Most people today can name only two New England seafood soups: clam chowder, and lobster bisque. New England Soups From the Sea sets out to change that.
Historical cookbooks showcase a time when Americans living on the east coast embraced the bounty of the sea, and everything was fair game for the soup pot. The Soup Book, published in 1949 by chef Louis deGouy, contains one hundred chowder recipes—and just six use clams! But in the twentieth century, the food industry simplified our eating habits and eroded our regional food traditions. A generation of Americans grew up thinking “seafood” meant fish sticks and tinned tuna, and “New England” meant clam chowder and lobster bisque.
New England Soups From the Sea makes the case that today, amidst a renaissance of regional food traditions through the locavore movement, is the right time for both a rediscovery of traditional recipes and for creating forward-thinking contemporary recipes. It features eighty recipes, from classics like Rhode Island clam chowder and Maine lobster stew to rediscovered and reinvented delights like curried squid chowder and scallop bisque with sage. With chapters on seafood broths and stocks, chowders, brothy soups, bisques, classic stews, and shellfish boils, this will be the first comprehensive cookbook of the seafood soups of New England.
Craig Fear is a food writer, blogger, and cookbook author based in western Massachusetts. He became a certified Nutritional Therapy Practitioner in 2008, and his first book, The 30-Day
Heartburn Solution, has helped thousands of people treat chronic heartburn and acid reflux
through simple dietary changes. Craig is also the author of two soup cookbooks, Fearless Broths and Soups and The Thai Soup Secret. His intense passion for all things seafood stems in part from his time living in Homer, Alaska, a coastal fishing village, where he worked in a seafood restaurant and regularly fished for salmon and halibut. Craig's website is Fearless Eating.
I absolutely loved Craig's proposal from the get-go, not least because it reminded me of the many happy summers I spent on Martha's Vineyard growing up. So I'm really pleased that New England Soups From the Sea will be published by Countryman Press, an excellent imprint of W. W. Norton & Company with many related titles, including the Maine Farm Table Cookbook and The New England Seafood Markets Cookbook. Here is the official Publishers Marketplace deal memo:
Congratulations to Craig and his editor at Countryman, Isabel McCarthy!