When Recipes from a Very Small Island by Linda and Martha Greenlaw was first published in 2005, I went to a local bookshop in Portland that specialized in cookbooks to seek it out. I didn’t find it and asked if they had the book.
“Oh, no,” the owner responded haughtily, “we don’t carry books like that,” as though it had the vapors.
Of course the book was everywhere else, what with the celebrity of Linda Greenlaw, an Isle au Haut Lobster woman who wrote such other best-selling books as The Hungry Ocean, The Lobster Chronicles and All Fisherman Are Liars. The cookbook written with her mother exemplified simple home cooking based on what’s sourced from the local waters and fields.
Some of my favorite recipes in the book are Mama’s Baked Beans, Simon’s Lemon Tart, Swordfish with Two Mustards, Gulf of Maine Haddock Casserole and another that I always meant to make but hadn’t until last week, Maxine Wright’s Apple Cobbler.
When you look at the ingredients list of cinnamon, sugar, apples and a biscuit batter that covers the cobbler you think what’s so special about this?
