How to Cook a Moose (18 page)

Before the back-to-the-land movement, which started in 1952 with Helen and Scott Nearing's move to Cape Rosier to found the now-famous Forest Farm, and exploded in the 1970s as young people came north in droves to meet these gurus and emulate them, restaurants in Maine used to serve what I think of as “horrible New England cuisine”: stodgy, “fancy,” oddly garnished dishes of dubious origin.

The Maine Historical Society has a collection of vintage menus from the olden days. According to an entertaining piece by Meredith Goad, published in the
Portland Press Herald
on September 11, 2013, local restaurants used to feature such delicacies as “mock turtle soup” (made with organ meats or calves' heads, rather than turtle), “baked halibut Manhattan,” and “boiled ox tongue with piquant sauce.” Tomato juice cocktails were popular. Weird garnishes abounded. A dish called “banana scallops,” according to Goad, contained no scallops, but was rather “a retro [for us] recipe of coated, fried bananas that were often served like a vegetable.”

The Preble House's extensive menu (pronounced “bad and disgusting” in 1868 by none other than Charles Dickens) included “fried smelts served with tartar sauce and French fried potatoes, breaded lamb chops with tomato sauce, oyster patties, apricot fritters with wine sauce, roast chicken with giblet sauce, tenderloin of beef and mushrooms, Roman punch [a tart, boozy rum and lemonade concoction with a dollop of meringue on top that was commonly used back then as a palate cleanser], roast partridge with game sauce and Saratoga potatoes, and on and on, until the meal is finished with coffee and cigars.”

Mock Turtle Soup

From
The Home Comfort Range Cook Book,
circa 1900

Boil half a calf's head with the skin on until soft; cut the meat into small pieces; also the tongue; prepare from the yolks of two hardboiled eggs round balls the size of marbles, and chop up the whites; take of soup stock two quarts; then fry in one ounce of butter a medium-sized onion and add one ounce of flour and brown the same; then add the stock, a teaspoon of Worcestershire sauce, pepper and salt, the juice of one lemon, and let simmer for ten minutes. Pour over the meat and imitation turtle eggs and serve hot, adding the chopped whites of the eggs.

This was, evidently, the state of public dining in Maine until the summer of 1974, when a young, unseasoned Sam Hayward sliced open the belly of a thirty-pound cod from the Gulf of Maine and looked inside. “It was chock-full of 1 1/2-inch baby lobsters,” he told Mary Pols and Meredith Goad of the Source section of the
Portland Press Herald
. “Lined up, all facing the same direction, stacked up.”

Although he had no formal training, Hayward had just been hired by Shoals Marine Laboratory on Appledore Island to cook for the teachers, students, and the construction crews and engineers finishing up the lab's new buildings. He was relying heavily on his copy of Julia Child's
Mastering the Art of French Cooking
, but it was the enormous cod he'd sliced open that made everything leap to life for him: There it was, the food chain, laid out in front of him.

“Suddenly you start to see interactions in the community in the Gulf of Maine,” he told Pols and Goad. “It became an object of fascination for me that I still feel. How do we connect the dots?”

That summer, he developed a passionate interest in local ingredients. Then he opened a restaurant in Brunswick and forged a bond with a local farmer, Frank Gross, taking whatever produce he had, a relationship that continues today. In 1996, he opened what is now arguably Portland's most famous and beloved restaurant, Fore Street. Hayward is widely hailed as the father of Maine's farm-to-table movement; all around him now are restaurants whose chefs have been inspired by what he started forty years ago—a whole posse of self-taught native Maine cooks up and down the coast and inland.

One of the most visible and exemplary of Hayward's culinary descendants is Erin French. I had heard amazing things about her restaurant, the Lost Kitchen, located in the small farming hamlet of Freedom. It had only been open since July of 2014, but it was already booked well into the future. When
Food & Wine
magazine asked me to go up and interview her, of course I leapt at the chance, and of course I brought Brendan with me. And it was there that I found the quintessential young Maine chef I'd been looking for.

To eat at the Lost Kitchen, first we had to find it. From Belfast, we drove inland on a two-lane country road through seventeen miles of snowy, windswept, mountainous farmland. The sign for Freedom was so small, we nearly missed it. A quick left on Main Street, and there was the Mill at Freedom Falls. We took the last parking spot and walked across a narrow bridge over a rushing stream. It was early December, snowy and icy, but that night's dinner was fully booked. (At that time, the Lost Kitchen served a multicourse prix fixe menu on Saturdays, family style; on three other days, they offered a full and ever-changing menu, and on Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday, they were closed.)

In the stone-walled wine cellar downstairs from the restaurant, Jess, the sommelier, was wrapping bottles in brown paper bags and tying them with twine for the diners. While we waited, we browsed her small, beautifully curated collection of wine on open shelving. (There were no liquor licenses to be had in tiny Freedom, but you could bring your own wine or buy it there.) When it was our turn, we asked what went with that night's main course, which was described tantalizingly on the menu as “tea-brined duck breast with root vegetable hash and caramelized onion jam.”

“Are you from Maine?” I asked Jess; she had a distinct New York accent, but I never presume.

She laughed. “Do I sound like I'm from Maine? I'm a Jewish girl from the Bronx.”

We bought the bottle of Gamay she recommended, as well as a half-bottle of port, then went up to the restaurant, which was in a large, airy room with barn-board walls, sanded plank floors, and a ceiling of exposed beams with suspended mill trestles. A wall of windows looked out onto the stream and bridge; the handmade tables were spaced far apart.

We sat at the polished concrete kitchen counter. Erin and that night's crew of four other young women (the only guy working in the place was the dishwasher) prepared and served the first of a succession of small plates, each better than the last: marinated herbed olives with crusty bread, butter, and watermelon radishes; luscious scallop crudo, the first of the season, with olive oil, shallots, and lemon; crunchy fried smelts with aioli; and the pièce de résistance, a succulent fried Pemaquid oyster in its shell on a bed of seaweed with piquant raw beet slaw and horseradish aioli.

After the appetizers, Erin stepped out from behind the counter and gave a toast, thanking us all for finding the place and making it possible for her, a self-taught cook—“I feel weird being called ‘Chef,' ”
she told me the next day; “I'm just a girl who loves to cook”—and a local girl, to realize her dream.

Next, warm roast carrot soup was swirled from Mason jars into bowls of crème fraîche and honey. Then came a crunchy, textured salad of late season lettuces, with slabs of shaved Pecorino tucked in here and there—and then the duck: brined in Lapsang souchong for a smoky richness, perfectly cooked, rare in the middle and steak-like. The caramelized onion jam was addictive; I wanted a jar full of it and a spoon. And the root vegetable hash was rich, savory, dense with flavor. And finally dessert: parsnip cake with salted caramel whipped cream and hazelnuts; the whipped cream was as addictive as the onion jam.

Every dish consisted of just a few local, seasonal ingredients; all were plated with fresh herb garnishes on vintage dishware. The crew moved from fryer to counter to tables in a well-rehearsed dance. The feeling in the room was calm, festive, and homey, all at once.

Erin sent everyone home with a bag of freshly baked molasses cookies, her grandmother's recipe that she'd tweaked with pieces of candied ginger. We drifted across the bridge to the parking lot, happy and sated, and drove back to our seaside hotel in Belfast.

Erin French's Fried Oysters with Beetroot Slaw and Horseradish Aioli

12 oysters

For the fry batter:

1/2 cup flour

1/2 cup semolina

For the slaw:

1 small shallot

1 large red beet

1 T seasoned rice wine vinegar

3 T olive oil

salt and pepper to season

For the aioli:

1 large egg yolk

1/2 cup olive oil

1 1/2 tsp horseradish

1/4 tsp lemon juice

1 tsp water

salt to season

4 cups canola oil for frying

seaweed and kosher salt for garnish

special tools: mandolin, deep-fry thermometer

To prepare oysters:
Shuck the oysters into a small bowl along with all of the oyster “liquor,” discarding the flat top shell, retaining the rounded-out bottom shell. Refrigerate the oysters until ready to fry. Wash the retained bottom shells, scraping out any remaining oyster pieces, and set aside to dry.

To prepare the fry batter:
In a small bowl, combine the flour and semolina. Set aside.

To prepare the slaw:
Finely chop the shallot, place in a small bowl, and top with vinegar. Let stand for 15 minutes to macerate. Add the olive oil to the mixture and whisk to combine. On the finest matchstick tooth blade of a mandolin, grate the beet. Add the beet to the shallot mixture. Mix to coat and season with salt and
pepper. If the slaw seems dry, add a bit more olive oil to suit. Set aside for flavors to incorporate.

To make the aioli:
In a small bowl, beat the egg yolk with a hand mixer on high speed. Add a few drops olive oil and continue to beat. Continue to add the olive oil, one drop at a time, beating constantly until the mixture is thick, pale, and fluffy. Add the lemon juice and water to thin. Stir in the horseradish. Season with salt to taste.

In a 12-inch cast-iron skillet, preheat the fry oil to 375 degrees over medium-high heat. Meanwhile, prepare the oyster “baskets.” On a large platter, scatter a bit of seaweed for garnish. Pour 12 small mounds of kosher salt and top each with a clean oyster shell. Fill each with a bit of beet slaw. Now, fry the oysters.

To fry the oysters:
Dredge each oyster through the flour and semolina mixture. Drop into the preheated fryer and fry until golden brown, about 15 seconds. Remove with a slotted spoon and blot on a paper towel. Season with a pinch of salt. Place an oyster on each slaw-filled oyster shell and top with a small dollop of aioli. Serve immediately. Makes 12 oysters.