Florence Griswold Museum

Bluefish is not palatable no matter what these people suggest. Don't trust any recipe that calls for prepared or pre-packaged foods or for margarine. Horror of horrors, there's a "pesto" made with ... margarine, vegetable oil, and *dried* basil.

Do people really serve canned mushroom soup or tinned beef to invited company? I'd serve jelly sandwiches to gourmands before I would offer any dish made with something from a package (because I could make jelly and bread, and even if I didn't, the food would be honestly simple).

The only undeniably native ingredients -- that anyone could readily gather or grow in Lyme or Old Lyme -- are oily, tough bluefish, other bland white fish (farmed trout is no good), berries, snapping turtles, fiddlehead ferns, spring greens, venison and other game, and summer vegetables; and one could buy local milk and maple syrup. Some of the book's recipes call for bay scallops, by which it means Niantic Bay, but I thought no shellfish from the Sound was currently safely edible (plus East Lyme isn't one of the Lymes).

I will keep this book (a gift) with the cookery books, not with the Old Lyme books. If it weren't a gift, I, rabidly loyal to my hometown though I be, wouldn't keep it at all.… (mehr)