Photo by Glenda Booth
At Maine’s lobster pounds, diners typically get a lobster, corn, tools, butter, a side, a toilette and a bib.
Sprawled across a dinner plate with its red segmented exoskeleton and 10 legs, two with claws, it resembles a shiny scorpion. The king of crustaceans, the lobster, is the unofficial symbol of coastal Maine and the target of many culinary quests.
Fall is a great time to visit Maine — cooler temperatures, colorful fall leaves and of course, lobster! You can take a two-hour non-stop flight from Reagan National or drive or take a train (about nine hours).
Lobsters are lower in calories and saturated fats than most meats, lobster promoters boast. A diehard lobster aficionado wears a bib and tackles the critter at a breezy seaside lobster pound, as lobstermen bring in their traps. Lobster fans pull and pick the critter apart, suck little morsels out of the legs and continue the dismemberment to the climax, the tail, and complete the feast with fresh corn on the cob.
Maine eateries offer lobsters steamed, boiled, broiled, baked, roasted and in a stew, pie, casserole or salad and piled into their famous sandwich, the classic lobster roll smeared with a slick of mayonnaise. The roll is a hotdog bun with the brown sides shaved and toasted. Luke Holden of Luke’s Lobster says, “A lobster roll starts with pure unadulterated lobster meat. The bun is just a vehicle.” Maine chefs will compete in October in Portland at Harvest on the Harbor.
Harvests of the Sea
Mainers have fished for centuries and Indigenous people and Europeans before them. Shell middens, like one today on the Damariscotta River, are testaments to the Wabanakis who harvested shellfish 1,000 years ago.
Seafood dishes feature cod, haddock, scallops, clams, crabs, oysters, mussels and more. Lusciously thick clam, haddock or seafood chowder can warm the innards any day, specialties of Cozy’s in Southport and Waldoboro’s Moody’s Diner (Motto: “When I Get Hungry, I Get Moody.”) Opened in 1927, Moody’s is operated by the fourth generation of founders Percy and Bertha Moody and serves 1,100 people a day at the height of summer.
Gastronomes in coastal Maine also scarf up codfish cakes, clam fritters and delicately baked haddock that falls apart to the touch. Clam and lobster bakes on the beach are long-standing traditions, likely adapted from the Abenakis.
“We are wrangling oysters,” Althea Pendur-Throne tells her customers at Damariscotta’s Glidden Point Oyster Farms where she gives oyster farm tours, shucking lessons and tips on how to slurp down these slippery bivalves. The Glidden Point oyster has a cucumber aftertaste, she asserts; the Butterfield, nutty. “We grow them cold and slow in this tidal estuary,” she explains, stressing that oysters have a terroir affected by the water, sun and the algae that they eat. True oyster devotees can identify the water the oyster came from.
The Maine clambake, like the one today on Cabbage Island, is a longstanding ritual. Cooks start by setting salty driftwood ablaze with spruce brush and topping it with wet, fresh rockweed. Then they dump bushels of squirting clams onto the rockweed and watch them steam. Calling these delectables a “half bushel of bliss,” Robert Tristram Coffin wrote in his book, Mainstays of Maine, “All that is needed is a bed of coals, a pile of rockweed and clams just out of the Atlantic in between the hot and cool halves of the natural sandwich.”
Use only your fingers, no utensils, please. Sip the juice from the crack, rip off one shell and drop the meat into your mouth. “Something apocalyptic” has taken place in that hot rockweed, Coffin declared in his book. “You swallow something that is part deep smoke, part bright blue sky, part the deep blue sea, part the sharpness and zest which is Maine, part that unforgettable and matchless taste of burnt meat.” Lobster bake chefs use the same method and contend that the wood fire enhances the flavor.
Beyond the Sea
Moose meat and fiddlehead ferns star on spring tables. Every spring, Nicole "Nikki" MacDonald of Boothbay Harbor makes a Maine meal. The menu? Moose burgers, fiddleheads and oysters. Her brother usually wins a moose in the hunting lottery. She adds bacon to the lean meat for fat.
MacDonald forages for budding ostrich fern fronds shaped like a fiddle’s head, and sautés them in olive oil. “They have a lovely texture,” she says. Safety alert: Eat only ostrich fern fiddleheads, not other ferns, which may be toxic to humans.
“That cornerstone of New England’s civic serenity and domestic righteousness” is the "Baked Bean Saturday," Coffin wrote. The main course is “wicked good beans,” the culinary centerpiece of a church, firehouse or American Legion fundraiser.
Cooking these beans — Navy, kidney, pea or Yellow Eye — “begins in the soil . . . they must pass through the hard and acidulous New England earth before they enter the pot,” Coffin writes. They should soak overnight or until all the water disappears and cook at least 12 hours in a greased earthen pot with a slab of salt pork. Many Mainers won’t disclose the secret ingredients, but some are known to throw in a dollop of ketchup, molasses or brown sugar.
Bob Scott from Sabattus insists that Bean-hole beans must cook in a hole in the ground. First, burn some hard wood down to coals, put a layer of dirt over coals, put in the pot with a cover, cover all of it with dirt and let them bake in their earthy tomb. They have to cook slowly, explains Mary Pinkham of Boothbay Harbor, so that “all the flavors meld together.”
The hallowed beanhole supper (“suppah” in Mainespeak) is also all about neighborliness. “There’s the togetherness that is important,” wrote Marjorie Standish, a 25-year columnist with the Maine Sunday Telegram and best-selling cookbook author.
Maine Potatoes
Up north, Aroostook County is potato country, where a perfect combination of sun and rain produce a good potato. The Maine Potato Board claims that these tubers bear a special trademark because they surpass federal requirements for number one grade potatoes. Maine spuds supply the nation with seed potatoes, fresh potatoes, French fries and potato chips. Maine’s Fox Family Potato Chips slogan: “Potato chips that taste the way Mother Nature intended.” The loaded baked potato sale is popular each August at the Houlton Potato Feast Days.
Mainers create many potato dishes from chips to chowders to fish hash and in the true Maine spirit of making the most of everything, Freeport’s Maine Distilleries produces potato-based gin and vodka, including one flavored with wild blueberries.
Every true Mainer knows from childhood that wild or "lowbush" blueberries are sweet and "highbush" blueberries are not. Maine is the top producer of wild blueberries — wild — not planted and fans tout that wild blueberries have twice the antioxidants and 33 percent more fiber than ordinary blueberries.
Cans at Freeport’s L.L. Bean flagship store dub them “the caviar of Maine” and blueberries find their way into many foods and drinks, for starters, muffins, pies, cakes, pancakes, salsa, fudge, cream, butter, vinegar, wine, syrup, jam and desserts like blueberry ice cream, claflouti, flummery and slump. Blueberries punctuate beverages like wine, ale, margaritas, coffee and a drink called blueberry yumyum.
The Union Fair, held each August, doubles as Maine’s Wild Blueberry Festival, culminating with the blueberry queen coronation. Both the Union and Topsham fairs stage blueberry pie-eating contests.
While cacao trees cannot grow in Maine, Mainers have adopted chocolate. Wilbur's of Maine has made Maine Mud since 1983, a chocolate sauce tinged with flavors like orange, mint and raspberry. Needhams tickle the palate of many curious foodies. A Needham is a dark, dense, chocolate candy, a one-and-a-quarter-inch square of shredded coconut and smashed potato. One Needham can feed four people, says Kat Arabasz of Boothbay Harbor’s Orne’s Candy Store where handmade Needhams fly off the shelves. “It tastes like a Mounds bar on steroids,” she quips. Motto: “Needhams. I need ‘em.” (Orne's also sells red lobster gummies and pops.)
Maine’s all-time, show-stopping, mouth-watering treat is the whoopie pie. The “pie” is a four or so-inch-wide, Oreo-like, moist, chocolate cake with a cream filling. Marjorie Standish’s cookbook recipe instructs bakers to cream shortening and sugar, add two beaten egg yolks; sift cocoa, flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt; add that to the cream mixture, add milk and vanilla; drop the mixture by teaspoons onto a pan and bake.
To whoopie pie purists, it’s an unpardonable sin to use marshmallow fluff from a jar or to make a cake other than chocolate. Some adventurous modern chefs have adulterated this sacred confection, making, for example, lemon- or pumpkin-flavored cakes, and adding peanut butter, maple flavoring or Bailey’s Irish cream to the filling. Moody’s and Valley View Orchards ship whoopies.
Beverages
Maine’s got Moxie, the state’s official soft drink which some say tastes like licorice. Duane Pinkham, of Boothbay Harbor, commented, “It tastes like root beer, Dr. Pepper and kerosene,” then lamenting that Coca Cola bought it “and sweetened it up.” Bob Scott added, “I’ll take three sips. It ain’t bad.” Lisbon Falls holds the Moxie Festival, “where the luau lasts three full days as we hang loose and drink Moxie," they brag.
Maine has craft breweries, distilleries and a few wineries. There are many choices of craft and other beers like Shipyard, Geary’s and Gritty McDuff’s and ales, even blueberry ale.
Resourceful Mainers create their cuisine from what’s available. Standish writes, “Maine cooking is a way of life. Our forebears made do with what was at hand.”
Maine’s tourism website has many food, drink and restaurant options, including an Oyster Trail, at https://visitmaine.com/food-and-drink/lobster-seafood/.
