Maritime Flavours Guidebook and Cookbook: With Recipes from the Maritime Provinces' Finest Inns and Restaurants.

John Abbott is a professor of history at Laurentian University’s Algoma University College. He is the co-author of The Border at Sault Ste Marie and The History of Fort St. Joseph.

Experience suggests that cookbooks purporting to offer recipes from a region’s “finest inns and restaurants” are often of little use for anything but a remembrance of trips taken and money (mis)spent. Sometimes they are blatantly promotional, written—one suspects—to specifications prescribed by umbrella organizations. Or they contain recipes that, while manageable in restaurants staffed by professional chefs and support staff, are quite beyond the abilities and inclinations of solitary individuals in home kitchens. Occasionally they are merely feel-good photographic displays of local colour, garnished with a few recipes, but lacking in the historical context readers need to understand the provenance of inns, restaurants, chefs, and owners.

Maritime Flavours is a brilliant exception. The recipes have been tested in the home kitchen, and were chosen to reflect the culinary styles of individual establishments (making due allowance for the peripatetic nature of chefs). Not only are almost all of the recipes within the accomplished domestic cook’s ambit of competence, but they are also to some extent a guide to the style of dining one might expect to enjoy on a culinary voyage of discovery. Every recipe in chapters offering appetizers, soups, salads, seafood, mains, vegetables, desserts, and breads begins with an introduction. Experienced cooks will be delighted by simple variations in standard dishes which transform their flavours and sometime their appearance. The seafood cocktail from the Rossmount Inn features mussels, scallops, and shrimp in a Dijon-based vinaigrette. Michael Smith’s recipes are the most complex on offer, but the chef of the Inn at Bay Fortune offers up a recipe for chowder (blue mussels in a sweet potato soup garnished with spicy butter) to die for. Three concluding chapters describe and locate each of the selected inns and restaurants in New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island. Highly recommended both for the cook and the traveller.