Maine Food & Traditional Cuisine

Maine cooking is built on what comes out of the water and off the barrens, and it does not dress either up much.

Lobster is the centre of it, and the local orthodoxy is firm: a Maine lobster roll is cold, dressed lightly with mayonnaise, on a split-top bun that has been griddled in butter. The hot-with-butter version is Connecticut's, and saying so out loud is a reliable way to start a discussion.

The state is also the largest producer of wild blueberries in the country — the low-bush kind, smaller and sharper than cultivated berries, harvested from open barrens Downeast.

Lobster roll, cold and lightly dressed, on a griddled split-top bun.

Steamed lobster at a lobster pound — bought by weight, eaten at a picnic table by the water, with corn and a bib.

Fried clams, whole-belly rather than strips, which is the distinction that matters locally.

Wild blueberry pie, made with the small low-bush berries, and blueberry everything else through August.

Whoopie pie, the official state treat, and Moxie, the official state soft drink and an acquired taste that Mainers are fond of watching visitors encounter.

Italian sandwich, a Portland invention that bears little relation to anything Italian.

A lobster pound is the institution to understand: an unglamorous building by the water, often seasonal, where you choose a lobster, it is boiled, and you eat it outside. Prices follow the boat price and move through the season.

Portland has an outsized restaurant scene for a city of its size, concentrated in the Old Port and increasingly on the peninsula beyond it, and it books up well ahead in summer.

Farmers' markets run through the warm months in most towns of any size, and roadside stands selling blueberries, corn and eggs on an honesty box are ordinary practice inland.

Maine is not wine country in any serious sense — the growing season is too short — though a handful of small wineries work with cold-hardy hybrids and, more successfully, with fruit: blueberry and apple wines are a genuine local tradition rather than a novelty.

What the state does have is a substantial craft brewing scene, with Portland at its centre and a national reputation, particularly for hop-forward beers.

Distilling has followed, and hard cider is a natural fit in a state with a long apple-growing history.