sure about this one. I didn’t like the way the stovepipe ran somewhat downhill – smoke rises, after all – or the way it vented into the same chimney the furnace uses, something that’s against building code today.

Besides, the weight of this one was definitely stressing the house structure.

Worse yet, it occupied the center of the small kitchen, and in our life focus, we need more space there – as well as a working oven, year-‘round.

Quite simply, it had to go. And it did.

We’re happy it found a new home – one being built, as it turned out – as well as a crew that knew expertly how to get it apart and out the door.

As for wood heat, which we truly enjoy, we’re planning on a Jotul in the front parlor and a new chimney or pipe to vent it.