It’s here! We are so excited to announce the arrival of the Maine Community Cookbook, Volume 2! After numerous printing and shipping delays, the books finally arrived at the Islandportpress warehouse! The cookbook looks amazing, and is absolutely overflowing with incredible recipes and stories from Maine families across our great state. We can’t wait to share the cookbook with you. We’re working hard to package up and mail out all the maine200cookbook.com pre-orders and Kickstarter campaign rewards. It should start popping up in bookstores and gift shops soon, and we’re keeping the special discounted pre-order price on the maine200cookbook.com website for a little while longer if you haven’t yet ordered your copy yet, there’s still time to get the cookbook and save! We really appreciate everyone’s patience in waiting for volume 2 to arrive. Thank you for your support, and thank you for being part of our community! Sincerely Karl & Margaret, July 13, 2022

TO DATE MORE THAN $20,000 HAS BEEN DISTRIBUTED TO ORGANIZATIONS FIGHTING HUNGER IN MAINE!

Celebrate Maine Home Cooking!

The success of the Maine Bicentennial Community Cookbook has inspired the creation of a second volume! With 200 more all new recipes and stories, the Maine Community Cookbook Vol. 2 will continue the celebration of home cooking and the vibrant cultural tapestry of Maine.

Get Ready for More Family Recipes and Food Stories!

Building on the success of the award-winning Maine Bicentennial Community Cookbook, this second volume is a brand new collection of more than 200 family recipes, stories, and photos. The Maine Community Cookbook, Volume 2: 200 More Recipes Celebrating Home Cooking in the Pine Tree State, is filled with dishes and stories from home kitchens in all of Maine’s 16 counties, including recipes from well-known Mainers such as Senator Olympia Snowe, historian Heather Cox Richardson, 101-year-old lobsterwoman Virginia Oliver, Olympic gold medalist Joan Benoit Samuelson, best-selling author Abdi Nor Iftin, and summer resident and humorist John Hodgman. At the heart of the cookbook are recipes and stories from everyday Maine families. Breaking bread together gives us comfort and strength, in good times and bad. Whether we’re teaching our kids to cook family recipes over Zoom, or gathered together and sharing them at the table, our food traditions help define who we are, and bring us together as a community.

Like the first book, Vol. 2 will raise money to aid organizations fighting hunger in the state of Maine, with $2 from each book sold distributed to non-profits with the goal of fighting food insecurity and inequity. The Maine Bicentennial Community Cookbook, now in its fourth printing with more than 11,000 copies in print, has raised and distributed more than $20,000 to 30 different organizations fighting hunger in all corners of the state.

“Working on this project was such a beautiful, inclusive, and fun celebration of our state,” says editor Margaret Hathaway, “During a time when we couldn’t sit across a table from friends and family, we made new community through the bicentennial cookbook. Each recipe introduced us to incredible people, flavors, and stories. We continue to explore Maine’s cultural diversity through home cooking in this second volume, and we look forward to continuing to expand our cookbook community.”

About the Maine Bicentennial Community Cookbook

Lobster Newburg, boiled dinner, bean hole suppers, whoopie pies, and more! If there’s one thing that brings Mainers together, it’s the flavors of this great state. Whether we’re teaching our kids to cook family recipes, or gathered together and sharing them at the table, we know that our food traditions bring us together as a community. The Maine Bicentennial Community Cookbook celebrates Maine’s rich culinary traditions—old and new— exploring indigenous foodways, hearty Yankee cuisine, community cookbook classics, and favorite dishes of new Mainers. This collection of more than 200 recipes spans kitchens across the state: pulling dishes from grandma’s recipe box, award-winning chefs, Maine personalities, and rustic fishing camps. Celebrating the state’s whole community with recipes from all 16 counties, this cookbook includes heartwarming stories and dishes from both prominent and everyday Mainers, and is beautifully illustrated with family photos, handwritten recipe cards and historic community cookbook covers.

This lovely testament to home cooking and the community cookbook tradition in Maine reminds us how the food we cook connects us to the people and places we love. It will surely become a treasured keepsake of Maine’s Bicentennial celebration for all who love to cook—and eat!

Proceeds from community cookbooks have historically gone to benefit a cause within the community. Working with food security advocates within the state, $2 from every book sold will support organizations fighting hunger in Maine.

Praise for the Maine Bicentennial Community Cookbook

The Maine Bicentennial Community Cookbook earned recognition in several categories at the Readable Feast New England cookbook awards in December 2020. The book earned three honorable mentions: for Book of the Year, New England Book of the Year, and the People’s Choice award. The Readable Feast is a five-year-old Boston-based contest that annually recognizes the best food books and cookbooks in the region.

“There are many ways to gain insight into a place. You can listen to its music, learn its language, educate yourself about its history... taste its food. The Maine Bicentennial Community Cookbook provides an expansive and loving introduction to the kitchens, traditions and people of Maine.” —Portland Press Herald

“True to genre, the book provides a colorful snapshot of places, people, and history, via short personal stories that accompany the recipes and tell about toting wax-paper-wrapped whoopie pies to work in the potato fields or recreating the spicy meatball subs a grandmother used to make to sell at fairs during the Great Depression. ‘The recipes aren’t really the most important thing,’ Schatz says, ‘The most important things are the stories and the sentiments behind the recipes.’”—Down East Magazine

“While the recipes are as interesting as they are varied, the true treasures in this crowdfunded compilation...lie in the stories behind the recipes, as told by the Mainers who submitted them. Together, these recorded memories weave a tapestry of community connections facilitated by food.”—Edible Maine

“In Maine Bicentennial Community Cookbook, there are dozens of gems that speak to family, tradition, home and home cooking, and community in its fullest form, in a nostalgic and meaningful way.”—Rachael Ray In Season