Marge Standish was an amazing and very popular cook, and her recipes have been the favorites of many of us over the years. My wife Linda has copies of Marge’s original books, handed down from Linda’s Mom who purchased them in 1976.
Down East Books has just published a new Marge Standish cookbook, Cooking Maine Style, put together by Sandra Oliver, a food historian who writes a weekly recipe column, Tastebuds, for the Bangor Daily News.
As Sandra noted in the book’s introduction, Marge’s “cookbooks have what we call legs, that is, a lasting quality.” Boy, that is so true. I was particularly pleased when I found, in this book, Marge’s recipe for Melt-In-Your-Mouth Blueberry Cake, our family’s all-time-favorite Marge Standish recipe.
If you haven’t tried that one, you are in for – well – a melt-in-your-mouth amazing experience.
Sandra also reported that, “Like Mrs. Standish, I love old fashioned, classic Maine dishes like chowders, baked beans, and hermits. In selecting recipes for this volume, I tended to favor them because the food historian in me hopes to preserve worthwhile traditional recipes.”
And as she notes, Marge’s recipes “have terrific utility for today’s cooks.”
This is cooking the Maine way, and I thank Sandra for bringing Marge Standish’s wonderful recipes to a new generation of Maine cooks.