Fall is New England's signature season, in both foliage and food. It brings the flavors of tradition - apples and cranberries, maple syrup, squash and pumpkins in vivid colors and interesting shapes. Hearty chowders and stews. Indian pudding. Pancakes, with the fruit of the orchard. And the abundant bounty of the sea, so much a part of life from Connecticut to Maine.
But, as a spate of new and updated cookbooks from the region shows, there's much more to New England cooking than the food of the Pilgrims and the American Indians, especially during this harvest time of year.
Cooking Vermont style, you may find beer in your chocolate cake, and maple syrup and mascarpone cheese flavoring your croque-monsieur. Yankee standards make room for classic fare from Brazil and Portugal, reflecting the long-growing ethnic communities whose feijoada and sweet breads are getting their due.
African-American cooks from Martha's Vineyard are getting theirs, too, with a new chapter of recipes in an updated version of a long-standing cookbook from that island vacation spot in Massachusetts.
"Our main focus was that people should know about these cuisines, and we hope to get people interested," says Jean Stewart Wexler, an author of The Martha's Vineyard Cookbook.
The most cutting-edge book of the recent New England crop is Dishing Up Vermont (Storey Publishing, 2008, $19.95) by food writer Tracey Medeiros, which showcases the products and recipes of farms, orchards, restaurants and inns in that increasingly food-centric state. The Vermont Fresh Network, which benefits from a portion of the book's proceeds, was the nation's first statewide farm-to-restaurant program.
As is the trend among local-food cookbooks, Dishing Up Vermont offers lots of beautiful photographs, not of the recipes, but of their raw ingredients in natural settings - stalks of corn, berries on the vine and, yes, unsuspecting lambs who may eventually become dinner.
Those raw ingredients are used in inventive ways.
Sometime this fall, you simply must put aside your normal brunch dish for the book's exquisitely decadent Vermont Croque Monsieur. This version of the traditional French bistro sandwich, contributed by a chef from Cliff House at Stowe Mountain Resort, features cinnamon-raisin bread cooked in egg and slathered with a spread of mascarpone cheese blended with chives and a bit of maple syrup, then piled high with ham, turkey and Gouda and baked.
