There's nothing better than settling into a nice, warm, home-cooked meal at the kitchen table. Kathy Gunst takes us into her own kitchen, introducing us to the flavors of fresh, seasonal Maine ingredients prepared in simple and inspiring ways. With essays conveying the mood of each month, Gunst gives readers a sense of Maine food and life. She follows each essay with a handful of recipes incorporating the seasonal ingredient or theme.
NOTES from a Maine Kitchen
Seasonally Inspired RecipesBy KATHY GUNSTDown East
Copyright © 2011 Kathy Gunst
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-0-89272-917-3Contents
January Smelts and Shrimp..................................................13February Ear Local, Shop Local, and Chocolate Cravings.....................27March Maple Syrup and Parship Harvest......................................41April Chicken and the Eggs and Ramp Hunt...................................57May Mothers and Daughters..................................................73June First Salad and Grill Time............................................83July Summer Houseguests and Getaways.......................................97August Crustacean Nation: Lobster..........................................111September Canning and Preserving Summer....................................127October Mushroom Hunt, Apples, and Cider...................................145November Giving Back.......................................................159December Party Time........................................................177Menus.......................................................................189Resources...................................................................194Recipe Index................................................................196
Chapter One
January
A WINTER ADVENTURE ON THE CATHANCE RIVER
Truth be told: the idea of sitting in a shack on top of the ice with a hole cut in it, putting slimy bail on a hook, trying to catch smelts has always struck me as a little crazy.
But here I am, just before 8 a.m. on a cold January morning outside Jim McPherson's Smelt Camps in Bowdoinham, Maine. I'm with Sam Hayward, chef of Fore Street restaurant in Portland, and Sam's old friend and fishing buddy, Brett Zachau. It's prime season for smelting, and we're hoping the tide is right and the fish are biting. For me this is a first. I've caught a flounder or two, but I've never fished for smelts, and certainly never stepped inside a smelt camp. I've come hoping to be proven wrong about this whole winter ice fishing thing.
By the time we check in with McPherson and grab our gear from the car — a thermos of coffee, some pastry, a knife, cutting board, worms, and a few kitchen towels — there's a line forming outside the camp office. The Cathance River in Bowdoinham is known as a good fishing spot and a small group of men wait in the cold to sign up for one of McPherson's fishing shacks. I appear to be the only woman for miles around. Although dressed in my three layers of clothing, which makes me very closely resemble the Michelin (wo)man, it's hard to tell what gender I am.
Like the tiny silver fish they arc here to catch, these men arc drawn By the tide. The best smelt fishing takes place during the incoming tide, which lasts about five or sis hours, and on this icy blue morning begins around 8 a.m.
We walk down a plank to the frozen river. I spot water flowing in the center of the river, not more than one hundred feet from where we are standing. Jim McPherson has been running the camps for more than thirty winters, so I'm guessing that if it were unsafe he'd be the first to know. We spot a four-wheeler with a strange-looking building on wheels hitched to the back. Sam and Brent start laughing as McPherson describes the rig: "This is the trailer I used to haul my four-wheelers, but now I use my four-wheeler to haul it. I put a small building on it with a propane heater to keep people warm while I take them upriver. Hop in and we'll get started."
We settle onto little wooden benches built into the side of the shack. I stare out the one small, foggy window in the rear of the building and watch civilization disappear. First the bridge, then the car, the church steeple, and finally the town fades as we drive two miles upriver to a spot called Town Farm Turn, where locals have been fishing for more than a hundred years. It's dead quiet as we step out and set eves on our camp.
"This here's my deluxe camp. Come on in and I'll show you around," says McPherson, waving his arm at the tiny structure like a game show host displaying a new car we just won. The camp, green with a red door and yellow trim, measures ten feet by ten feet, the size of a large outhouse. Sam and Brent seem awfully impressed. "Wow!" they say in unison. "Look at this. Sixteen lines! Oh boy, we're gonna catch some fish!" I look at these two middle-aged men, one a famous chef and the other a carpenter, builder, and see them as the boys they must have been, gleeful children playing hooky from school on a cold January morning, out on the river, not a worry in the world.
Inside the camp is a small, old, black cast-iron woodstove. There's a pile of wood and McPherson, as part of the fee for renting the camp, has cranked the fire and gotten the place toasty warm, I look down at my hands wrapped inside expedition-style gloves, big, thick things with so much insulation 1 could probably stick my hand into the icy water and not feel the cold. My whole body starts to sweat.
There's a narrow wooden table and a few fold-Lip wooden chairs. On cither side of the camp McPherson has cut a long, thin rectangle in the ice (what he calls "the race holes") where under foot-thick ice we can see the black water swirl beneath us. At the beginning of the season, sometime near Christmas, he uses a chainsaw to cut out the holes. As long as the camp is in use the ice doesn't have a chance to refreeze completely, McPherson heads upriver every day around 6 a.m. and uses an ice chisel and a skimmer to break up the frozen water so it will be clear by the time the early-morning customers show up. Attached to opposite walls of the camp above the swirling water, are eight Lies dangling over the race holes. The fishing lines end with a hook and a two-ounce lead weight or "sinker" dangling from it.
Brent and Sam start cutting up sand worms, our bait. They're nasty looking and are said to bite. Even after they're cut into ¼-inch pieces the worms wiggle on the wooden cutting board. We place the bait on the hooks; it's not nearly as hard as it seems once I get the hang of it and forget about the slimy, warm blood coating my fingers.
We drop the lines until they hit the bottom of the river; it takes a while to feel the gentle thud on the muddy riverbed. Then I'm told to raise the line up off the bottom about six to eight inches, and wait.
The woodstove is cranking, and I sit down next to the lines I have baited, expecting to settle In for the long haul. Within seconds (I am prone to exaggeration, but I swear it was only seconds) one of my lines wiggles back and forth. Hate to admit it, but I make a sound like a squeal. "I GOT ONE!" Brent joins in: "Yup! I think you got somethin' there. Give it a quick jerk and pull it up." There, at the end of my line, is a gorgeous eight-inch silver smelt. Before I can pull the fish off the C-shaped hook and rebait it, lines two and five are squiggling. Suddenly things are out of control. We can't bait the lines fast enough.
"We have hit pay dirt," Brent says, slapping his knee. He and Sam are marveling at the situation. "This is the best spot on the river." they say. "Can you even imagine a more perfect spot?" they ask each other, huge grins on their faces. "This is just unreal. Unbelievable."
Within an hour we have almost filled half of a large plastic bucket with more than one hundred smelts. They range in size from tiny ones — about five inches — to really impressive-looking larger ones measuring...
