Today we’re talking about "Fish, Flesh and Fowl," the very first community cookbook from Maine, published in 1877 by the Ladies of the State Street Parish in Portland. We’re joined by current members of the State Street Church, Camy Barrantes and Jane Lindquist, and we share the results from cooking a few of the recipes from the book: Bannock, Cabbage Salad, and Queen of Puddings.
Our first episode!
On today's podcast we’re talking about "Fish, Flesh and Fowl," the very first community cookbook from Maine, published in 1877 by the Ladies of the State Street Parish in Portland. We’re joined by current members of the State Street Church, Camy Barrantes and Jane Lindquist, and we share the results from cooking a few of the recipes from the book: Bannock, Cabbage Salad, and Queen of Puddings.
In this first episode, we also discuss the three basic pillars of a community cookbook: The book is made by a defined community, the recipes come from within that community, and proceeds benefit a charitable cause. We also talk about the history of recipe writing and formatting, and some of the considerations that would have gone into the creation of a community cookbook.
Thank you for being part of our community!
Special thanks to our guests Camy Barrantes and Jane Lindquist, current members of the State Street Church in Portland, Maine. For more information about the State Street Church, visit https://statestreetchurch.org
For the recipes from today's episode, visit: https://communitycookbook.com/recipes
To see images from today's cookbook and photos of the food we made, visit our Instagram feed or Facebook page.
https://www.instagram.com/communitycookbookpodcast/
https://www.facebook.com/communitycookbookpodcast
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This episode is sponsored by the Maine Bicentennial Community Cookbook.
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Hosts: Margaret Hathaway, Karl Schatz, & Don Lindgren
Produced by Karl Schatz & Margaret Hathaway
Edited by Karl Schatz
Music byZiv Grinberg.
Recorded on Riverside. Edited with Descript. Hosted on Simplecast.
In 1877, the Ladies of the State Street Church in Portland, Maine embarked on a fundraising project. Portland, at the time, was a bustling town of 35,000 people. It had been more than a decade since the Great Fire of 1866, and the city, like its motto, Resurgam, had risen again. Each day, more than 65 trains rumbled through the railway station, delivering passengers and freight from up and down the Atlantic coast. Steamers and schooners slid in and out of the port, competing with the fishermen to unload their goods on the docks. Further into town, Miss Fanny Marsh’s Theater put on four shows a week, and on Exchange Street, Bailey and Noyes competed with Brunel and Co. for the business of those seeking fine stationery, books, and piano fortes.
At the State Street Church, the parish was celebrating its twenty fifth year. Never ones to shy away from work on behalf of the church, the ladies were nevertheless relegated to the Afternoon Guild, whose activities conformed to the social mores of the time. They supplied flowers for the pulpit, coffee for the urns, and, though they were not yet allowed to serve on church governing boards, they filled the pews in numbers double the men.
As they planned to raise funds, their object may have been rebuilding the steeple struck by lightning the week after the Great Fire, or funding much needed repairs to the vestry, or simple repayment of parish debt, which their pastor had been managing with contributions from his salary. However they planned to use the money, the ladies would raise it in ways that suited the standards of the day: discreetly, modestly, and in a manner that extolled the virtues of a well run home. And so the Ladies of the State Street Church created a cookbook.
Welcome to cooking is community, the community cookbook podcast. I'm Margaret Hathaway, food writer, goat farmer, and mom of three.
Don: [00:02:05] I'm Don Lindgren antiquarian bookseller and food historian.
Karl: [00:02:09] And I'm Karl Schatz, photographer, goat farmer, and journalist.
On today's pod we're talking about Fish, Flesh and Foul, the very first community cookbook from Maine published in 1877 by the Ladies of the State Street Parish in Portland. Later we'll be joined by current members of the state street, church, Camy Barrantes and Jane Lindquist. And we'll share the results from cooking a few of the dishes from the cookbook. Stay tuned for the "queen of puddings!”
Margaret: [00:02:43] In 2019, the three of us put together the Maine Bicentennial Community Cookbook. When Don shared his extensive collection of community cookbooks with us, Karl and I were hooked. These wonderful books are both familiar and strange. They're treasures that describe so much more than the recipes they contain.
Karl: [00:03:01] I think what I love most about these cookbooks is how they connect us to so many disparate communities and the people we get to meet, or imagine, through the food that they cooked and the recipes they shared. These cookbooks open a fascinating window on 150 years of American food, culture, and home life.
And so we started this podcast to share our love for them, and for the communities that put them together.
Margaret: [00:03:24] in each episode, we'll look at a single community cookbook from Don's collection and examine it as a physical object, a reflection of community, and a source of recipes from a very specific time and place. We'll talk about why it's interesting and what it says about the community it came from. We'll interview special guests and we'll try a recipe or two from the cookbooks pages.
Karl: [00:03:47] Don, maybe we need to start by defining what is a community cookbook?
Don: [00:03:52] Community cookbooks are a genre of cookbooks that arose in the aftermath of the American civil war. And they have three distinct characteristics. The first characteristic is that they are produced by and issued by, a community of some sort that's identifiable. And by community, I don't mean a place. I don't mean a town or a village or a city, but rather an organization within that town or village or city such as a ladies auxiliary of a hospital, a group of church ladies, members of a grange hall. So there's a specific organization, social organization, community group that produces the book itself.
The second characteristic is that the recipes in the book are drawn from the members of that community. And those recipes are then compiled by members of a committee and they figured out how they're going to organize those recipes.
The third aspect of the community cookbook is that the purpose of it is to raise funds for some sort of charitable purpose.
And it might be just to keep the organization going. It might be to rebuild a church or build a new town library or, perhaps just simply to get some waste baskets onto the city streets. So people aren't littering, but there's a specific fundraising purpose.
Karl: [00:05:17] Don, are you saying you have a community cookbooks in your collection that were put together to raise money for new trash cans?
Don: [00:05:24] I do. There's a book from the early 20th century from the state of Colorado that was specifically used for that purpose. Sometimes the books were used to raise money to support something really basic like that. Or it might be a public ordinance is another one I have that was used to support a no spitting ordinance.
Karl: [00:05:44] Who's putting together a cookbook to prevent public spitting?
Don: [00:05:49] well, in addition to groups that were tied to existing organizations. There were also groups of women who gathered together and created civic organizations that used charitable cookbooks in order to make money for a much broader range of general civic concerns and they weren't attached to any other organization.
They were just a standalone civic organizations. Perhaps the best known one of those today would be something like the Junior League.
Margaret: [00:06:16] I think everyone has some of these cookbooks in their pantry, whether it's a ring bound, or a yarn bound, or a junior league. I know my mom has a stack of junior league. This is kind of a ubiquitous type of cookbook.
Don: [00:06:29] Well, I think there's probably an argument to be made that they're amongst the most numerous of all American cookbooks. Every family has them, as you say. And it's because we're probably all associated over the generations with different groups of people, whether it's churches or synagogues or Grange halls or whatever.
But after they started in the years after the civil war, they were immediately super popular and people recognized that they were a really effective tool for raising funds for whatever purposes they had. And so they produced them and they, they grew up in every single state of the union very, very quickly, to the point where today we can look back and we know that there were tens of thousands of different titles of community cookbooks issued in America.
Karl: [00:07:16] Wow. Tens of thousands of community cookbooks. We've got a lot of ground to cover on this podcast. So maybe we should get started on today's book Fish, Flesh, and Fowl. Don, do you want to start by describing the book?
Don: [00:07:30] It's a small book. It's probably the size of like one of those very large cell phones or maybe a small tablet. It wouldn't quite fit in your pocket, but almost. It's a plain Brown cloth covered book, but it has this really nice handsome topography on the cover.
It says Fish, Flesh and Foul, Foul Flesh, and Fish each served up in a separate dish, which is the long form of the title. It's also 64 pages long. It's very simple. There's no introductory matter. There are no illustrations. But it's very simple and humble and…
Karl: [00:08:12] I would say elegant.
Don: [00:08:13] It is, it is elegant , but not at all what we expect to see it in a cookbook.
Karl: [00:08:18] No, certainly not. And if people are interested in seeing some photographs, we have pictures of the book itself of some of the inside pages that we'll be talking about, on our Instagram feed, which is @communitycookbookpodcast, and you can also find us on Facebook @communitycookbookpodcast, or on the web, our website is communitycookbook.com.
Don, how do we know this is a community cookbook?
Don: [00:08:46] Well, it's got all of the aspects of a community cookbook. Some are very obvious, others you have to do a little digging. The first is the most obvious one and it tells us right up front on the title page that the community, the organization that this book is from, and that produced the book is the Ladies of the State Street Parish in Portland.
So that one is taken care of, but the second one is a little harder. The members of the community that contributed the recipes, don't get their names listed immediately adjacent to each recipe, which is something we see in a lot of community cookbooks. It's, it's very common that there'd be the recipe, and then immediately below it would be the name of the person who contributed it. And this one, the names are included in the titles. And if we look at the index of the book where all the titles are close together, so it's easy to see it, we notice that there's things like Julia’ cake and Marshall cake and Mrs. Clark's cake and Aunt Caroline's Donuts and Aunt Grant's Donuts and so on. But maybe only 10% of the recipes in the book give us a name, but we do know that they're coming from within the members of the community.
The third aspect, there’s absolutely no mention of within the book itself, but when we go back and we look at historical records and we look at the church records, we can see that there were three things going on that the book probably contributed to exactly which ones and how much we don't know.
The first one was that the church was celebrating an anniversary. The second was that they were expanding the church to include a new chapel across town, which would be able to accommodate a large and growing congregation. And the third one is that there were repairs necessary on the church due to some damage from a lightning strike.
So it's not in the book and chances are that it's not in the book because the people who would be the audience to purchase the book already knew all of that. They knew the context they were living. There was really no, no need to have a big statement of what this was for.
Karl: [00:10:48] Margaret, what did you find interesting about the book?
Margaret: [00:10:51] oh, I took so many notes. So let me just jump in. I will start with note number one. So there are a lot of recipes in here that are just purely formulas. And to me that suggests that the people writing it expected everyone to know what they were doing. but then they're interspersed with a few that have some instruction. And I thought that was, that was interesting. And I have questions for Don about it, but an example that I found, one of the striking ones is there are two recipes for lemon pie on the same page. And one is just a very simple like list of ingredients and the other has actual sort of fairly step-by-step instructions. So I was wondering, looking at these how much editorial work went into these books in general And were people expecting to be giving instruction or was this really just a, a way of transmitting recipes from one person who knows how to cook to somebody else who knows how to cook?
Don: [00:11:52] Oh, there's so many different things going on there in that question. And, and on the page of the book. I mean, there's the, the, you know, the first question I have is like, why are there two recipes for the same thing? And then the second question is like, why are these in very different forms? And there isn't a lot of historical evidence for exactly how compilation went on with these books.
And the reality is that they went on however they did. And in each group of people who gathered around a table in a church basement or, or in someone's living room would have approached it slightly differently. It's worth remembering that they're outside of the professional publishing world. And so they're not working with a codafide list of standards. They're just gonna, produce a book cause they know what a book is. So the terms of the recipes coming in my guests, based on the books I've worked with, is that the reason these two recipes for, for the lemon lemon pie,
Margaret: [00:12:50] Yeah, lemon pie.
Don: [00:12:51] that the lemon pie were so different from each other was that these were just stylistic differences of the two women who submitted them. They didn't have organizations telling them, or, assisting them with what the form of a recipe should be. We're also at a moment in, recipe history where they are very simple and the, the idea that the, the classic recipe that we now know, wasn't a thing yet.
Karl: [00:13:14] Yeah. If a, if a modern consumer of cookbooks were to look at this book and look at the recipes in it, they wouldn't really recognize it even as a cookbook in terms of what we kind of expect from a, a cookbook today, and the way that recipes are formatted.
Margaret: [00:13:30] Yeah, certainly not. I mean, , the ingredients are listed just one after another, nothing has pulled out. It fits very tightly onto a couple lines.
Don: [00:13:39] Yeah. And that's a, a thing that was in the middle of a change. Yeah. At the moment this book was published and you, you know, if you were to look at a lot of books in this time, period, you'd find some that were starting to break those things out, but most didn't most kept to , what's called a narrative form where the recipes include the ingredients in the sentences that are the steps. And you know, what we expect now is a title of the dish. Individual ingredients, almost a shopping list, if you will. And underneath that a list of steps that might be numbered or bulleted, but they're very clearly individual and distinct steps. And one of the reasons that didn't exist prior to that or that, you know, historically cookbooks use the narrative form is that the narrative form used less page. There is less reason to go out and, and make a book that was instead of 64 pages like this one, 128 pages, because of all that extra white space, you'd have to put around the list of ingredients.
Karl: [00:14:41] If you're raising money for a cause then that costs saving of saving pages in a book is really gonna provide you with more revenue that you can put towards the cause you're raising for.
Don: [00:14:53] Absolutely. And I'm sure that they didn't approach it thinking that way. But when they got together and met with the printer, the printer said you're going to use half as much paper and half as much time. If you do the recipes in this form instead of that form, lots of different pressures come to bear on, on why a book takes the form. Especially with the cookbook. And there's one other thing that's really interesting here. There's something else missing from these recipes and that's specific timings or specific temperatures. And the reason for that. You always have to think, like, when exactly is this in the history of appliances, you know?
And so the, you know, the stoves they were using did not have a dial that said 350 degrees. And once you don't have specific temperatures that you can dial in, you don't have specific timings.
Karl: [00:15:46] right. These were all, these all would have been wood stoves.
Don: [00:15:49] Coal or wood.
Karl: [00:15:49] Coal or wood. Right.
So some of the instructions, like I noticed it says, you know, like bake in a quick oven or bake in a slow oven. So I guess that would have been like a really hot oven or a slow oven would be cooler temperatures?
Don: [00:16:05] Absolutely. And they use lots of things like an egg sized bunch of butter or a thumb of something, you know, and we know what those things are, as soon as we hear them. And like, I know what a thumb of butter looks like. And an egg is probably three times as much, but it made perfect sense. So were those were good measurements.
Karl: [00:16:23] Our eggs come in all kinds of different sizes.
Margaret: [00:16:27] Another thing that really jumped out at me when I was looking through this is that most of the recipes are super bare bones. And then a couple have these little editorial asides at the end that say like very nice or most excellent. And for me as someone who has spent a lot of time volunteering on this sort of project, it was so evocative of the, kind of like daily diplomacy and ego massaging that you often end up doing when you're in a group trying to collaborate on something like this.
I put this whole narrative in my head of, you know, someone. Saying most excellent to the cabbage salad of an elderly woman that they want to like them. You know, I made up these whole stories that went along with that, but it's only, it's like maybe one in 20 of the recipes have these little asides at the end.
Don: [00:17:24] My expectation with that is that those came in that way, that the recipe slips of paper actually had that written on it because it existed that way in the recipe, slip of paper in the families. Little box or in their manuscript cookbook that they kept that, that they just copied everything they're verbatim, including the little comment.
Karl: [00:17:47] It really adds to the personality of the book and, a little bit of insight into the people that were putting it together.
Margaret: [00:17:58] Another thing that I thought was great was the cures and remedies section under miscellany. You know, I, I think even more than the fancy section, which is full of candy and ices, the cures and remedies was just hilarious to me because since they're organized alphabetically, it's just such a hodgepodge of, of things put together, like how to choose meat comes right after cure for warts and cure for boils, you know, boils chilblains dysentery poisoning and smallpox appear in that order because they're alphabetical. And then right after that, there’s how to clean your jars and knives. And there was one, a remedy for a felon that I originally thought was just like a weird punishment for a criminal. But then I did some Googling and it's actually felon is an old time way of saying abscess. So it was a cure for, for an infected finger. But it was, it was wonderful to see all of that. It was also really evocative to see what people were making remedies for at home. But to have that in a cookbook was, seemed a little jarring.
Don: [00:19:07] Actually, it's not unusual at all to find different sorts of recipes combined within a single book like this. Although this is very much the tail end of the historical period where you would see this, but in the centuries leading up to this book, you would find cookery recipes like what we expect now, but also medicinal recipes, veterinary recipes, household recipes, which would be things like hair gel or shoe Polish or toothpaste, and even sometimes a commercial recipes, which would be something you could make at home, but then sell as a product. It makes a lot of sense when you really think about it because the person doing the work, the room in the house where the work is done, which is largely the kitchen, the equipment that's used to do the work, and the place where the materials are gathered, which is largely the garden or the farm or the, the, you know, the great outdoors, plus a few things you'd buy at the apothecary. All of those things were the same, whether it's veterinary, medicinal, household, or culinary recipes. And if you can combine those all in one handy book that you keep in the kitchen, all the better.
Margaret: [00:20:14] there's also reference things like the weights and measures and liquid measures. And then, uh, the time for boiling vegetables, which is horrifying.
Karl: [00:20:26] Margaret, you've got the book with you. Do you want to read some of those times?
Margaret: [00:20:30] Yes. Uh, well, no, because they are not sound advice, but green peas, one to two hours, string beans, three hours, turnips, one and a half hours, and spinach, it also one and a half hours, which I don't, I don't know what you get other than a mess with that. Yeah, yikes.
Karl: [00:20:59] Margaret. Was there anything else about the book that, that really stood out to you?
Margaret: [00:21:03] Well, in the back of the book, there's a chunk of pages that are lined paper and it’s after the end of the printed piece, there's probably 10 pages of line notebook paper that in our copy, it’s got recipes, hand copied out in a couple different, beautiful penmanship. There's sugar cookies is there's a brambles Bordeaux sauce. Brown bread pudding. The handwriting is lovely. The recipes are written out in the same. They're just formulas. The spelling is horrific and all over the map, which I think says a lot about what was valued in education at the time, but, uh, but it's neat. Don, do you have that in the copies that you're looking at, do you have recipes written in the back?
Don: [00:21:54] I do. And they're different because they were written by the individual to own this copy. I've got Mary's recipe for almond cake. Very, very nice. And each very, very nice was underlined and fruit pudding, par excellence, and maybe seven, eight, nine other recipes. One of the things that's interesting is that. As I go through ginger snaps, hermits donuts, molasses donuts, Brown bread pancakes, though, all of those recipes exist in the other part of the book. So it, they had recipes for them, but these were new acquisitions. These were new and perhaps better than they thought.
Karl: [00:22:32] I guess those would be their family recipes?
Don: [00:22:36] Could be, you don't know, you never know. People would copy things out of the newspaper. There'd be a little column in the newspaper with a one or two recipes a day, and they might do that. My favorite thing about the section of the book is that the blank lined pages. We're part of the published book. They weren't something that was added later, so that the, the people who put this together, the Ladies of the State Street Parish produced a book that expected that the people who had it would use it going forward into the future, recording their own memories, recording their own recipes, and that it was something that was going to remain active and useful through the years. It's not just something that stopped with the fundraising purpose, but lived on in every household that owned it.
Karl: [00:23:24] well, I think that's a great segue into our guests this week. And so when we come back, we'll chat with current members of the state street, church, Camy Barrantes and Jane Lindquist. We'll be right back.
The state street church was founded in 1852 at a time when Portland was experiencing significant growth as a port city. At its founding, the church membership was drawn from five existing churches in Portland when Fish, Flesh and Foul was published by the Ladies of the State Street Parish in 1877, the church would have just celebrated its silver anniversary. Today at almost 170 years old, the church continues to thrive and remains an active presence for social justice in their open and affirming church.
We are delighted to welcome church members, Camy Barrantes. And Jane Lindquist. Camy is a member of the church council and current church treasurer. Jane was an active member of the churches afternoon Guild. Welcome Camy and Jane! Camy, can you tell us a little bit about the state street church and your history with the church and a little bit about the church community today?
Cammie: [00:24:53] Yes. The State Street Church has been around since 1852. And that's when the first sanctuary was built. And then in the early 1920s, we added the chapel hall and the office wing when the High Street Church, then joined with State Street Church, and at one time it was a huge congregation in the fifties, six or 700 people easily. We’re now more like 150 to 175 people, which is common for main line churches at this time.
Karl: [00:25:30] And you're you're part of the church council. Is that correct?
Camy: [00:25:34] I am. I've been the treasurer of the church since 2005. And I sit on the council, which is the group that meets all year long and does the business of the congregation.
Karl: [00:25:45] How has the church been doing, and continuing to serve its congregation during the pandemic?
Camy: [00:25:50] Well, it's been challenging, but we've been doing okay. , we've been having online worship and in the good weather, we've also had once a month worship at Deering Oaks, which has been nice. It gives us a chance to see people socially distanced in masks, but at least we get to see people. We've continued to function pretty much over zoom with meetings and, conversations, small zoom groups, . We've done. check-in phone calls with the congregation at various times, and there's pretty much a big informal network among church members that people are checking in with each other.
Margaret: [00:26:26] So before the pandemic, I understand the church was doing quite a bit of community outreach, and social activism. Is that correct?
Camy: [00:26:36] That is true. That is true. I think there is a real interest in social action and social justice at the church. We have a climate justice group that meets, our mission board supports a lot of local social justice organizations through its budget. Many of our members are often out at different protest demonstration shows of support in the community. We also have a clothes closet that provides free clothing, not during the pandemic, but at other times. It's open once a week, and that has given us some real ties with the immigrant community. Um, we have a number of immigrants that have become members of our church. So we have that connection. It also gives us connections with the homeless community. And, uh, we have members of our church who are also members of that community. So those are two areas that we are particularly focused on.
Margaret: [00:27:33] If you have members of the immigrant community who are now part of the church membership, I wonder if a community cookbook put together today would have a very different flavor to it.
Camy: [00:27:42] It may. Well, it may, well, that's been one of the interesting things over the years where we've occasionally had a church supper or a potluck where we have some unusual dishes that are very interesting for us to try.
Karl: [00:27:56] That's great. Jane, I'd love to bring you into the conversation. There were at least two later community cookbooks that we know of, that the church put together: The Best in Cooking in Portland, which the church, , published in 1954 and Tried and True Favorites in 1994. And I understand that you were part of, at least one of those efforts. Can you tell us what you remember about the cookbook being put together?
Jane: [00:28:22] Well, I was not a member of the church in 1954 because I didn't come back to Portland from Connecticut, with my husband until 1958. And so I would have missed that one. And so it was in the nineties that, that I began getting more involved in the church. And my children had grown and I was teaching and there were, there were things that I really enjoyed doing. And of course one was cooking. I wasn't involved in the production of the book, but I was always interested to keep involved because I was a member of the Guild. Now the women's Guild is another story.
Karl: [00:29:10] Oh, well, tell us a little bit about the afternoon Guild of the state street church. Is that correct?
Jane: [00:29:16] Right. The Afternoon Guild, I think was a big moneymakers of the State Street Church during that period. And, uh, it was a well attended. One of the pastors, I believe used to say they, these are the 60 year olds and their mothers. In this group. And so it was true. There were, , many mother daughter groups in the group and we had a church fair. Every year, which produced a lot of money and it really was a big support to the church. So the cookbook, I think, was a result of finding something new to have on our sale list at the, at the fairs. And, I was very happy to contribute to it, which I did. And there were several recipes here.
Karl: [00:30:10] What are some of the recipes that you contributed?
Jane: [00:30:13] Uh, let's see, I had a lemon cake square recipe. And, that was one that I had had taken from an a ladies' home journal back years ago and had been making. And everyone loved that. And I did contribute the sweet and sour mustard recipe, which was a family recipe. The Rockcraft's sugar cookies that, that were made, Rockcraft was our church camp. And the women used to go up there for a retreat every year. So it was one of the cooks favorites and we made that. And it was kind of a good summer cookie, winter cookie, it was a year round cookie was made for everything. So I love this cookbook.
Karl: [00:31:10] Yeah, well, maybe we can, put that recipe on our website and share it with folks. It sounds like a good one.
Jane: [00:31:16] Okay. That would be good. Wouldn't it? Yes.
Karl: [00:31:20] For either Jane or Camy, you know, the two later cookbooks that the church put together included some recipes from the Fish, Flesh and Fowl book from 1877. I'm wondering if either of you have ever cooked any of those recipes or, or if there are recipes from the other cookbooks that you make or, or have made.
Jane: [00:31:42] I was reading some of those, just a while ago. And. I really was impressed that they did do things like boil eggs and cut them into and put them together with vinegar and mustard that, that we would now call deviled eggs, they used to make deviled eggs. And in baking cakes. One of the things that I remembered that I used to use was, not baking powder, but baking, baking soda and cream of tartar, and that was a nice taste for the baked goods.
Karl: [00:32:19] Camy are you a home cook? Do you like to cook?
Camy: [00:32:24] I like to eat good food. So I cook enough to eat good food. I wouldn't say that it's my passion, but I do enjoy it and I have not made any of the Fish Flesh and Fowl recipes. But I have used recipes from the other books and have some favorites. One in particular that we have used a lot from the cookbook from the 1980s is called Mother Gribbins Oatmeal Bread. And we always used it for a communion bread, until recent years when we've gone to a gluten free bread. And I still make that oatmeal bread for the fair luncheon every year. And it is a great hit. There, there are some really good recipes, but what I really enjoy about the cookbooks is skimming through and remembering the people, because I read the names and I say, Oh yes, I remember her, this is she did, or, Oh, I remember her because this was the story she told so it's a really, it's a wonderful way to just think back over the people that have been at the church in the almost 30 years that my husband and I have been members.
Karl: [00:33:38] That's that's really nice. And I think that is really one of the. Great things about community cookbooks is how they connect us to the people and the places that we love.
Margaret: [00:33:49] And people live on through their food and through their food stories, it's really, that's wonderful.
Karl: [00:33:55] Well, Camy and Jane, I just can't thank you enough for joining us today. It's been really great to talk with you both and learn more about the church and about the Afternoon Guild. And if anyone wants more information about the State Street Church, you can visit: statestreetchurch.org is the church's website.
Karl: [00:34:27] After a short break, we'll be back to talk about the recipes we cooked and how they turned out. And now a word from our sponsor, the Maine Bicentennial Community Cookbook.
Margaret: [00:34:47] If there’s one thing that brings Mainers together, it’s the flavors of our great state. The Maine Bicentennial Community Cookbook celebrates Maine’s rich culinary traditions—old and new— exploring indigenous foodways, hearty Yankee cuisine, community cookbook classics, and favorite dishes of new Mainers. This collection of more than 200 recipes spans kitchens across the state. And includes heartwarming stories and dishes from both prominent and everyday Mainers. The book is beautifully illustrated with family photos, handwritten recipe cards and historic community cookbook covers. This lovely testament to home cooking and the community cookbook tradition in Maine reminds us how the food we cook connects us to the people and places we love. It will surely become a treasured keepsake for all who love to cook—and eat!
Working with food security advocates within the state, $2 from every book sold supports organizations fighting hunger in Maine. To date, more than $14,000 has been raised and distributed to support the fight to end hunger.
For more information, or to order your copy visit maine200cookbook.com.
And now back to our Podcast…
Karl: [00:36:07] Welcome back before we get started talking about the recipes that we cooked, we have a little correction to make. Camy reached out after our interview and the oat bread recipe that she mentioned, she said was always used for communion. And she wanted to correct that statement and just say that it was only sometimes used for communion, but it was used, and, we've put that recipe. On our website. So if you're interested in cooking Mother Gribbins Oat Bread from the State Street Church, you can find that recipe on our website, communitycookbook.com.
Karl: [00:36:42] , Margaret, what did you cook from Fish, Flesh and Fowl?
Margaret: [00:36:46] so I made the queen of puddings, which is normally something I love. It's like a bread pudding with a layer of jam. And then meringue on top. But in this case, it was more the knave of puddings. It was not, it was not what I'm used to. And I have a few theories about why, one of which is that the recipe itself was just a list of ingredients with kind of no instruction, except it at the end it said, do not let it get watery, which of course is what I did. It doesn't specify what type of eggs, so our ducks had started laying. So I used duck eggs, cow milk, some soft white bread that I ground in the food processor. And then some quince butter that I had made last fall and it called for butter, the size of an egg. So I approximated the same size as the duck eggs, which was like a third of a cup, which was probably,
Karl: [00:37:45] They're big eggs.
Margaret: [00:37:46] I think that was my first mistake. And then the pudding part was much, much looser. There's really just like breadcrumbs rather than chunks of bread. So our daughter described it as being kind of like a tapioca, , And the timing said like 30 minutes, but at 30 minutes it was far from being set. So I added another 20 minutes and then another 15 minutes, , , the meringue had a great texture and had some lemon juice in it. They used both the rind and the, the juice in various components here. , but then it just totally flopped. Because I kept checking on it and adding more time.
Karl: [00:38:31] I will say the meringue was particularly tasty. I really liked that the lemon, , was it lemon juice or lemon zest? That was in the meringue
Margaret: [00:38:40] it was juice in the meringue and zest in the pudding.
Karl: [00:38:45] Yeah, the lemony meringue. I mean, I can imagine using that meringue on like a lemon cream pie. I mean, a lemon merengue pie, not a lemon cream pie
Margaret: [00:38:57] yeah. So next lemon meringue pie. Definitely I'll do this trick with the meringue, but probably never again for this iteration of the queen of puddings.
Karl: [00:39:08] Don, what did you cook?
Don: [00:39:09] I did a couple of things. And I felt like I had to start with the very first recipe in the book because it's the very first Maine Community Cookbook, and that recipe is for bannock, and in a way it seemed like a symbolic thing. But then I reminded myself that the recipes are in alphabetical order within that section. So it made sense that bannock was the first one, but it was still symbolic because bannock for me is a dish, that has roots both in the old world and the new world. And there are versions of it because it's such a very simple thing that exists both in the Native American community and that have come over from England and Northern England in particular.
It's a very simple recipe, although I will say it's a li it's got a little bit more in it than a very traditional bannock might have. It's got a pint of Indian meal scalded with a quart of milk, six or eight eggs, which is a lot of eggs. A little sugar and salt and a stir in the eggs when cool and bake in a hot oven.
And it's also symbolic of another thing, which I, which is connected to this, this whole overall topic of cooking in Maine. And that is that this is a, this is a dish, maybe not in this exact form. But it's a dish that you would find in, in hunting and fishing camps, you'd also find it in communities of loggers and the, like, it was this incredibly simple way to make a bread. That's something like a pancake in form, you know, it looks kind of like a thick pancake. So it just reminded me of Maine's roots with the Native American community. It reminded me of the roots in England and it also tied me to the great outdoors of Maine.
Margaret: [00:40:54] Did it taste good?
Don: [00:40:55] Yeah. I mean, it's a very simple thing and you can kind of dress it up, how you'd like to dress it up. ,
Karl: [00:40:59] How did you dress it up?
Don: [00:41:01] I put a little bit of butter and some cinnamon on them, which is, you know, probably completely inauthentic and non traditional, but it was, that was tasty. And I ate some of them by themselves.
I made more than I needed with this recipe with six or eight eggs. Um, I made more than I needed, uh, for any one sitting. So I had, I had a couple with lunch and a couple of with breakfast the next day. And I, I put some cheese on the couple. I mean, you know, some soft cheese, however it fit into my next couple of meals.
I made one other thing. I think we all made this other thing, is that right? This is called dressing for cabbage, but it's really a cabbage salad.
Karl: [00:41:37] I think in the, in the book it just is identified as salad. And this was one of the recipes that had an editorial comment saying most excellent, which was what prompted us to make this because if it was a most excellent salad, we definitely wanted to try it.
Margaret: [00:41:56] I thought it was medium excellent.
Karl: [00:41:58] I liked it. I thought it was good. And it was really the dressing. That was the kind of the most interesting component, which was very similar to making a hollandaise, sort of a slow, mixing some egg yolks…
Margaret: [00:42:13] It was yolk and butter and vinegar. It was a
Karl: [00:42:16] and butter and vinegar.
Margaret: [00:42:17] it was a little yolkey for my taste, but, uh, But that's my problem with hollandaise too, so
Karl: [00:42:25] but I liked it. I thought it was good.
Don: [00:42:27] Yeah, I liked it too. And, and I actually liked , the sort of eggy balance being balanced with the vinegar, and I also really liked the fact that cabbages are one of the things I still have, , from last year's garden, so that was an extra little plus. It made me really happy to be cooking with something in the late winter that I grew myself and then making it in this 150 year old recipe.
Karl: [00:42:58] Yeah, that's great. And Don, I have to say that. the photograph that you texted us of your cabbage salad and your bannock together, was beautiful and sort of put me to shame a little bit as the pictures that I took of our food. We've shared your beautiful photos of bannock and cabbage salad on our Instagram and the recipes for everything we cooked, , is on our website at communitycookbook.com.
Well, I think that takes us to the end of our very first episode, which is exciting. Thank you everyone for joining us today, a special thanks to Camy Barrantes and Jane Lindquist from the State Street Church for joining us today. Make sure to visit us on the web at communitycookbook.com, and follow us on Instagram or Facebook @communitycookbookpodcast.
We've posted the recipes and photos of today's book, Fish, Flesh and Fowl, including the 1877 recommended boiling times for vegetables. And in a couple of days, we'll be posting the recipes we'll be cooking from next episodes. Book, the Orono Cook Book, a 1906 community cookbook from Orono, Maine.
If you have questions or comments about any of the cookbooks we’re discussing, or about community cookbooks in general, you can send them to us at podcast@communitycookbook.com -- you can also leave us a voicemail. We’d love to hear from you!
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