Maine Chef Erin French turned a string of early catering gigs into a secret suppers series in her apartment. She took her dinners on the road, organizing traveling "fork-to-field" dinners from a tricked-out 1965 Airstream trailer, before returning to her tiny hometown, Freedom, Maine, to build her dream restaurant, The Lost Kitchen, in a restored 1834 gristmill. Each spring, the day the phone line opens to accept reservations, the restaurant books up for the entire year. This is her first book.
An evocative, gorgeous four-season look at cooking in Maine, one of America's last great wild New England states, with 100 recipes
No one can bring small-town America to life better than a native, especially when it comes to Maine. Arguably one of the country's most off-the-beaten-path states, it enjoys four distinct seasons and an abundant natural bounty that comes from its coastline, rivers, farms, fields, and woods--a cook's dream. Erin French grew up in Freedom, Maine (population 719), helping her father man the griddle at his greasy-spoon diner. An entirely self-taught cook who used cookbooks and trial and error to form her culinary education, she now helms her dream restaurant in a restored historic mill in the same town, creating meals that draw locals and visitors from around the world to a dining room that feels like an extension of her home kitchen. In fact, Dana Cowin, former editor-in-chief of Food & Wine, singled out a dinner at Erin's resaurant as one of her five "Favorite Meals of 2015" in the December issue of the magazine, writing: "The food was brilliant in its simplicity and honesty." It is this pure approach that makes Erin's cooking so appealing--and so easy to embrace at home.
