Great Recipes from Maine’s Favorite Cook

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.

George Smith

About George Smith

George stepped down at the end of 2010 after 18 years as the executive director of the Sportsman’s Alliance of Maine to write full time. He writes a weekly editorial page column in the Kennebec Journal and Waterville Morning Sentinel, a weekly travel column in those same newspapers (with his wife Linda), monthly columns in The Maine Sportsman magazine, two outdoor news blogs (one on his website, georgesmithmaine.com, and one on the website of the Bangor Daily News), and special columns for many publications and newsletters. Islandport Press published a book of George's favorite columns, "A Life Lived Outdoors" in 2014. In 2014, George also won a Maine Press Association award for writing the state's bet sports blog. In 2016, Down East Books published George's book, Maine Sporting Camps, and Islandport Press published George and his wife Linda's travel book, Take It From ME, about their favorite Maine inns and restaurants.