You might think it was all about salad greens, blueberries, and lobster rolls, and in part it is. But there is more to it than that, the difference in summer island cooking and what happens the rest of the year.
We first see it in the store. Fine little comestibles: fancy little cookies, crackers, a wider array of cheese, special little jars of pesto. Artisan breads that get stale off-season fly off the shelves in summer, and where zucchinis and summer squashes get wrinkly with old age in winter, now we see dainty baby versions of them since they are beloved by our summer residents.
In kitchens all around the island, hopeful husbands observe pie, cake, and dessert making and ask, “Is any of this for us?” too often to be disappointed. It’s like Christmas: every organization in town claims a weekend for their bake plus book, craft, or art sale. We make box lunches for auctions, benefit cruises, and manufacture pies for Old Home Day, Blueberry Festivals, Lobster Festivals, and every other special occasion, one of which happens it seems about every weekend. If hubby wants a pie, he has to buy it.
In between, some of us cook for our summer people. It’s been that way for a hundred years on some of our islands. People in a few grand homes bring their cooks and probably a good thing. Some of those places are run like hotels with a dozen or so houseguests on hand all the time and numerous others invited in for lunch and drinks and dinner. You need an unflappable professional who can cope with a guest list for lunch suddenly inflated from 24 to 40 something as golfing buddies and tennis pals are invited at the last minute. Other households acquire helpers for the occasional dinner party. Some of us have done this so often it feels more natural to cook and clear for a party than to attend one, and the urge to go around picking up empty glasses when one is a guest needs tactful suppression.
One time at a yard sale I spotted a little notebook with a marbleized paper cover full of carefully hand written recipes. The former owner started the notebook back in the middle 1900s when she went to the Boston Cooking School to learn the finer points, no doubt, of making black bean soup, roasting lamb, and creating Bavarians for dessert. She never used the notebook, as far as I could tell, it was spotlessly clean where well-used notebooks are full of spatters and grease stains. I am not sure she ever cooked for that many summer people, though being educated to do so was the goal of the trip to Boston. Also in her house was a recipe for fritters–flour, baking powder, eggs, milk, add clams. Plain home food, fried in lard. It is a long shot that she ever fried up a batch for wealthy employers.
We hear and tell stories about the rarities brought in from a great distance: grapes in the early 20th century, requested for dinner the next day, brought by steamer from Boston to Castine to Islesboro, and by horse and wagon to the summer cottage just in the nick of time. Not that many years ago, a batch of blue crabs were flown to the island by a charted flight from the Chesapeake. Another time, hundreds of special super-sized shrimp at a buck apiece were served to birthday party guests.
Then there are the dishes introduced to islanders by the more sophisticated summer cooks from away. Ruth Hartley, the daughter of a caretaker, remembers in the 1940s that the Irish cook who had befriended her mother, brought from the big house down to the caretaker’s cottage peach ice cream in a fancy mold. Ruth and her family certainly had had ice cream, but as Ruth said, “I didn’t know you could make peach ice cream, and we never had anything molded.” At Christmas a box of special chocolates arrived as a gift to the caretaker’s family.
Coastal and island Mainers have been trying to please summer people for a long time with mixed success. Rusticators in the early 1900s either got into the spirit and tucked into the baked beans and codfish balls, corn pudding and blueberry pie, or complained at length about the overly casual service and slovenly table linen. One coastal church group recently found that fund-raising church dinner menus fare better with summer visitors if they feature Thai or Mexican food; then the group reverts to its traditional baked beans in winter. If you do bean-hole beans on the other hand, visitors cluster around with oohs and ahhs.
Service is still a problem. Periodically I hear complaints about bare arms sticking out of the white shirts worn by party waitstaff with their black skirt or trousers. It’s against the law for restaurant servers to wear open toed-sandals, but all too often it still happens at formal dinner parties, where youthful wait staff haven’t got the message that no one wants to see the dragon tattoo crawling up from ankle to shin.
Not that long ago, a summer person hired me for a few days to produce three squares over a weekend. When asked about dessert, I suggested various crisps, pies, cookie bars, mousse. She sighed and said, “Well, what other fun things do you make for dessert.” Fun? Does that mean some desserts are not fun?
Well, I’ll tell you. If it was summer and I was on vacation in Vacationland, and someone else was making dessert, and I didn’t have to wash up afterwards, that would be about as much fun as I could stand.
When it comes to summer cooking, some are cooking and some aren’t.
Sandy Oliver cooks and writes on Islesboro.