(self-published)
$28.95
“If I can get the younger generation into the kitchen then I will have done what I hoped to do,” said Sylvia Hocking, who has just published her second cook book, Sylvia’s Recipes for All Cooks, Many Maine Dishes from Maine Folks. The South Thomaston author baked for the rich and famous after a couple from Hollywood filming in Port Clyde stopped at her baked goods shop and fell in love with her coffee cakes, breads, and muffins. They gave her an order for the holidays that entailed sending baked goods all over the country, a big change from her beginnings in 1966 – stocking a table by the road with a jar for money on it.
Among her customers was Julie Andrews, who wrote an introduction to Mrs. Hocking’s first book, Sylvia’s Cakes and Breads: Famous Recipes from a Small Maine Kitchen, which she wrote when arthritis convinced her finally to close the little shop at the back of the gold cape with the black shutters on the St. George Rd. nearly 30 years later. Mrs. Hocking, now 76, began her new book a few years ago, drawing on a lifetime of her family recipes, from fifty boxes of clipped recipes she and her sister found after their mother’s death, and many recipes contributed by friends and neighbors.
Her own home cooking was influenced by fellow Mainer Marjorie Standish and Mrs. Hocking says her personal favorite cookbook is The Betty Crocker Cookbook. Her childhood recollection is of watching a mother who loved to cook for her family, and throughout Sylvia’s Recipes there are references to things she recalls liking when she was a child and ones that her own two sons loved. In her notes to the chapter on meat dishes, she observes that children seem to enjoy meat and chicken more than fish, but she says today that one of her sons’ favorite dishes is the White Fish Casserole that is included in the new book.
The recipes in Sylvia’s Recipes are simple, good home cooking, and just the sort of fare we find at Maine pot-luck dinners. Many are kid-friendly. Mrs. Hocking offers 241 recipes for appetizers, salads, soups and chowders, seafood, meat, chicken, meatless dishes, vegetables, breads and muffins, pies, cakes, bars and cookies, and desserts. She says she does not plan a third book, and it would appear that between the two she has all the bases covered.
The spiral-bound book is printed on special paper that you can wipe clean when you spill on it, and it sells for $28.95 (plus $1.40 Maine State sales tax.) It is published by Sylvia Adams Hocking, and is available in some midcoast Maine bookstores. The best and easiest way to get it is to write Mrs. Hocking, or to ask your bookstore to contact her directly, at 434 St. George Rd., South Thomaston, ME, 04858-3105.